Minnie is back from one of her trips with a mug.
The way I look, I can't blame her.
At any rate, no sooner had she settled down that she complained to me.
She said, he used to miny so much to me, and now we are just mean to each other.
What's the mini of all this?
This video is my attempted answer. I hope you find it minifool.
The narcissist's five stages of emotional investment within the shared fantasy, the cycle of Cathexis.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the owner of minnie and I'm a professor of clinical psychology and the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.
That was Shakespeare, of course, or my take on Shakespeare, and here's another thing Shakespeare had to say.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.
He was a wise chap, wise bloke, this Shakespeare. He knew his stuff and his stuff was human nature.
Today we're going to deal with a particular population, a particular group of people, known as narcissists.
What is typical of narcissists is that they switch between all out emotional investment, emotional commitment, emotional displays, hyper-emotionality, and total absence, withdrawal, avoidance, detachment, coldness, cruelty even.
And these pendular shifts between one state of utter immersion and intensity and another which is essentially absence reified, these pendulum motions are typical of the narcissist.
I call it splitting cathexis.
Cathexis is just a fancy word for psychic energy, emotional investment.
When you put energy into something, you know, during the love bombing stage, when the narcissist is laser focused on you and you feel it physically. It's as if his gaze carries some kind of energy.
And so this energy is cathexis.
And the narcissist switches between 110% cathexis and minus 110% cathexis.
And they see only human being capable of doing so.
And today I'm going to describe the minutia, the exact details of the cycle of cathexis.
In general, I call it splitting cathexis because the narcissist pendulates, the narcissist shifts, oscillates between all good and all bad perception of you and an all bad perception of you, all out investment in you, and all out absence.
And this division of the world into I'm all here and I'm out of here. Your perfect being and you are decrepit and stupid and ugly and possibly demonic.
These constant swings, these constant shifts between states of mind. This is the outcome of a primitive infantile defense mechanism known as splitting.
And that's why I call the whole phenomenon splitting cathexis.
As far as a narcissist is concerned, everything is a stage, is a theater.
The narcissist in this sense is a Shakespearean hero.
Everything to the narcissist is role-playing.
Narcissus plays a role.
Self-assigned role.
He is now cerebral. Tomorrow, he is somatic. He is career-oriented. Tomorrow he switches a career. He is in a relationship and then he is out of the relationship.
None of it feels real to the narcissists. It's all a simulacrum. It's all a kind of movie.
He is just an observer, a tourist in his own life, in the landscape of his being. It's just passing through.
Non-committal, not as a matter of policy, but as a matter of inability to experience positive emotions.
Narcissists are capable only of negative emotions, such as envy and hatred and rage.
And so in the absence of positive emotions, there's no attachment, no bonding, no commitment, and no investment, and everything appears to be unreal, surrealistic, nightmarish, dreamlike, fantastic, through a glass darkly, through a gauze.
And so the narcissist experienced life secondhand, mediated and brokered via his cognitive distortions, defense mechanisms, and the absence of a self, a black hole where a self should have been.
Because the narcissist does not exist in any meaningful sense of the word, the narcissist imposes his own absence on everything and everyone around him.
He does not really believe, there's not conviction there, that he is living alive, that what he's experiencing is external and objective, that other people have, are separate from him, that the universe is really out there regardless of him.
Everything to the narcissist is a projection. Everything is his mind writ large and everything is subsumed within his mind in the form of internal objects.
In this sense, of course, as I keep saying in many of my videos, the narcissist is psychotic. This de-realization, in the case of the narcissists, is constant.
In the case of the borderline, de-realization is episodic from time to time.
When the borderline is under stress, under duress, tension, anxiety, abandonment, real or imagined, engulfment. When the borderline is exposed to torsion, to powers of tension, then she might react, or he might react with a feeling of de-realization.
This is not real. Or depersonalization. This is not happening to me.
The narcissist is in a constant state of de-realization in the sense that he does not perceive reality as real. He does not perceive what's happening to him, everything around him, animate or inanimate, as real. It's a prop in a theatre production, the theatre production of his life. He is walking, talking, living fiction, a piece of fiction, a story.
