We are now going to discuss the Gnostasis' interpersonal relationships.
In other words, without a people.
I mentioned before, hopefully some of you will remember, if you are not dissociating throughout this lecture, which I did in the premium, that the Gnostasis uses the same methodology, the same structures, the same dynamics and the same techniques in all relationships.
Whenever external objects are involved that are internalized.
So, to be anything from colleague to intimate partner and so on.
And the shocking thing for all of you perhaps, is that the Gnostasis does not see a difference between an intimate partner and a colleague, a boss and a child, money.
Therefore, the Gnostasis does not choose you as his intimate partner.
There is no choice involved here. You are all dispensable, interchangeable, commoditized, like so many grains of rice.
The Gnostasis doesn't care if you are empathic, because he doesn't do empathy. He doesn't care if you are kind and nice.
There are many of these things that you see online, when victims self-aggrandize.
The Gnostasis chose him because, amazingly empathic, I am super galactic and powerful as a machine.
Supernova example.
These are all Gnostasis. The Gnostasis is interested in four things. They are known, I call them, the four "eses".
Four "eses" are sex, of course, services, safety and supply.
Two types of supply, Gnostasis, and Sadistic supply.
Small minority of Gnostasis are Sadist.
So they derive pleasure from inflicting pain.
And this is a form of supply, Gnostasis, Sadistic supply.
These are the four "eses". If you provide two of the four "eses", two, any two, you qualify.
So if you provide sex and services, it goes in. You got the job.
If you provide services and safety, you got the job, etc.
So it's also not true that the Gnostasis is on the totality of the package, all the four.
Gnostasis, therefore, is in this sense, as dissocial, is goal-oriented.
Exactly like the cycle one.
In intimate relationships, goal-oriented, but in intimate relationships, the Gnostasis is goal-oriented.
What can you do for him? What can you give him? Who you are is utterly irrelevant.
That's why Gnostasis never envies you. It's not true.
They don't envy you because they are superior to you, of course.
God doesn't envy humanists, for example.
So you must get rid of a lot of these Gnostasis. You are a production unit equivalent of a refrigerator, a television set, or a laptop. You are a production unit. Of course, most Gnostasis don't have sex with their laptops. It's very dangerous with electricity, but still, you understand what I'm saying.
These are functional units.
Okay. Now, the deal that the Gnostasis offers you is a bad deal.
I mean, who wants to be a service provider? Essentially, he's offering you to be a service provider.
Who wants to do this? No one wants to do this.
So he has, and again, everything he does, everything Gnostasis does, is not intentional.
He's not premeditated, and very often, he's not conscious.
Gnostasis are not psychopaths. Psychopaths are premeditated. Psychopaths are intentional. Psychopaths have plans and goals. Not Gnostasis. Gnostasis do everything automatically.
I would compare Gnostasis, for example, to a virus. A virus has a purpose, has a goal. This is known as teleology.
Yes, it's a teleological assumption.
So a virus has a goal, obviously, to penetrate the cell, to replicate in the cell, etc., etc.
By the way, a virus doesn't have any goal to kill the cell, but to replicate.
But we wouldn't say that the virus is doing this on purpose. It is intentional.
So we should not confuse intentionality with purposefulness.
The Gnostasis is purposeful, of course, because he needs to secure favorable outcomes. He needs to be self efficacious, but he's not intentional like the psychopath.
Everything he does is almost automated, almost automatic.
What he does is called the shared fantasy.
It's a way to lure you, to attract you into a holy trap, and then to prevent you from exiting.
And this is done in a diabolically sophisticated manner.
But many processes in nature, which are not self-aware processes, not conscious processes, are diabolically efficient.
Many. I mention viruses, but not only.
So you can say Gnostasis is not a virus, it's not a tiger, because he knows right from wrong.
Yes, but when he implements the plan of attracting you, captivating you, capturing you, converting you into a hostage, sucking your lifeblood, and so on, he doesn't do this in terms of right and wrong. He does it more like nutrition. He has to eat.
It's a predator, in other words. Simply a predator.
So stop thinking about Gnosticism in terms of a morality claim. Good versus evil, you know, angels versus demons.
This is medieval. There's not place for this in psychology, clinical psychology.
There was a guy called Scott Peck, totally insane, and Scott Peck, and I mean, he was totally crazy.
And Scott Peck wrote a book where he said that the modern expression and modern reification of evil is Gnosticism.
Okay, that's nice, but it's all psychology.
So here's what the Gnosticism does.
But before we go there, as usual, I have to say something. I have to introduce you to the concept that I developed that I called the Hall of Mirrors.
Victims of Gnosticism think that they fall in love with the Gnosticism. They don't, because you can't fall in love with an absence, with a void, with a black hole.
They have no ability to affect, to emotionally invest in that which is not there, in a nothingness.
Observe. So what are you falling in love with? With yourselves. You're falling in love with yourselves. You're falling in love with the way the Gnosticism sees you, with the way the Gnosticism claims to love you. You're falling in love with the interaction between you and the Gnosticism that renders you ideal and perfect.
So I call it the Hall of Mirrors.
The Gnosticism lures you into the carnival, the Gnosticism carnival. And there's a Hall of Mirrors.
And you enter the Hall of Mirrors and you see a thousand reflections of yourself. But they're not real. They're idealized reflections.
In these reflections, you're perfection. You're amazing. You're drop-dead gorgeous. You are super intelligent. You're unprecedented.
And Aussies tells you nothing like that has ever happened to me before. You're the love of my life.
What I experience with you, I've never experienced with anyone else.
And so, he renders you ideal.
And we all have a self-love deficit, including nothing in modern society. There's a self-love deficit.
And here the Aussies allows you to experience for the first time, maybe, for many people, for the first time, allows you to experience self-love.
Because now you can fall in love with yourself. Why? Because you're perfect. You're perfect. We learn, many of us, even healthy people, we learn what is called performative love, love that is dependent on performance, conditional love.
And when I love you if you're a good girl, when I love you if you're a good boy, mother tells you, father tells you, you learn that love is a means of exchange. You provide performance and you get love.
The promise could be defined differently in different families, of course. But it's always a trait. It's always transactional.
And the narcissist comes and offers you the opportunity to revisit your childhood, to experience unconditional love.
Why unconditional? Because you're already perfect. You don't have to perform. As you are, you're perfect.
We need to perform when we are not perfect. We need to perform when we are imperfect so that we become perfect.
The need to perform means something is missing. We need to do something.
So when there is a parental demand to perform, the hidden message, the occult message, is you are not good as you are. As you are, you're inadequate. You're insufficient. You need to improve on yourself, or you need to change, or you need to not be you.
I want you to be a good boy. Message, you're not a good boy.
So you need to not be you.
