I know you don't understand the word, I'm saying. It all flies over your head. You're tuning into my videos because of the sound of my voice as your eyelids droop heavier and heavier and you descend mercifully into the arms of more of you hypnotized by my vocalities.
Okay sleeping beauties, today we're going to discuss the following question.
Why does the narcissist think that you should read his mind, anticipate his wishes, foretell his needs and preemptively cater to them? Why is that?
Narcissists are divorced from reality, mind you. They have impaired reality testing and they reside firmly habituated to a fantasy.
Narcissism is a fantasy defense written writ large.
But fantasy is not the same as psychosis and to assume that you should possess telepathic capabilities and the ability to read the narcissist mind, that is strange.
And today I'm going to explain to you what goes on in that dark place, in that penumbral cave known as the narcissist mind. And why does he firmly believe that you should definitely read it with eloquence and with skill?
My name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Surf Loud, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently a long-term member of the faculty of CEAPS. We're not going to do that.
Now before we proceed, there is a channel with my videos translated into Portuguese, which is spoken in Portugal and in Brazil. So those of you who want to watch my videos with subtitles in Portuguese, the link to the channel is in the description. Now description is a relatively simple word, which some of you may understand. It's the area under the video, not above the video, not to the left of the video and not shockingly to the right of the video, but just under the video. Got it?
Shvan Panim.
Okay, back to the narcissist.
The narcissist believes that you should read his mind. He believes that you should make every effort and strive to tune in and resonate with his thoughts, with his negative affectivity, with his negative emotions and with his moods.
He regards both of you as a kind of duet or stitch on TikTok. And so you should be there not only externally, but you should maintain an internal presence in his mind, kind of observer who is attuned to the vicissitudes, the ups and downs and the tinted abulations of his finely tuned kind of brain.
Why is the narcissist so emotionally invested in this?
The narcissist get really, really angry when you cannot second guess their thoughts, their wishes, their dreams, their hopes, their needs. They get really, really pissed off. They become aggressive and they punish you or seek to punish you for such misbehavior.
Why?
Why this cathexis? Why this emotional investment in the idea of telepathy?
And today I'm going to try to explain to you why.
Number one, mind reading is a test of maternal symbiosis and unconditional love.
I recommend that you watch the videos in my shared fantasy playlist on this channel.
It explains, these videos explain that you as the narcissist intimate partner, friend, you constitute a maternal figure, a substitute mother.
The narcissist interacts with you in his interpersonal relationships as a mother. So a mother should love and should accept unconditionally. A mother should idealize the baby.
The narcissist is about two years old, mentally speaking. So he expects to be idealized, expects to be cherished, to be coddled, to be accepted, to be embraced and to be loved unconditionally.
But because he is constitutionally unable to separate from the mother figure, remember his original separation and individuation at chronological age, 18 to 36 months, that phase was disrupted usually by the maternal figure.
So the original mother, the biological mother of the narcissist did not allow him to separate from her and to become an individual.
They remained, the original mother and the narcissist remained in a symbiosis. They remained enmeshed, fused, emerged.
Now this is on the emotional level and the psychological level.
The narcissist tries to recreate this with his intimate partners who are stand in mothers.
They are, the intimate partner is like a mother.
So the narcissist tries to create a symbiosis with her and expects her to respond in kind.
Now in a symbiosis, the intimate partner should be able to read, literally read or scan the non-verbalized unspoken content of the narcissist's mind.
If you are one and the same, if you're a single organism with two heads, then you shouldn't have equal access to the same mind.
The narcissist's mind, of course, you don't have a mind. If a narcissist wants you to have a mind, he will give it to you.
So this is point number one.
The symbiosis makes it logical, makes it sensical, makes it reasonable for the narcissist to expect you to expect you to access a single mind, your hive mind, the common mind, the colony mind, if you wish.
Then once you have accessed your mind, the narcissist expects you to love him and accept him as he is unconditionally.
He tests, he's testing you. Will you be deterred?