And so there's no investment, stable cathexis no commitment no emotions and no grief no mourning when something is lost the narcissist does not grieve or mourn his or her losses the narcissist doesn't grieve over anyone and doesn't mourn anything except for himself or herself. Half of all narcissists are women.
So the narcissism, as I keep saying in many of my videos, is a prolonged grief disorder. It's a process of mourning what the narcissist could have been and has never become owing to bad parenting, dysfunctional family, abuse, trauma, and instrumental identifying, and so on so forth.
For a variety of reasons, the narcissists did not self-actualize, remained in a state of potential, and the narcissist grieves this. He grieves his non-existent self, the self that could have been, could have become and never did.
But he does not grieve anyone or anything else.
Because as far as a narcissist is concerned, only he is real. He is the only object imbued with reality, with an existential dimension. Everyone else, everything else, these are figments of his own mind, they are internal objects.
And so this is why the narcissist doesn't grieve or mourn.
The narcissist is capable of nostalgia for periods of plentiful narcissistic supply. But that's the extent of his ability to look back in any emotionally meaningful way.
So no emotional investment, no emotional commitment, no mourning, no grief, constant switches between all out and nothing, kind of splitting, the narcissist in his shared fantasy with you, in his so-called relationship with you.
And this relationship could be romantic, intimate, friendship, or collegial.
Narcissists impose the same shared fantasy, structurally speaking, and functionally speaking, they impose a shared fantasy on all their interpersonal relationships.
And within the shared fantasy, the narcissists goes through stages.
We are all acquainted with them.
Idealization, devaluation, discard, replacement, hoovering.
These are inexorable, inevitable stages because they reflect internal dynamics within the narcissists.
For example, his need to resolve early childhood conflicts.
But each and every one of these stages requires psychic energy, requires emotional energy.
And so in parallel with the stages of the shared fantasy, there are stages of Cathexis, the Cathexis cycle.
In the love bombing phase, in the infatuation phase, in the limerence phase, and again, this is not limited to intimate sexual romantic relationships.
The narcissist gets infatuated and limerent with a prospective source of narcissistic supply, with a friend, so-called friend, with a colleague, with anyone who flatters him, and so on.
Shared fantasy is a universal pattern of interpersonal relatedness in the narcissist life and it starts with love bombing, which involves infatuation, limerence and so.
In the love bombing phase, there's a lot of cathexis. There's a huge investment, inordinate investment, of emotional energy.
Normal people are incapable of such intensity the narcissist is.
In psychoanalytic theory, Cathexis is the investment of psychic energy in an object of any kind.
It could be a person, it could be a wish, could be a fantasy, a goal, an ID, a social group, the self.
So, cathexis is there. It's like undifferentiated energy, ready to be invested or directed at a specific object.
So when the analysis commences the relationship, what he does, he simply creates a burst, a huge burst, a huge explosion of psychic energy.
And this is the cathexis.
The object is cathected.
The narcissist attaches emotional significance to the object.
Again, the object could be an intimate partner, a friend, a colleague, and so.
So at that point, when the object has been cathected by the narcissist, the narcissist actually appropriates the object.
Because the narcissist is unable to perceive other people as external or separate, any cathexis in other people is actually self-cathexis.
The narcissist perceives other people as internal objects within his mind.
So when he invests in them emotionally, he is actually investing in himself.
It's a process of auto-erotic self-infatuation, actually, via the agency and the mediation of another person.
Exactly like in sex, the narcissist masturbates with a body of his partner. It's all auto-erotism.
The narcissist is attracted to himself or to herself as a sexual object via another person, another person's gaze, another person's body, another person's touch, and another person's availability, submissive availability for sex.
So, similarly, when the narcissist directs emotional energy, and cathexis also includes sexual energy, by the way, libido, libido, and heos, never mind that, but when the narcissist directs any energy at someone for whatever reason with whatever goal in mind, at that point the narcissist is actually affecting himself.
He is the sole exclusive cathected object.
So the idealization is actually co-idealization.
The narcissist is, by idealizing you, he's idealizing himself.
By emotionally investing in you, he's emotionally investing in himself.