This is self-denial and self-negation. It's extremely common in parenting all over the world, even in total guilty and functional and all the family.
And here comes a narcissist and says, you need to do nothing.
By virtue of your existence, you're perfect. You're a deal.
So this is the world of mirrors. You fall in love with yourself, with your reflection, through the narcissist's gaze, through the narcissist's eyes. You're beginning to see something very interesting.
The narcissist replicates with you the deficiencies in his own upbringing, in his own child.
The narcissist did not enjoy a mother's gaze, so he provides you with a mother's gaze.
The narcissist was not able to separate from mother, so he would attempt to separate from you, as you will see.
It is as if the narcissist recreates his childhood with you and helps you to recreate your childhood with him.
It's a principle called dual mothership. I will come to it in a minute.
Okay, so this is the world of mirrors.
And I have to go back a bit to the process of early childhood, to understand the shared fantasy, which I will discuss in a minute.
You need to understand the dynamics in childhood.
So what happens in childhood? A baby is born.
Now raising babies sucks. It's a horrible thing.
Babies are horrible. Absolutely horrible.
I'm not going to do this.
Can you tell me? Mothers are so happy. Yes, I will not say it again.
I know I raised my brother's assistant from scratch. It was the biggest trauma of my life.
So it's really difficult.
And so one third of mothers developed depression, postnatal depression. Today we know the real figures.
These figures were hidden many, many decades.
But now we know.
About one third developed postnatal depression and anxiety disorders.
One third.
And most mothers, if not all mothers, idealize the baby. It's the initial phase. They don't later. They don't continue with the idealization.
Remember, they give the baby a realistic picture. But initially, to raise the baby, to adapt to the new situation, which puts a normal stress and strain on the relationships, on the career. The price is huge.
To adapt to this, the mother idealizes the baby. It's a process of idealization.
This idealization continues usually until 18 months.
Because the mother idealizes the baby, the baby has developed grandiosity. The baby experiences the wall of mirror effect. The baby sees itself through the mother's gaze. And through the mother's gaze, the baby is perfect.
So the baby develops grandiosity. It is this grandiosity that allows the baby to separate from mother and to explore the world.
Because think about it. You are two years old, and you tell mother, "I'm independent, and I'm free, and I'm going to explore the world." You need to be seriously grandiose to do this. And this grandiosity derives from the idealization of the mother.
So the mother becomes what is known as a secure base. The baby is not afraid to lose mother if he says goodbye to her and begins to discover other people. In a process known as object relations.
Okay?
Such children, when the mother allows them to separate, develop secure attachment style. When the mother does not allow separation, there's insecure attachment style.
Okay.
Now, the concept of shared fantasy, again, to my huge regret, was not invented by me.
It was invented by Sander, S-A-N-D-E-R, in 1989.
Sander came up with this concept of shared fantasy and applied it to healthy, normal relationships.
Sambakhni applied it to narcissistic abuse and abusive relationships.
So this adaptation is mine, but the concept is his.
And it involves fantasy, of course, shared fantasy.
What is a fantasy?
In psychoanalytic theory, a fantasy is a defense.
It's a defense mechanism.
Why?
What does it defend against?
Reality, of course.
Fantasy defends against reality.
In a way, it's good because fantasy allows you, for example, to daydream, to plan, to imagine things.
Okay?
Fantasy is a good thing.
But if fantasy takes over, if it metastasizes, if it becomes a total alternative to reality, which is much more appealing than reality, then, of course, it's pathological.
And the shared fantasy is a pathological fantasy.
The thing about fantasy is that it's addictive.
It has elements of addiction.
So you could have a fantasy about a person, and this is known as person-centered fantasy, exactly the equivalent of person-centered addiction.
Or you could have a process, a fantasy about a process.
So this is known as a process-focused fantasy.
Compare comparable to process addiction.
All right?
So it's addictive.
Why is it addictive?
Because, again, reality sucks.
Reality sucks.
And if you think you are not living in fantasy, then you are living in fantasy.
Because you are all living in fantasy, of course.
Every time you open the television, you are in fantasy.
Actually watching a movie, believe it or not, involves extreme dissociation.
Do you know why you jump in a horror movie?
Because you are inside the horror movie.
You are dissociating.
And fantasy in today's world was not the case, let's say, 100 years ago, 150.
But in today's world, fantasy definitely has replaced reality in many ways.
So we have a general situation of heterological fantasy.
Now, the shared fantasy between the narcissist and his intimate partner.
I'm taking this as an example, yes?
The shared fantasy between narcissist and intimate partner is first of all shared.
We all tend to ignore the shared part.
Because the victims of narcissistic abuse, the survivors of such relationships and so on, they want to exonerate themselves.
They want to say, "I am not guilty. I didn't do anything wrong. I was the passive recipient of evil intentions and evil actions. It's not my fault. I did not contribute anything to my predicament." And that's, of course, counterfactual. It's actually a fantasy. It's a fantasy defense.
The shared fantasy is a full-fledged, full-scale collaboration between the narcissist, intimate partner, and the narcissist, each for their own reasons.
Each for their own reasons.
And each couple, each diode, requires a different, as a highly specific and idiosyncratic analysis.
So we cannot generalize.
But the rule is that the partner collaborates with the narcissist, colludes with the narcissist, conspires with the narcissist to create a common fantasy.
What is this reminiscent of?
A cult.
It's equivalent of a cult.
This fantasy is inward-looking. It excludes the world. And it has its own narratives, which are counterfactual, that defy the facts.
And narratives which are very often paranoid, and narratives that are grandiose in majority of cases.
And the partner of the narcissist fully collaborates with all this.
For example, she encourages the narcissist to be grandiose. She enhances the narcissist's grandiosity. She colludes with the narcissist in excluding all others, or criticizing all others, or demeaning and debasing all others. She conspires with the narcissist to adopt unrealistic goals about, I don't know, marriage or children, or financial plans or business plans or whatever.
So there's a lot of collaboration and conclusions.
And when victims will tell you, "I've been deceived. The narcissist is a great actor. I didn't know what was happening.
I gave the last moment.
And when I discovered, I exited the fact that whatever it was." That's unfortunately untrue.
Actually, we have studies that show that when you're in the presence of a narcissist within minutes, you develop something known as uncanny value reaction.
It's a sense of discomfort and ill at ease, as if the person you're with who happens to be a narcissist is not fully human.
Something wrong, something off key, something put together wrongly, wrong manufacturing.
Now, the uncanny value reaction was first described, of course, by a Japanese.
In 1970, Masahiro Mori, a roboticist, Masahiro Mori said, "As robots will become more and more human, we're going to begin to feel more and more discomfort, more and more ill at ease.
The more the robot resembles humans, the worse we will feel in the presence of the robot." And this is the uncanny value reaction.