When you have accessed the narcissist's mind, when you have found there all the darkness and all the shadow and all the complexes and all the hurt and all the shame and all the fear and all the nastiness and all the obnoxiousness and all the lack of empathy, when you have accessed the narcissist's mind and when you have toured this horror land, this Disneyland of decay and decadence and disintegration, when you have seen the narcissist's true face by melding with his mind, will you then reject him? Will you abandon him? Will you walk away having come to learn exactly who he is?
It's a fear.
The narcissist is terrified of this.
So it's a test.
Narcissist wants you to read his mind and then once you have read his mind, he wants you to accept him as he is unconditionally, warts, shortcomings, failings and all.
Remember that deep inside the narcissist harbors, maintains an all pervasive debilitating inferiority complex wrapped around the core of life threatening shame.
He lets you in by choosing you as an intimate partner and converting you into a maternal figure.
The narcissist is giving you the keys to the kingdom but then he expects you to unlock the doors and walk in and survey, survey the landscape.
Get acquainted with his inner dynamics and the moving parts of his non-self.
He expects you to face the void and the emptiness and the absence and still love him.
But he is incapable of verbalizing this.
He's too terrified and he's too defensive.
His grandiosity, his false self won't let him admit to what a flawed, dysfunctional, deformed and defective creature he is.
So he needs you to do all this by yourself. He needs you to read his mind without his help and without the assistance of language and words and then he needs you to love him as he is unconditionally.
If you do succeed to read his mind, to guess his wishes, to anticipate his needs means you love him and it means that you love him as a mother.
Additionally, this mind melt, this co-joining of minds, this merger infusion on certain levels because the narcissism biosis with you is not the same as the co-dependence merger infusion.
This is totally different phenomena.
I may dedicate a video to the differences, but it's still a form of co-joining, still a joint venture, still a collaboration which involves a merger and acquisition to borrow from the world of finance.
So this joining at the hip is proof of a grandiose and anxiolytic mind, mind melt.
The narcissist says, I have appropriated her, his intimate partner.
And of course, when I say he, it's a she, when I say her, it's a his, the gender pronouns are interchangeable.
I'm using the male gender pronouns because this is good literary practice for no other reason about half of all narcissists are women.
So the narcissist regards his success at appropriating you, his ability to annex you, his capacity to take over you and to subsume you and to digest you and to render you an extension of himself, an internal object, to snapshot you.
All this, this is proof of the narcissist's omnipotence.
It enhances and buttresses the sense that he is all powerful and this reduces his anxiety.
I am the world, says the narcissist.
And so let's summarize the first part.
The first part is the narcissist expects you to rid his mind because you are his mother.
And because he wants to merge with you symbiotically, he wants to create a symbiosis with you because you are his mother.
And that's what babies do.
They have a symbiosis with the mother.
And then he expects you to enter his mind, visit all the nooks and crannies and corners, get acquainted with everything that's there, all the contents.
And he expects you to do it on your own.
He will not help you. He will not verbalize. He will not speak. He will not signal. He will not connote. He will not do anything to assist you.
It's your job because he's a baby and you're a mother. You are the adult in the room.
And so you take over his mind, you visit and revisit every aspect and dimension and wall and connecting corridor.
And then despite what you have seen there, despite what you have seen there, the horror of the narcissist's absence, you would still love him unconditionally.
It's a test.
Mind reading is a test.
Second function, by forcing you to merge your mind with his mind, the narcissist feels grandiose, omnipotent, and it reduces his anxiety.
But what proof does he have that he had succeeded in the symbiosis with you, that he had merged your mind with his?
What proof does he have?
Mind reading.
If you're capable of reading his mind, it means your mind is his.
He took over. He appropriated. He made you his property. He made you his extension.
And then of course caters to his self image as godlike and grandiose.
The narcissist doesn't regard this expectation of mind reading as unreasonable, irrational, illogical or frankly, a bit nutty.
He doesn't regard it this way.
This is not telepathy.