By creating a shared fantasy for you, he is creating a shared fantasy for himself.
You are just a prop in his theater, an instrument of gratification and pursuit of pleasure, among other things.
At the same time, you fulfill maternal functions and so on.
I recommend that you watch the playlist of the shared fantasy playlist for more.
So the first stage of the shared fantasy involves what is known as object cathexis, the investment of libido or psychic energy or emotional energy or call it what you will, elan vital, in objects outside the self, such as a person, a goal, an idea, an activity, a social group, a collective, a religion, a church, I mean you name it.
Object cathexis is always the first stage.
Object cathexis is followed by hypercathexis, an excess of psychic energy invested in the object.
And this corresponds to the love bombing and idealization phase.
So the narcissist starts by redirecting emotional energy, redirecting cathexis at an object, and that object could be a potential source of supply, potential intimate partner, potential friend or colleague or whatever, so on.
But could also be a potential leader, potential fan or follower, any external object.
The narcissist cathects the external object and at the same time, cathects himselfvia the external object. That is the initial phase. Then the narcissist idealizes the external object and love bombs the external object, love bombs, and then this involves hyper-catexes. Hyper-catexies is cathexis on steroids. It's exaggerated cathexis. Hyperbolic cathexis. Crazy cathexis. Insanely intense, insanely frequent, crazy-making cathexis, which kind of disorientes and is also very addictive and very flattering. And so hypercathesis is a hook, it's a bait. It's intended to lure you in by rendering you a perfect entity or a perfect object and making you fall in love with yourself through the narcissus gaze. That is the second phase of the cathexis cycle. The next phase of the cathexis cycle is hypo-cathesis, hypo with an O, hypocatexis. That is an abnormally low level of investment of psychic energy in an object.
So the narcissist goes from a high, a crest of emotional investment, hyper-cathesis. He goes dramatically to hypo-cathesis, which corresponds roughly to the devaluation phase. So we have cathexis, identification of target, acatexies, love bombing and idealization, core idealization actually, because the only object ultimately catheter is a narcissist. Then we have hypo-cathesis, which corresponds to devaluation, and then we have de-cathexis.
De-cathexis is the valuation. And then we have decafexes. Decafexes is the withdrawal of energy, of libido, from objects, from other people, for example. From the external world. The cafexes, the emotional investment, the energy is taken in, redirected inwards. And so de-catexies is more or less the equivalent of discard. So we have cathexis, hyper-cathesis, co-idealization and lab bombing. We have hypo-cathesis, devaluation, and we have de-cathesis, discard.
It's all a form of energy management. It's an energy account. It's like, think of it as a bank account or bank deposit in a bank. The narcissist deposits a lot of money on your name. No, first the narcissist decides that you are deserving of a bank account, that's Cathexis. Then the narcissist deposits millions of dollars on your name. That's hyper-catexies. Then the narcissist decides that you are disloyal or stupid or whatever, devalues you, and there is hypo-cathesis. He withdraws most of the money. And then he discards you and closes the account. That's de-cathesis.
That's the Cathexis. But there's a fifth stage, stage number five. And that is anti-Cathesis. Anticathsies is actually connected to Hoovery. But not only to Hoovery, changing loyalties, transitioning from one political party or persuasion to another, from one religion to another, etc. Anticathesis in psychoanalytic theory is the process in which the psychic energy is withdrawn from certain wishes and ideas, and it is used in order to strengthen alternative wishes, ideas, people.
In other words, the psychic energy is withdrawn from one object in order to strengthen the emotional investment in another object. But the other object is not chosen randomly. In antithesis, the other object has a role, and the role of the other object is to block the de-caffected materials entrance into consciousness. Let me break it down for you, translate it to English. The narcissist de-cathects you. He takes away all his investment in you. He no longer idealizes you, on the very contrary, devalues you. He doesn't want anything to do with you. He walks away. He discards you. There's no energy invested in you anymore. He couldn't care less what's happening to you, who you're with, and what you're doing with that other person. Nothing whatsoever. This stage you don don't exist. As far as a narcissist is concerned, you don't exist. There's only an internal object that represents you in his mind. And that internal object is an enemy, a persecutary object. So the persecutary object tortures the narcissists, threatens the narcissus, generates paranoid ideation because it's an enemy within.