And everyone has it in the presence of a narcissist.
So why do many people claim to have been deceived?
Because they suppress it. They deny it. They don't have to recognize it.
For example, if you're very, very, very lonely, then you will tell yourself all kinds of stories about the narcissist and say, "Ah, it's nothing." Otherwise, it's a great guy. He's misbehaving here, but otherwise, it's a great guy.
You will convince yourself, you create narratives to push yourself into the fantasy.
So it's a collusion. It's a collaboration.
Not let anyone tell you otherwise.
And it has seven stages.
Stage one, co-idealization.
Co-idealization is when the narcissist idealizes you, he tells you that you're perfect, you're amazing, etc., etc.
as I mentioned before.
And this idealizes him.
Because, for example, if I own a Ferrari, it says something about me. If my partner is perfect, drop that gorgeous, amazingly intelligent, it says something about me that she is my partner, right? It idealizes me.
So that's a process of co-idealization.
The partner enters this phase because she loves to be idealized.
It's a bit narcissistic. Don't tell anyone.
So the feeling of being idealized, the feeling of being perceived as perfect is intoxicating. It's addictive.
And anyone who has exited a relationship with a narcissist will tell you this.
She misses this. She misses the focused attention, the love bombing, the amazing concentration on herself, on her needs, on her history, on everything. It's like she's the center of the world. She's the most amazing creature to have ever been created, except somebody.
So, you know, it's addictive, it's intoxicating. And it allows a narcissist to idealize himself because it's usual with a narcissist.
It's all about himself. Never lose sight of this. It's all about himself.
And when he idealizes you, it's in order to idealize himself. To say, "I own an ideal object that makes me ideal."
So this is co-idealization.
The second stage is the dual mothership.
The dual mothership is a covert contract. It's a contract, but I'm known to you. And the contract says, "You're going to be my mother and I'm going to be your mother, not father.
Everyone asks me online, and it cannot be father.
The psychological role of a father is very different to the psychological role of a mother.
A father has to do with acquiring skills, socialization, later in life.
The father comes into play around age three. That's why many single-parent families with single mothers raise healthy children without a father.
The unpleasant truth for us males is that we are not needed until age three and four.
So the dual mothership, the smart system sort of communicates to you, subliminally.
It's not open. He says, "I'm going to love you unconditionally. I'm going to idealize you. I'm going to let you experience maternal love as you should have experienced it and did not experience it.
With me, you will experience it.
I will love you like you've never been loved before.
And all I want you is to be my mother.
I want you to love me the same way.
I want you to love me unconditionally.
I want you to accept all my behaviors.
I want so." He tests. He tests you.
He tests you with narcissistic abuse.
He pushes the ender on.
He behaves egregiously.
He's misconduct, skylines.
He abuses you.
He maltrates you.
He attacks you.
He criticizes you.
All the time, testing, will you continue to love me?
Will you love me despite my misbegging?
So test. Some other one tests.
And this is the--here at this stage, there is dual messaging.
You're perfect. You're ideal. You're godlike. You're amazing. You drop dead coaches.
Okay?
But I'm going to abuse you.
I'm going to attack you. I'm going to criticize you.
So this creates dissonance. Yes?
There is--in this stage of the dual mothership, the victim begins to experience dissonance.
And the narcissist tests the victim, but there's a self-limiting test.
At some point, the narcissist says, "She passed all the tests.
She can be my mother." And at that point, in the relationship, there are two mothers.
The narcissist is your mother, and you are this mother.
And you both love each other unconditionally, and you both accept each other without any reservations, without any limitations, without any boundaries, and so on and so forth.
In other words, you recreate what mother called this symbiotic stage.
You become one. You merge, you fuse. You're single organism with two heads.
And this is stage number two, the dual mothership.
The next stage, the narcissist converts you into a mother in order to reenact or recreate the early childhood with his dead mother.
So he's trying to find a substitute mother, a good mother.
But do you remember what a good mother does?
Pushes the child away.
For the narcissist to conceive of you as a good mother, he needs to separate from you.
If he doesn't separate from you, you're just another bad mother.
You're exactly like his mother.
His mother didn't separate from him.
Didn't allow him to separate.
He needs you to allow him to separate.
In order to prove that you're a good mother, and this is said irony of the shared fantasy, because the devaluation and the discard phases, the phases of breakup, are baked into the shared fantasy.
They are the reason for the shared fantasy.
The narcissist embarks on romantic relationships in order to divorce you, in order to break out.
That's the goal of the shared fantasy.
And victims don't understand this.
They keep asking themselves, "Could I have behaved differently?
Did I do anything wrong?" Or maybe he is evil, he is malicious. He didn't see my value. He didn't understand that I'm perfect for him. My love could have transformed him.
All kinds of nonsense.
The narcissist chose you to become his next mother.
And he needs a good mother, because his previous mother was a bad mother.
And he needs a good mother.
And a good mother normally breaks up with her child, no?
The devaluation of a good mother.
And so he needs to break up with her.
And this starts by something which I call the mental discard.
He begins to transform.
Before we go there.
He cannot submit you, and besides that you could be his intimate partner.
You remember what he does?
He creates an internal object.
He snapshots you.
He introduces you.
He creates a representation in his mind that stands in for you.
That is you.
He continues to interact with this internal object. Never with you.
That's another common mistake of victims.
He snaps you, introduces you, and all his future interactions are with the internal object.
Never with you.
He's incapable of receiving external object anyhow.
So he continues to interact with this snapshot with the internal object.
And now comes the phase where he has decided that you love him unconditionally as a mother should.
That you are a good mother.
And therefore you are a secure base.
It is safe to separate from you.
Safe to separate from you.
All this process takes place inside his mind, not with you.
So you are not aware of all this.
It comes as a shock.
Because there's no external interaction.
It's all happening inside.
And so he says, "Okay, she's a good mother.
Time to separate." And he begins to change, to transform the internal object that represents you.
He doesn't transform you.
He doesn't exist.
He transforms the internal object.
He transitions the internal object from idealized to persecretary.
He makes you an enemy thing.
An enemy.
He's called persecretary object.
This is fourth phase?
This is the third phase.
The mental use of it.
So in preparation for the separation, he converts you from ideal, pervert, etc.
He converts you to an enemy.
So now you're an enemy in his mind, but not yet in reality.
Because he doesn't interact with the external object.
And you begin to feel strange because of this mixed message.
It all takes place in his mind.
But then there's a problem.
He idealized.
He has idealized.
Now he's converting you into an enemy.
What does it mean?
He has been wrong about you.
He's been wrong.
If you're an enemy, then you should not have been idealized in the first place.
There's a mistake here.
And one thing now says is never to.
Especially me.
He's not made to mistake.
They are never on what we call infallible.
