The Narcissus can be compared to a carnivorous plant.
He opens up his petals to you, obliterates the lines of demarcation, and then consumes you succulently within.
The inner part of the carnivorous plant is the shared fantasy and you are there slowly dissolving into it until you are no more. The shared fantasy is a form of identity theft. The lines in a shared fantasy is a form of identity theft.
The lines in a shared fantasy, the lines between you and the narcissists, blur.
There's a bleeding of identities into each other.
It's a kind of pernicious symbiosis where the boundaries between host and parasite kind of disappear. They meld into each other. It's a form of merger and fusion.
During the period of the shared fantasy, the narcissist assumes your identity in many ways.
He adopts your speech patterns.
He steals your ideas.
Sometimes he or she dress as you do.
They co-opt your friends and family members. They isolate you socially so that they could acquire your social circle.
Gradually, you vanish. You are vaporized, suspended animation, while the narcissist thrives on your essence, on your past accomplishments, on your personal history, on your knowledge, on your ideas, and quite frequently, on your finances.
This is the parasitic nature of the narcissist.
But what happens when you walk away?
Or what happens when the narcissist discards you and you're no longer in his life?
Well, remember, the shared fantasy involves acting. The narcissist is an actor.
It's a kind of thespian display.
It's a theater production.
When you walk away, when you're no longer in the narcissist's life, what happens is the narcissist reverts to basic form to the period before you have entered the shared fantasy.
And then the narcissist becomes again his or her absence, his or her empty container and receptacle, ready to adopt and subsume and consume and digest and simply be filled with someone else's essence.
It's very reminiscent of vampirism, of course, which is why people keep calling the narcissists the vampire, or a demon, or what have you.
But really, it's a matter of mirroring and reflection.
The narcissists consist of an emptiness surrounded by an imitating shell, a shell of mimicry and simulacrum.
The narcissist's main activity is to resonate with others, to force them to emit all kinds of feedbacks and inputs which the narcissist then adopts, combines, and creates a hive mind on the fly.
The narcissist is an apparition, It's a simulation. It's a recombinant form of spiritual DNA, if you wish.
And so the narcissist passes through life as this kind of bot, BOT, this kind of bot that simply spots other people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities, infiltrates and invades their defenses, then consumes and digests and recombines and absorbs, whatever it is that they have to offer, becoming other people in the process.
And then when these other people are out and away, the narcissist goes back to being this very basic, primitive device that devours and consumes everyone around them, a kind of Pac-Man, if you wish.
And so narcissism is acting, exactly like the actor.
An actor, having finished a theater production, having concluded the shooting of a film, the actor devolves or re-emerges as his or her original self.
The actor had assumed someone else's character.
The actor has become a protagonist in a film or a theatre production for a while.
And then the actor goes back to being himself or herself.
The narcissist doesn't have this luxury.
The narcissist assumes other people's identities, but these are the sole identities that the narcissist possesses.
Once these people are gone and out and discarded and devalued and rendered and rendered persecutory objects and so on so forth, the narcissist buries them deep in his or her unconscious.
And then he becomes once again the black hole, the emptiness, the howling void that he or she has always been.