To prevent this discomfort, this dissonance, this growing entanglement and conflict with the internal object turned enemy, the narcissist chooses another object, and then redirects all his emotional energy, all his libido, all his psychic energy, to that second other object, and he chooses that other object so that the second object is the exact opposite of you or the second object can somehow block your memory, block out, delete, erase the internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind, or at least deactivated.
So the role of the second object, once a narcissist has discarded you, transitioned away from you, broke up with you, divorced you, walked away in a meaningful manner, at that point, the narcissist chooses another object.
And that other object is either the exact opposite of you so that together you neutralize each other. It's like matter and antimatter. You become zero.
Or the other object has the capacity to somehow deactivate, somehow reduce the activity, somehow ameliorate, or control or somehow able to render the internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind to render it weak, inert, inactive, inaccessible.
So the choice of the second object is not random, actually.
And I will dedicate a video to this.
It is not true that narcissists transition from one object to another, from one intimate partner to another, from one spouse to another, from one intimate partner to another, from one social group to another, from one friend to another, from one workplace to another.
It's not true that the transition has no rules.
It's not true that the narcissist acts randomly that anyone would do.
That's absolutely not true.
The choice has to be anti-cathetic. It has to allow the narcissist to experience antacathesis, to silence the persecutory internal object that now represents you in the narcissist mind as a kind of threat, ambient threat.
The antacathed material may be similar to the original or opposite, but it somehow must be related to it. And that way it neutralizes it.
It's a very interesting topic.
The rules of choice of alternatives when the narcissist, for example, breaks up with you or divorces you and finds another partner, another intimate partner.
Again, the choice of that other intimate partner is not random. He's dictated by highly specific rules of Cathexis, which is a topic for another video.
This is the Cathexis cycle. It represents the emotional, the allocation of emotional energy, the distribution of psychic energy, and libido if you wish, within the various stages and phases of the shared fantasy.
And now you understand many of the narcissists' behaviors or apparent choices and decisions. It all has to do with losing interest.
One minute, you are the narcissist because you have become an internal object. Narciss identifies with you, mergers and fuses with you internally. It's a symbiotic relationship. You are like a maternal figure.
So one minute, you are the narcissist's world. So one minute, you're the narcissist world. The next minute, you're nothing. Nobody. Narcissists couldn't care less. It's as if you have never existed.
And so this transition is very bizarre, but it is fully explained once you understand the cathexis cycle, the cycle of energy.
Ultimately, we are all finite beings. We have a limited amount of energy, and we have to allocate this energy. We have to use it. It's not infinite. We can't generate an endless supply of energy, internal energy, psychic energy, libido. We can't generate an endless amount of it.
So we need to use it in a way that is self efficacious, in a way that yields outcomes that we desire.
And so the narcissist has X amount of energy at his disposal, and if he gives it to you, he can't give it to another.
If he wants to give it to another, he has to take it away from you. And he wants to give it to another because you have become an enemy, a persecutory object. You have conflicted with the internal object that represents you in his mind, in a variety of ways.
Watch the shared fantasy playlist. Also watch the two videos that I recommend. They are in the description under the video. One is titled Victim, Narcissist's Reality or Role Playing, and it deals with role theory in psychology. And the other one is self-hovering narcissism, trauma or role play?
And in addition to that, if you don't have enough time or you're bored by me, which is fully understandable, then watch the video seven phases of the shared fantasy. It's a summary of the shared fantasy.
But there's also a whole playlist with dozens of videos on various aspects of the shared fantasy.
So, I owe you one. I owe you a video on how the narcissist chooses his next victim, next target, next intimate partner, next friend, the next one.
How does a narcissist choose the next one?
Again, it's not a random process. Although you are interchangeable, you are dispensable, the choice of the next spouse, next girlfriend, next lover, next friend. The choice of the next is not random. It has to conform and to comply with highly specific requirements known as anti-cathexis.
Stay tuned. Ministers hi and minises, bye.