They are like the Pope, only worse.
They are in fallow.
So the narcissist cannot admit that he has made a mistake in having idealized you.
So this creates internal narcissistic injury.
The narcissist is wounded by his own machinations.
He cannot reconcile.
He doesn't want to explain.
How did he make this mistake?
And so in order to explain this to himself and to restore his grandiosity, because the narcissistic injury is a challenge to the grandiosity.
But grandiosity, if we get to understand, is a cognitive distortion.
It's a misperception of reality.
It's an impairment in reality testing.
So, am I going too fast?
No.
A little too fast?
What happened?
I'm a little too fast.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
with a new per-secretary internal volume, so that he can explain to himself that he did not get it wrong, he did not commit a mistake, but you're not the same person, simply.
You're mental ill now, maybe, physical ill, both, and so on and so forth.
He will find, you will find in your history, or autobiography, or personal circumstances, you will find some explanation.
You will, you see, since you started to be friends with Ix, you are not the same person, she has bad inferences, or, I don't know, and you are now interested in music, and when we met you were interested in history, like me.
So you have changed.
He was constant, he was loyal, he was always there for you, he was you, so he devalued you, to restore grandeur.
The secretary object now matches the external object.
Whenever there is a discrepancy between the external object and the internal object, this creates dissonance.
Even though the narcissist cannot perceive the separateness and externality of the external object, still, the narcissist cannot deny reality infinitely.
So if, for example, he developed the belief, he realized that you are the most loyal partner imaginable, that he can trust you fully, you know, and you're super reliable, and then the next thing he knows, you're having an affair with your boss.
I mean, there's a limit how much you can deny reality. The narcissist is not, after all, not fully psychotic.
It's not a question of total devotion.
So the limit, if you cross this limit, it creates dissonance. The divergence and deviance between the idealized object and you, if it becomes too big, it creates dissonance.
Similarly, if the divergence between you and the persecretary object is too big, it creates dissonance.
For example, if the persecretary object is that you are cheating on him, and yet he never succeeds to prove it, or if the persecretary object is, I don't know, you're not taking care of him, and yet you are taking care of him. And then, they are hired. This creates dissonance.
And he will try to push you to not take care of him, to cheat on him. This is known as "projective identification".
He will push you in ways, to behave in ways, that affirm, that support, that devalue the secretary object.
So many narcissists push their partners to cheat on him. This is known as the betrayal fantasy.
Because this controls, then it matches, the external object matches, the internal object does not decide.
This is the next stage.
And then, at this stage, the narcissist is ready. You are, you love the human conditionally like a mother does. You idealize him, you coin him, like a mother does. You are a good mother, you survive this narcissistic abuse, with flying covers, and then he prepared to separate from you, he converted you into a secretary object, so there is good reason to separate him.
You are cheating on him, you are a employer, you are not taking care of him. There is a good reason to separate him, yes?
So now he is ready to separate from him. And the separation is known as "discard".
So, a word that I coined.
Discard.
Alums, break it.
This is the fifth.
This is the fifth.
One more.
And now the narcissist is ready to separate from his good mother.
This time, it should work.
That mother did not allow him to separate.
He is a good mother, he protected himself. He cannot separate from you as a mother. He is not a child, you are not a child, I mean, so he needs to devalue you.
That is his way to separate from you.
And now he can separate from you, and if he is safe to separate from you, because you are a secure if he is safe, if he is justified, if he is okay to discard you, it is okay to separate from you.
And so he separates from you. It could be physical, but it does not have to be physical. It could be emotional, for example, emotional absence.
It could be staying with you and having affairs. It could be sabotaging your coexistence, your life together in a variety of ways. It does not have to be physical separation, that is another common mistake.
It is simply absenting himself, removing himself from the scene, and destroying the intimacy.
There is a campaign to destroy the intimacy, and numerously, and this is the discard.
And this is a symbolic reenactment of the separation that should have happened with the original mother and never happened.
And here he separates, but this is a psychological cost. Everything is a psychological cost.
This is a psychological cost.
The minute he discards the partner, the minute he separates from the partner, he has several psychological reactions.
The first one is known as separation insecurity.
This is the clinical term, and the colloquial term online is abandonment anxiety.
Abandonment anxiety is not a clinical term.
So he experiences abandonment anxiety because, remember, he is getting rid of mother.
Mother, mother and mother explain that the child who separates from mother experiences abandonment anxiety and then runs back to mother in a process called rapporte-schmoe.
So this is absolutely the correct way to separate individually.
You separate, you experience abandonment anxiety, and you run back to mother.
You run back to mother to test whether mother still loves you despite the fact that you have discounted her that she still loves you.
And this is a process known as hoovering.
So hoovering is the adult version, adult narcissistic version of rapporte-schmoe.
Testing whether he is still loved, still has a place in your heart despite the fact they made your life hell, converted you into an enemy, and shot your dog.
At that point, there is a problem.
So the shared fantasy is very intricate. It's a very intricate mechanism.
But I hope that you see how it fits well with so many phenomena in relationships with masses.
So as far as I know, and not because I invented it, but I did not, some of them invented it.
As far as I know, this is the best explanation to all the phenomena that we are aware of in relationships with masses.
There are other explanations, but they don't explain everything. They explain point one, point seven, point C, but nothing explains everything. Only this.
So it's pretty safe to assume that this is what's happening.
Also, any partner of masses would tell you that she had to act as a mother. At some point.
There were maternal functions somehow involved.
Maybe not all the time, but there were maternal expectations at some point.
So when the discard is completed, there's abandonment anxiety, which leads to hoovering.
Hoovering is an attempt to reestablish a shared fantasy.
But there's another phenomenon.
Remember that the narcissist converted the internal object that represents you from ideal to the secretary, to enemy.
When it gets rid of you, it remains stuck with the object, with internal object.
Your gun, but the internal object is there.
By the way, same thing happens to you as victim of narcissism.
The narcissist's gun is introjected in your head.
And in order to heal from narcissistic abuse, you need to get rid of the introject, and you need, you need to go through separation individually. Because remember the dual mothership. What is a dual mothership? The narcissist tells you, I will be your mother. But for the narcissist to be your mother, you need to become a child. The narcissist regresses you, infantilizes you. So you go back to being a baby. And he goes, he is a baby. And you are a baby. These are two babies pretending to be mothers, each other's mothers. So when the narcissist exits your life, thankfully, you remain stuck, you remain as an infant. You're an infant. And you actually need to go through separation, individuation, as an infant does. So the only way to heal from narcissistic abuse is to get rid of the introject, there are ways to do this. And to separate individually from the maternal figure of the narcissist.
And only then you can proceed to restoring your adult identity.
So same happens to the narcissist.
You're stuck in his head, there's an introjector view in his head.