Many narcissists are scientists and they're rational and they know that at this stage at least telepathy has not been proven.
So it's not telepathy.
They're not superstitious. They're not prejudicial. They're not uneducated. They're not primitive.
They don't regard it as telepathy. They regard it as internal object communication.
Remember you don't exist outside the narcissist.
The narcissist is incapable of perceiving and interacting with external objects.
What the narcissist does immediately, he converts all external objects, especially significant external objects like you.
He converts all external objects to internal objects.
He creates introjects, voices and representations, sometimes visual representations that stand in that represent external outside objects.
So once he has created a representation of you in his mind, he continues to interact with that representation, not with you.
But your avatar in his mind, your icon in his brain, these are internal objects.
They are not external.
And so these internal objects are able to communicate, to converse, to dialogue, to intercourse in the verbal sense at least.
In short, the internal objects share a communication space with access to common databases of information.
So mind reading in the narcissist, as far as the narcissist is concerned, mind reading is just when two internal objects talk.
So for example, when his false self communicates with your representation in his mind, when his false self talks to the internal object in his mind that represents you, this is mind reading.
This is the telepathy he's expecting, not calling it telepathy.
The narcissist internalizes and introjects the world and then identifies with the world and incorporates it.
As far as the narcissist is concerned, there is no world except in his mind.
Narcissist in this sense is a philosophical solipsist.
So of course, his parts of his mind can communicate with each other and you, his intimate partner, his friend, his colleagues, his family, you are just parts of his mind, your elements in his mind, your figments of his mind.
And so when you talk to other parts of his mind, this is internal communication, not external communication.
He expects your avatar in his mind. He expects the internal object that represents you to be able to fully decipher and read and decode what other parts in his mind are doing and thinking and emoting.
And so the partner is an extension of the narcissist and being an extension of the narcissist without any independent autonomous or agentic existence, the partner should be able to communicate with other parts of the narcissist, including his mind.
The partner should be able to read the narcissist's mind because the partner is the narcissist's mind.
And this is, of course, the principle of hyper-reflexivity in psychotic disorders, inability to tell the difference between internal objects and external objects.
Narcissism is a mirror image of psychosis.
In psychosis, the psychotic confuses internal objects with external ones.
He believes that his internal objects are actually external.
While the narcissist is exactly the opposite, he believes that external objects are actually internal and therefore should be able to read his mind because they are inside his mind and they are parts of his mind.
And so failure to read the narcissist's mind provokes in him frustration.
He's frustrated because he can't make sense of it.
Why can't you read his mind? After all, you're inside his mind and you're only inside his mind. You don't have a separate existence.
So why can't you do this very simple trick, this very basic function of reading other parts of his mind?
And that frustrates him a lot and he becomes aggressive.
He wishes to communicate to you how angry he is and then maybe punish you.
But it also provokes anxiety.
Your inability to read his mind provokes anxiety because it challenges the maternal object.
A good mother or a good enough mother should be able to tell, to predict, to foresee her baby's needs and wishes and thoughts and emotions.
If she fails in that, she's a bad mother. She's an abandoning mother. She's a neglectful and rejecting mother.
So if you fail to read the narcissist's mind, you will have proven to him that you are not a good mother or maybe not a mother at all.
It challenges, it challenges his worldview, your role in his life and in his mind. It unsettles him.
He's terrified exactly as a baby would be terrified when mommy leaves the room.
We will discuss it soon in a few minutes.
So there is an issue here.
Your inability to read the narcissist's mind, predict his wishes, cater to his needs in advance.
These are not mere dysfunctions that the narcissist can gloss over and move on.
He can't move on because it reveals to him your true face.
Are you a fake? Are you just pretending to love him? Are you after his money? Are you a gold digger?
He becomes paranoid. There's persecutory negation and you become a persecretary object.
He become an enemy because had you been a real mother, had you been a true maternal figure, you would have been able to read his mind because he's your baby and mothers do this with babies and then you would have been able to establish for him an environment that keeps him happy.