And it's a bad one. It's an evil one. It's an enemy one. You're his enemy.
And of course, I don't need to tell you that when you have such an internal alternative, it's very threatening. It creates, in other words, anxiety.
It's un-zeogenic.
This kind of internal object in your head creates anxiety, and anxiety leads to paranoid ideation.
That's the sequence.
So when you are gone physically from the narcissist's life, he remains stuck with the vision of you, his enemy. And this vision generates anxiety and dissonance, and later, paranoid ideation, against who suspects you of conspiring against him, doing bad things, and so on and so forth.
Even when you are really out of his life, out of his life, when you are not in contact, not on that strategy, which I designed you in my case, even then you are still there as a threatening internal object.
Threatening and frustrating internal object.
This you cannot get rid of.
And he's stuck with this.
So what can he do about this?
He has only one option.
He needs to re-idealize it.
He needs to convert the secondary object back to an idealized, non-threatening maternal object.
He has to do this.
And this is done in the process of hoovering.
The process of hoovering, attempting to re-establish the shared fantasy, the massages re-idealize you.
So a month before the hoovering, he told you that you are a bitch, you are a thief, you are disloyal, and you deserve to die under an 18-wheel truck.
Usually it's an 18-wheel truck.
He tells you this a month before.
And a month later, you are again the most amazing, perfect, super beautiful.
And so he re-idealizes.
He changes the internal object back from the secondary to ideal, but then he must have you in his life.
Remember, the principle is the external object must conform to the internal object.
Not because the narcissist interacts with the external object, but because there's a limit to how much reality he can deny.
So if he re-idealizes you, he will intervene his life again in a maternal capacity.
The shared fantasy is to be re-established.
And this is the seven stitches.
Now, another option is when the narcissist, of course, finds a replacement, a substitute.
But then something very interesting would happen.
The substitute would be snaxle, but introjected, and there would be an ideal object, which represents her.
Ideal internal object, which represents her.
And there would be your, the secondary object, which survives in his mind.
So he would have in his mind an ideal object, and not the secondary object.
And if he doesn't resolve the situation, there will be war, this or that, so conflict, internal conflict between these two objects.
So what he does, and very, very few victims of intimate partners are aware of this, what he does, he merges the objects.
So he idealizes the new mother in your form.
He would tend to idealize her as you.
And this is a very interesting process.
He's kind of merging all the internal objects so as to avoid the secondary dissonance.
So a narcissist would select one intimate partner, de-idealize her, devalue her, get rid of her, and move on to another.
And then he would idealize that new source, that new intimate partner, but he would talk about her in terms that actually describe you.
He would idealize you, her, as if she were you.
And there would be a huge discrepancy between the new idealization and the real object.
So for example, if you are truly beautiful, okay, you are truly beautiful, and he idealizes you, he said you are amazingly gorgeous, and I don't know why.
And then his next sketch is how to be gentle, less than a girl.
That one sadly.
Less than a girl.
He would still idealize her as drop-dead gorgeous.
He would carry over your idealization to her in order to avoid dissonance.
And this becomes more and more divorce from reality as the narcissist goes through repeated shared fantasies until finally he is totally divorced from reality.
And then this kind of narcissist can fall prey to a psychoanalyst or to a gold digger.
He is so divorced that the interaction is totally in his mind, and he doesn't pay attention that he is being coned and, you know, he really comes across an enemy, or just a truly evil person who takes advantage of the narcissist.
This is because the divorce between reality and fantasy grows all the time.
The more intimate partners the narcissist discards, the harder he has to work to merge these internal objects to avoid conflict and dissonance, and the further away from reality the idealization is, until finally it has nothing to do with reality.
And then the narcissist is entirely inside his mind, and he is helpless, he is truly helpless then as a child.
He is helpless.
And then he is easy prey.
He becomes, he transforms from predator to prey.
And then all kinds of evil people take advantage of the narcissist.
Psychobots, gold diggers, I mean you know.
This is because he is defenseless, reality testing completely destroyed over many many cycles.
That's in an actual, the Schrod conflict and no more spayment. Goodbye, Selys.
A brave soul. I'm going to convert her into a secretary of... I'm sorry.
So vodka, but you know, you get, you drink what you get.
Yes, how can a view help you with wine?
Any questions?
You should then.
You can ask a question.
You can ask a question? Of course you can ask a question.
I paid you to ask a question.
Okay, so I want to ask a question about grief after a relationship.
If it was such an abusive relationship, then what would you say that people or abused wine is grieving about?
That's precisely what I said. You are not in love with you. You are not in a relationship with you. You are in a relationship with yourself.
What you are grieving is yourself. You are grieving the lost self-love, lost capacity to self-love.
You are grieving, of course, the shared fantasy. You are grieving the child, like a mother who lost her child.
You are grieving a mother. You lost a mother.
So grief after narcissistic abuse is not typical grief. It's what we call prolonged grief disorder.
It's not typical grief, but it's four layers of grief, like a wedding cake.
Four layers of grief, and each one of them is very powerful.
Is there anything more powerful than losing your child?
And nonsense gradually becomes more and more your child. And when you lose this child, it's horrible. And then you also lost a mother, because initially he acted, he truly acted as a mother.
It was a shared fantasy, which was a refuge, an escape from reality, if you hate reality.
And you lost yourself. You finally fell in love with yourself, or learned to love yourself.
And it was taken away from you, because you can love yourself only through the nonsense, his gaze and all of mirrors.
It's not that the nonsense teaches you how to love yourself independently.
On the very contrary. It makes you addicted to his gaze, so that whenever you want to fix, you want to inject, no intoxication of, I'm perfect, I'm amazing, I'm ideal, I'm gorgeous.
You go to him, he will tell you. He'll tell you what you want to hear about yourself.
And that's really addictive. It's intoxicating. It's a wonderful feeling. Love bombing is a wonderful feeling, which is why everyone wants for it. It's known as love bombing.
He gets the love, you get the bones.
And it's known as love bombing. So that's the reason.
There's multiple forms of grief, superimposed on each other. And each one of them possibly the worst kind of grief imaginable.
So all four of them.
Let us take it.
Yes.
How do you feel about the ability of the object?
Could it be understood as a sort of splitting?
Yes. All the dynamics of nonsense, as I said at the very beginning, all the dynamics of nonsense are built on splitting and another mechanism called projection.
Yeah, but also like splitting the boot from the bed.
You're right. It's a form of splitting.
But all interactions of nonsense and all the dynamics of nonsense are based on splitting and projection.
So for example, it involves not only splitting, but also projection.
This analysis makes you all bad. And by implication, it makes himself all good.
But he makes you all bad because he is all bad. He projects onto you the parts of him that he rejects, the parts of him that he's ashamed of.
So he is the narcissist who wants to be aggressive with you. He wants to discard you. He wants to get rid of you. It is he who is planning to do something bad to you. But he cannot admit it. So he projects it onto you.
Because you are the one who is planning to do something bad to me. You're evil.
When actually he is the one who is planning to do something bad to you. You're evil.
When actually he is the one who is planning to do something bad to you. You're evil.
When actually he is the one who is planning to do something bad to me. You're evil.
I have a question. I was in that kind of relationship, like from the book, all stages.
And it was short. Thanks, God. Because I ran away, but I agreed for two, three years.
But I want to ask something. It was almost clear to me what is happening. But I was in desperate feelings and situations before I met him.
For three, four years, it was my business relationship between people. I was really desperate. I wanted to run away from that situation and to run away from my body. It was so strong, I wished to run away from that situation.
So I ran away straight to his arms and all happened.
All this addictive idea. Everything, everything what you mentioned.
So I was questioning myself how this happened to me. But now when we said this loneliness and this before this situation, before I met him, was really hard for me for years.
The shared fantasy is a promise that you no longer need to be in reality, in order to obtain outcomes. So you can be self efficacious even when you are not in reality.
And it's a promise that all options and alternatives and possibilities will materialize.
So like endless promise, whatever you wish, whatever you dream of, whatever you, it will happen.
There's a guarantee by the narcissist that it will happen.
Narcissist, because he feels godlike, projects to you or somehow convinces you that he has the capacity to make anything happen. And everything happens.
It's like land of infinite possibilities, you enter a land of infinite possibilities that is not grounded in reality. You don't have to pay the cost, only the benefits.
And it's very, very captivating, it's not because who wants to be in reality and who doesn't want to be with someone who can instantly realize all your wishes and dreams.
This helps for shared family, it helps a lot.
I really wanted to run away, and it happened that I ran away from Croatia to another country.
So this shared fantasy, my part, was very strong that I really wanted to run away into this, of course, fantasy, the rest of the story.
I think people who find themselves in the shared fantasy of narcissism, I think there's speculation because it's normal studies.
But I think they really hate their reality. They really hate their reality.
Even if they don't admit it, but actually they hate their reality.
And they sabotage.
This is a form of self-harm. Trauma bonding, shared fantasy, these are forms of self-harm.
So they self-harm because they want to remove themselves from reality.
It's like a small child, they say, "Mommy, I'm sick, I don't want to go to school." So they self-harm.
And another thing, they don't believe their capacity to realize their wishes and dreams and fantasies. They don't believe.
They don't believe themselves. They don't trust themselves. They believe that if they want anything done, it has to be through someone else. It doesn't have to be narcissists.
But they always think that the solution will come from the outside somehow. And this is called external locus of control. These are people with external locus of control.
They always believe that if they are faced with a, for example, if they have a dream to do something, they need someone to push them. If someone doesn't push them, they are stuck. They are stuck.
And so in life they learn to disbelieve themselves, distrust themselves. They are not their good friends. They are not their own good friends. They don't have their own back. They don't self-accept, they self-reject.
And it can deteriorate into self-loathing and self-arming and self-trashing and substance abuse and can deteriorate if it's not so.
And the narcissist comes and tells you, you are so perfect that you deserve all your dreams and wishes to come true, and I have the power to do this.
Of course, what I'm talking about is a religion. It's a religion, of course.
Narcissism is a private religion.
When the child is small and helpless and subject to abuse and to trauma, the child makes a choice. He invents a God. That is the false self. It's a deity. Because the false self is all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect. It's a God.
So the child invents a God. And then like every primitive God, this God wants human sacrifice. You know, like the monarch in the Bible, this God wants human sacrifice.
So the child sacrifices the only human the child has, himself. The child sacrifices himself to this new God. He sacrifices what is known as the true self. He sacrifices himself to this new God. And then it becomes a religion.
There is a God. There is a worshipper. There's been human sacrifice that binds them. Now there's a contract. God must now fulfill the narcissist's wishes and so on because the narcissist gave him everything he had. Even in the Bible, when you make human sacrifice, not human sacrifice, it's like a contract with God to appease God, to convince God to.
There's a lot of negotiations with God in the Bible. Moses negotiates with God, the fighting with God. Jacob brokered God's family. There's a lot of kind of a topomorphism.
A narcissism is a private primitive religion invented by a child. That is what a narcissism is. And because it's a private religion, and because it's a primitive religion, and because this religion was invented by a child, the narcissist is missionary. He's trying to convert everyone into this religion.
And so how to convert you to this religion? He makes promises. Is it different to classical religion? Of course not. God makes you promises. If you believe in him, if you obey the commandments, if you engage in some rituals and ceremonies, and so on and so forth, there are some promises. There's a contract here. Religion is a shared fantasy. Absolutely shared fantasy.
And it's no wonder that God, all gods, are describing narcissistic terms. The narcissists, Yahweh is a narcissist, Allah is a narcissist. They're all narcissists. I'm sorry to say. The prophets are psychotic, but the gods are not.
It's a shared fantasy. And the narcissist is a private religion.
Now, narcissism is threatening to become the biggest global religion. Why?
Because unlike other religions, actually unlike most religions, it's distributed. It's a distributed religion. It's like network religion, the internet religion.
Because you have one god and one worshipper. One god and one worshipper. One god and one worshipper. One god and one worshipper. One god and ten worshippers. Or one god and ten million worshippers. But it's always separate.
These are called nodes. These are network nodes. But the religion is common. The belief in the false self and the shared fantasy. The rituals and ceremonies of this religion are the same.
So it's a distributed religion. There's only one other religion like this, Islam.
Islam does not have a central authority. Unlike the Vatican and Catholicism, Islam is a distributed religion.
That's the source of its power. That's why it's the biggest growing religion nowadays.
Narcissism is growing like mushrooms. And Islam is growing like mushrooms.
I'll leave it up to you to make the connection. I'll probably be assassinated after I'll probably take two years.
Yes, maybe.
What a way to go.
What a way to go.
Yes, someone, you have one question.
When you were talking about the artistic supply, and you said that a narcissist is supplying himself when other people adore him, admire him. When they don't, then he supplies himself. When he doesn't get it from outside?
Yes, he does it for himself. But when they don't do it, they actually...
He then can become aggressive or mad. And then it's also supply for him when he releases that anger.
Aggression.
Aggression, yes.
That's not exactly supply. Depending if he terrifies people, that's only supply.
But in the Muslim religious cases, there's not supply.
That's the result of narcissistic injury.
There are three types of supply. You can get supply from other people. There's primary supply from other people. You can get supply from someone who is close to, like an intimate partner, who remembers the past supply.
So she's like a memory bank, external hearties. And she releases supply when you're not getting it from others.