Failure at mind reading implies that you, the external object, you possess content that is not identical to the content of the narcissist's mind.
Your failure to read his mind provokes him to notice that you're separate. Your inability to gauge and to predict his emotions and his cognitions, these are proof positive that you are not inside his mind but you are outside his mind.
It triggers him because it reminds him, number one, that you are an external, separate, agentic, autonomic, independent object and number two, that something is wrong with him. Something is wrong with him.
When you fail to read the narcissist's mind, you're actually broadcasting to him two messages.
Number one, I'm not you. I'm not inside your mind and I'm not you. I'm separate from you.
And number two, if you think that I'm not separate from you, if you think that I am inside your mind, if you think that I am an internal object and only an internal object, my dear narcissist, you're very sick, mentally ill, you need help and medication, you're probably psychotic, something is seriously wrong with you.
These messages are terrifying and they provoke in the narcissist, separation insecurity, abandonment anxiety owing to a lack of object constancy or object permanence.
In short, the narcissist thinks, believes that your separateness portends, is the precursor and the antecedent of abandonment, rejection.
He extrapolates your behavior and he says, she refuses to read my mind or she can't read my mind.
It means that she's separate. It means that I'm mentally ill. It means that she sees that I'm mentally ill, she realizes it and that means she's going to walk away. She's going to reject me, neglect me and abandon me exactly as my mother, original mother had done.
It's a ripple, a reenactment, but not the way the narcissist wanted it.
And it provokes in him all the primordial terror of a baby being abandoned. It's life threatening because when a baby is abandoned, there's no food, there's no shelter, baby dies. It's a life threatening feeling.
A failure at mind reading implies that the external object, you, is unique, is not a clone of the narcissist, is not an extension of the narcissist, is not a part of the narcissist's mind, inseparable or otherwise.
And so if you're unique, if you're separate, it means that you cannot be exchanged, it cannot be substituted for. The narcissist cannot replace you. You're not interchangeable, you're not fungible.
As a mere figment in the narcissist's mind, as a mere internal object, you're easily replaceable, deactivated, changeable, fungible.
That's why narcissists switch so fast between so-called intimate partners. I call them insignificant others because one internal object is as good as another internal object.
You can't tell them apart. The idealization process, the photoshopping, produces identical copies, replicas of the original mother, of a maternal figure.
But if you remind the narcissist that you are separate, that you are unique, that you have your own existence and independence and agency and autonomy, that you're not him and that you're not inside his mind, if you do remind them of all these things by not being able to read his mind or being willing to try to read his mind, you're threatening him. You're threatening him because what you're telling him is, "I'm an external object, and you will never find an external object that is me, that is exactly like me."
So this threatens the narcissist. It's like saying, "I'm your only real mother. You will never have a mother substitute again."
That means the narcissist will remain stuck in the separation/deviduation phase. He will never complete it. He will never become an individual. He will never separate from the mother figure. And of course, he will never become an adult or anything else.
This is terrifying.
Now, the last observation is a bit complex, and I ask you to bear with me, those of you who are still awake, probably two or three of you, judging by past experience.
The failure to read the narcissist's mind is also a failure of the extensionality and intentionality of the external objects and the narcissist's extrajects.
Okay, I know, I know.
Cool it, cool it.
Wash your face, get a drink of water, relax, breathe in, breathe out, meditate a bit.
It's been a mouthful and a very threatening one, but I'm going to help you.
I'm going to help you because I'm a nice, empathic, and kind guy, a healer, a fixer, a rescuer, a saviour, and I learned it from the best.
Okay, so what I just said is the following.
If you refuse to read the narcissist's mind, there is a problem that has to do with something known as extensionality and intentionality.
Every object in the world has a definition.
For example, if I ask you what is a bachelor, a bachelor is an unmarried man. That's the definition of a bachelor, and that is the extensionality, the intentionality of the bachelor.
So the intentionality of a bachelor is the definition of a bachelor.