So for example, a narcissist can give a great lecture and be admired, by all of you, clearly. And I will remember. And my wife has the role to remember this. And I will take photos. To record this. And then if next month I will not get supply.
Then she will tell me, do you remember the lecture you gave in Zagreb? Wow. You are amazing. You have changed your mind.
But I hate to do that. And I don't do it.
Yes. That's why I evaluate you.
So this is secondary supply. This is a form of regulating the flow of supply. Not having ups and downs, but regulating it.
So when the narcissist doesn't get it from outside, the intimate partner or the friend releases recorded supply, stored supply, so as to stabilize the flow of supply.
And the third option is self-supply.
Lasses is true self-supply variable. Because anyhow, they live inside their minds, everything is internal and so on and so forth. They have no difficulty to self-supply. They sometimes create even scenarios where internal objects inside their mind talk to each other. And this way creates supply.
So for example, paranoid ideation is when you believe that you are the center of some conspiracy. So paranoid is a form of self-supply.
If you convince yourself that you are so important, so crucial, so either one, that everyone has malevolent, malign intention, everything is revolving around you that plans to destroy you, etc. This is self-supply.
Pardon my ideation, it is a form of self-supply and therefore a form of mass activity.
How do we get rid of the introject?
How do we get rid of the introject?
There are treatment modalities with focus on this.
So for example, transactional analysis is a focus on this.
CPT is not so good with this because CPT deals with the voices of the introject, it deals with the messages, the automatic negative thoughts.
So CPT gets rid of sometimes the voices, but the introject is there, so it's not very helpful.
But transactional analysis is schema therapy, SCH, EMA.
Schema therapy is very useful with this.
To some extent, Gishtat.
Not for you.
To some extent, Gishtat.
There are therapies with focus on introjects.
Of course, psychoanalysis.
But psychoanalysis you start when you're 4 years old and when you're 82 and treatment is over, you're over.
And you end up in a funeral and your tombstone is written, "Here lies a cured patient." Probably.
Maybe.
We go 10 years more.
We're in the middle.
But there was problems.
Absolutely.
Psychoanalysis is actually a truly powerful methodology, but the techniques are very lacking, but there are a lot of ways.
And it's a great pity because when it comes to introductions, for example, by far the most powerful system that we have.
And of course, all the language comes from object-relation schools, which are extension of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic fields.
But psychoanalysis itself, as a technique, is more like intellectual pursuit or intellectual gain.
It's not really built to produce healing or curing outcomes, not in any meaningful sense.
Inside, this that you can get to know yourself much better.
This for sure.
You can get to know yourself much better.
But that's not the problem.
I know myself perfectly.
And I'm a major contributor to the theory of narcissism, so.
Awareness and knowledge, cognition, is not the same as insight.
Insight is transformative.
And for insight to be transformative, you need cognition.
And emotional correlate.
The cognition needs to produce an emotional effect, which will induce change.
And this is missing in narcissism.
So if I went to psychoanalysts, we would make great progress.
We'll talk about my mother and my father.
And I will really learn about myself.
I'm not underestimating psychoanalysts, but it will lead more.
There will be no zero outcomes.
Zero outcomes.-
Any of those who questions, there are several treatment modalities with focus on inner voices, interjections and so on.
Some of them existentialist therapies, they focus on finding the authentic self, the authentic voice, and then all the others for the way.
You have local therapy, which is a therapy developed by Victor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, and local therapy helps you find meaning.
And the meaning, but the meaning is linked actually to voices, it's a voice of meaning.
So these are all interject oriented therapies.
CBT is very, very useful, but I compare CBT to John Fu.
It's fast, it's fast, it's effective, super effective.
But it doesn't deal with root, with core problems. It just changes your programming.
So you think differently. And you act differently. It's very efficient, not so I'm not understanding.
Of course, there's DBT, the electrical behavior therapy. DBT was developed by a patient, psychotic patient. She was an mental asylum.
Another example of a non-psychologist at the time. Later she made a degree in psychology.
But when she developed DBT, she was not a psychologist, she was a patient. She had 20s. She was misdiagnosed as psychotic and bipolar. And later she understood, others understood that she had borderline personality disorder. So she, in their asylum, she started to develop DBT.
And it is extremely, extremely efficient treatment modality. 50% of patients with BBT diagnosis, loosely diagnosis, after one year in DBT, which compared to other modalities is amazing.
By the way, borderline personality disorder is very good, prognosis. 81% of people with borderline, with BBT diagnosis, lose the diagnosis after age 45. It's 81%, which leads us to believe that it is a biological problem. Not a psychological problem.
Something in the brain happens, biology changes almost. Almost, and what?
And that disease disappears. Almost, yes.
Psychopathy is also definitely a biological problem. Definitely.
And there is this hybridity in the manuals, in the ICD, Financial Classification of Disease, in DSM.
There is this hybridity.
There are this, sorry, there are mental illnesses, which used to be included in these books and are still there.
Although by now we know for sure that these are not mental illnesses.
These are medical conditions.
For example, schizophrenia.
But it's still there.
And similarly, borderline and anti-social, not anti-social, but psychopathy.
Most clearly a biological.
I mean, there's, for example, if you have a first degree relative with borderline personality disorder, your chances to have borderline personality disorder are 500% higher.
It's a strong indication of a very heredity.
Of course, psychopath brains are totally different to normal brain.
Totally, in every possible way.
White, metal, glia, shia, you name it.
And physiological reactions of psychopaths are different.
For example, perspiration and heart rate do not increase when the psychopath is experiencing fear or when he's lying.
And so on.
So clearly it's a different animal.
But because of economic reasons, I think money only, these were not removed from the DSM.
They should not be there.
These are biological issues, medical issues.
Not very different to, I don't know, dementia.
And dementia is there.
And why is dementia there?
What dementia has to do with mental illness.
And for that matter, what psychopathy has to do with mental illness.
There's a lot of gender bias.
A lot of gender bias.
For example, to this very day, it's wrongly written that majority of narcissists in the DSM for text revision, it's wrongly written that majority of narcissists are men, majority of older men are women, overwhelming majority of histrionic are women.
Well, that's not the reality.
50% of all people diagnosed with NPD are women.
50% of all people diagnosed with BPD are men.
And among in the histrionic group, actually there's a small majority of men.
So there's a lot of gender bias.
There's almost been no major figures in psychiatry, female, no major female figures in psychology.
No psychology, psychology.
So it's a work in progress.
And there is a lot of pressure to include, to increasingly orthologize and medicalize behavior.
So today you have mental illnesses, mental disorders that are connected to coughing, consumption, internet usage.
I don't know why.
I gave you one parameter.
When I studied medicine, the textbook of internal medicine, like Harrison's internal medicine, the equivalent, the textbook at the time was about, if I remember correctly, 700 or something pages.
That was when the last dinosaurs died.
So it was 700 or something pages.
Today, Harrison, which is the 22nd edition of Harrison's internal medicine, is about 1,300 pages.
We'll add a lot more.
The first edition of the DSM in 1952 was 100 pages.
The current edition, 1952, 70 years ago, the current edition is 1,200 pages.
It's like what?
We became 12 times more crazy.
I mean, what?-
Yes.-
What is this?
What is this if not, Occam's razor proliferation of entities?
It's wrong.
Something is wrong.
Absolutely something is wrong.
In this field of diagnostics, and taxonomy, and ossology, something is wrong in psychology, in psychiatry especially.
And people notice this, so they lose trust in the profession.
They lose trust in these professions completely.
They notice this, a lot of nonsense going on, a lot of commercial interests, which are not good.
Contamination, no-most contamination in the field.
The DSM, for example, the committee of the DSM-5, they wanted to rewrite the diagnostic criteria of personality disorders, especially borderline, narcissists, antisocial and a few others.
They wanted to rewrite them to reflect current knowledge.
And they were not allowed.
By the insurance companies, they were not allowed.
So what they did, if you go to DSM, text revision of the links, what did they do?
You have like narcissistic personality disorder, diagnostic criteria, one, two, three, four, five, nine.
Copy, pasted from a text which is 25 years old.
DSM-4, copy, pasted, nothing changed.
We didn't learn anything in 25 years.
But at the end, page 767 in the fifth edition, at the end, you have alternative model of narcissistic personality disorder.
When the truth is written, the state of the art, the latest knowledge, like their hiding, it's the appendixes, not to be seen.
Because they're afraid.
I'm simply terrified that they will lose the funding and the grounds there.
The ICD is much better.
The ICD is absolutely cutting edge.
Even I would say, too cutting edge.
ICD is reversion, the latest edition, the 11th edition.
It's stunning, absolutely stunning.
I'm not worried about diagnostic.
And the ICD is used in most of the world.
Don't forget that DSM is used in America.-
Yes. - Canada.
To some extent, United Kingdom, together with the ICD.
Not alone.
In some parts of Australia, some states in Australia, that's it.
Rest of the world, more than 80% of humanity.
They don't use this.
They use ICD or variants of ICD, like the CCBD variants of ICD.
It's one health organization.
ICD is one health organization.
So it's a global diagnostic.
And it's really good.
If you want to learn about class B, they don't call it class B.
If you want to learn about personality disorder, go to ICD.
Even older DSM.
DSM is 20, 30 years old.
A lot of wrong information.
It's disaster, the disasters of it.
Except the alternative models.
It's very good, but the text itself is foreign.
ICD is, I would say, the knowledge is about five years old, which is great in terms of diagnostic knowledge.
Excellent.
And let me show you.
You want to shoot because you don't want to.
Shall we do a house?-
No, don't do it.-
No, don't turn to me.
The presence in Croatia on the moonless.
A lot of weaknesses.
Thank you.
Okay, so.
Oh, sorry, there is one more question.
Oh.
At the beginning, you mentioned the excellence of the subconscious.
And you also mentioned two schools.
The two schools, particularly both in the country field.
But you also mentioned about projecting the audience in parts to the party.
You can tell me something more about that.
Defense mechanisms in classic theory are part of the ego.
They are connected to the ego.
And the ego in the trilateral model, four in the song, later on.
The ego is partly conscious and partly unconscious.
It's not true that the ego is conscious, it's foreign conscious.
Partly conscious, partly unconscious.
Similarly, the super ego is part of the ego.
And even in later work, the ego became part of the ego.
So it's one thing.
And it's partly unconscious, partly conscious.
However, in Adafroyd's work, Adafroyd is the authority of defense mechanism.
Much more than the father.
So in Adafroyd's work, defense mechanism became automatic but not unconscious.
And not associated with the unconscious.
They are like automatic reactions.
It's not entirely clear where this automatism comes from.
But for example, your smartphone is automatic and as far as eye-check doesn't have an unconscious.
The whole construct of unconscious is very, very debatable.
And there have been very many serious thinkers in psychology.
The disputed is the need for explanatory power of the unconscious.
But if we adopt a classic definition of the unconscious and the etymology of them, the way it was created, then there is no pathway that I can see where the narcissist would have an unconscious.
There's no internalization of external voices.
There's no path that I can see.
Even the use of language in narcissism is very compromised.
Not overt language, but internal.
It's very compromised.
So as you know, there are schools in society, not minor schools, but major schools, which completely dispute the concept of the unconscious.
For example, behaviorism is a major school.
Social learning theory is no place for the unconscious.
So take it with a grain of salt.
The unconscious is a 19th century concept which started with Miss Mayer and all this.
And Breuer developed it and Freud started.
And even at the time it was highly disputed because at the time it was sexualized.
Consciousness was essentially sex related.
Sexual drives, repression, and so on and so forth.
And while everyone continued to talk about the unconscious, for example, in object relations theories and so on, if you look into object relations theories, Fairbairn's theories, gantrip, if you look into them, there's no unconscious.
Fairbairn, for example, says that you're born with an ego.
You're born with an ego, it's non-conscious.
You're born with it.
And then life causes the ego to divide in three parts.
The libidinal ego, the antilibidinal ego, the central ego.
So there's no trace of the unconscious in Fairbairn's work.
Even though he uses the term ego which theoretically is partly unconscious, he doesn't use the construct of unconscious for anything theoretical.
And Fairbairn is not a minor figure, not a minor figure.
Similarly, someone like Winnicott.
Also, we didn't mention, of course, they all mentioned the unconscious, but there's no role for the unconscious there.
He talked about the false self, the true self, and so on and so forth.
There's no role for the unconscious.
I think the unconscious lost its role more or less in most of the world in the 30s and in France in the 60s.
France is always 30, 40 years behind.
So Lacan, Lacan was the last guy that kind of contributed to the theory of the unconscious and there was the end of it.
But be that as it may, if you wish to use this language element, I think unconscious is a language element.
I don't think it has any validity.
If you wish to use this, then it doesn't apply to narcissism.
So Lacan.
So before everybody leaves, I just want to say a few words.
I would like to thank Professor Sam Matli for this interesting lecture.
And I would like to thank you for helping me all these months before we met.
Because I was listening to your lectures online.
It's a great source of knowledge, the YouTube channel.
And I'm happy that I contacted Professor and he was very kind to answer.
So he said that he's coming to Croatia.
And then we arranged the lecture and Lacan was a great help because it was in such a short notice that she managed to gather you all here and find a place for the lecture.
Blame her.
So thank you for coming.
Thank you, Dihana, for working on this.