Intentionality is a list of all the bachelors in the world. So when I say the world bachelor, it is an intentional with S dimension, which is the definition of the world, and also a set, a group of all the instances of the world, of all the bachelors in the world. Because every object in the world has this, whether external or internal, the narcissist attaches to you as an intimate partner, as a friend, as a colleague, as never mind. Any person who is in an interpersonal relationship with a narcissist is being snapshot and converted into an internal object, period. Shared fantasy is the only way narcissists interact with other people, mainly in intimate relationships, but not only. So when the narcissist converts you into an internal object, he attaches to you an intentional with an S dimension and an extensional dimension. He defines you. He says, this is Marge, and Marge is my mother, my maternal figure. Marge is the intimate partner, is you. So this is Marge, my intimate partner, and she is my mother. She is my maternal figure. And this is what a maternal figure does. Maternal figure knows to guess or second guess, her baby's needs and wishes and thoughts and emotions. She knows, a maternal figure knows how to read minds and a maternal figure loves and accepts unconditionally. So this is the intentional dimension of the internal object. And there is an extensional dimension of the internal object. And in this case, it's very interesting because the narcissist chooses an extensional dimension which is known as null set. Remember what is extensionality? Extensionality is a list of all the instances of the object. So if I say bachelor, it's a list of all the bachelors in the world. When the narcissist attaches to you an extensional dimension, he says, there is nobody there. There is no external object. We call this a null set.
I'll read to you the definition of a null set.
In mathematical sets, a null set is a set that does not contain any values or elements.
So what the narcissist says, he comes across you and he says, wow, that could be my intimate partner. I'm going to convert her into an internal object.
And then I'm going to Photoshop this object and so on and so forth.
And now I need to define this object. Every object has two types of definitions, intentional and extensional.
So the narcissist defines your intentionality as a mother figure, loving, accepting, mind reading and so on.
But your extensionality he defines as there is no external object. This is his way of eliminating you as an external object and recreating in his mind an internal object that is not you, just represents you.
So he then continues to interact with the internal object because you have no extensionality in his mind. You don't exist. You're a null set.
This is very difficult to understand.
I realize that.
But think of it in simple terms.
Think of it this way.
The narcissist comes across an intimate partner, potentially intimate partner, potential source of supply, creates immediately a representation of that person in his mind and then says, if it's an intimate partner, he says, that's a mother figure and these are her characteristics.
But having created the internal object, the narcissist firmly believes that you don't exist out there only in here.
And this is null set extensionality.
Null, you're zero. You don't exist.
When you fail to read the narcissist's mind, you challenge the intentional dimension of you and the extensional dimension of you. When you fail to read the narcissist's mind, you prove to him that you are not a maternal figure because mothers read the minds of their babies. And if they don't, they're not mothers.
So you challenge the intentional dimension, your definition in the narcissist's mind.
But you also challenge your extensional dimension. According to the narcissist, you don't exist as an external object.
Your extensionality is a null set.
But when you fail to read the narcissist's mind, predict his emotions and cognitions and needs and wishes and so on, when you fail to do this, you prove to the narcissist that you are separate from him, that you are not inside his mind, that you are not a part of his mind.
And in this sense, you challenge the null set extensionality of you.
You're telling the narcissist you're wrong.
I do exist. I am an external object. I am not a zero. I am not a null set. I'm a set with one member. That one member is me externally to you, not dependent on you. My existence is independent on you.
And this of course shutsters the narcissist's view of you and the narcissist's view of the world, not only of you.
According to the narcissist, you and him, you are what we call a co-extensive object. You are a single object. You're one. The external object and the narcissist are one.
And so your inability to read his mind proves to him that you're not one. You are two.
The narcissist specifies the internal content that he attributes to you, the external object.
Now this internal content that he attributes to you, these are all his projections.
He tries to create a clone of his mind as an internal object and to say this is you.
So he takes his need to be loved, his need to be accepted, his wish for a mother, his compulsion to separate an individual. He takes all these things and he puts them inside the internal object.
And then he says to you, you don't exist out there. You're not an external object. You are this internal object.
But this internal object is a copy of the narcissist's mind. It's a replica, it's a clone of the narcissist's mind. And he attributes it to you, the external object.
He attributes it to you and he says from this moment on, you're not external, you're internal because the internal object that represents you in my mind is my mind.
And how many instances of you are there outside the narcissist's mind? Zero.
He tells you that there is a null set of all possible instances of you as an external object.
He tells you that you are one with him. And because you are one with him, you don't have a separate existence.
So how many instances of you are there? Zero.
Null.
And this is why I keep saying that narcissistic abuse is a unique form of abuse, unprecedented because the narcissist absolutely needs to eliminate you as an external object.
If he fails to eliminate you as an external object, you will never be his mother. If he fails to eliminate you as an external object, you will abandon him. If he fails to eliminate you as an external object, you will never read his mind.
He needs to eliminate you out there in reality and recreate you in here inside his mind as a copy of himself.
Your intentionality, your intentional with S dimension is a mother figure which is part of the narcissist's mind. And your extensionality with an S is a null set. You don't exist out there. There are no instances of you.
And when you fail to read his mind, you remind him that all this is BS nonsense, counterfactual. You do exist. You are out there.
There is at least one instance of you and it has nothing to do with the narcissist's mind.
And because you can't be one with the narcissist, you can't be his mother.
This challenges and destroys everything the narcissist believes the way he interacts with reality, his reality testing. It drives him to the point of psychosis.
He is not only frustrated and aggressive, he becomes anxious, panicky, terrified by your egregious inability or perhaps unwillingness if you are evil and malicious to read his mind.
And he needs then, if this failure continues, he then converts you into an enemy. You're doing this on purpose. You could, you know me better. You know me by now. You should have read my mind. You should have anticipated my wishes. You should have catered to my needs.
Well in advance. I don't need to speak. I don't need to verbalize. I don't need to talk to you because you are part of me. And if you defy this, you're trying to destroy me mentally. You're my enemy. And then devaluation and discard.
So this is all intimately connected to the narcissist, the bill, the compulsion, repetition compulsion to replay or reenact the separation individuation. Everything with the narcissist is very deep.
Substandard experts online describe superficially the behaviors. They confuse psychopathic and narcissistic behavior. It's a bloody mess. But sometimes they hit gold and they describe the narcissistic behavior.
But narcissistic behaviors are deep rooted. And that's not me.
There's a monthroid and Jung and all the grace, all the grace of psychology, Winnicott, you name it. Narcissistic behaviors are deep rooted.
What you see is the tip of a glacier, tip of an iceberg. And it's what you see is not what you get. And you often get it wrong. And so what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to take you by the hand and guide you through this hiatus, through this inferno, the hell, hellscape of the narcissist mind.
And to explain to you that everything is interconnected and the narcissist, disproportional and sometimes irrational reactions are actually very rational.
And as far as the narcissist is concerned, always proportion. This is why it's literally impossible to heal or cure the narcissist or convert him into some kind of reasonableness, to conduct any meaningful communication with him or to cause him to learn and to transform. Everything is connected to everything. It's like Indra's net.
When you pick up one bead, you pick up the whole net.
It's a problem because you can't isolate. There are no isolates. You can't isolate a specific trait, a specific behavior, a specific psychodynamic, as you can do, for example, in borderline personality disorder. Even in psychopathy, you can't do this in narcissism. And so it's mind boggling to try to work with the narcissist in clinical settings, for example. And perhaps artificial intelligence will do a better job one day, backed by supercomputers or quantum computers. I don't know. But the regular human mind, even if it's extremely endowed and gifted, hint, hint, still boggles, still gets frozen, still stalls when it is faced with the hyper complexity of the narcissist's internal world. How could an absence give birth to such a twisted, thwarted universe is beyond me? But then you know what it says in Genesis. At the beginning, there was nothing. There was chaos. And out of it came creation. So this is the narcissist, a nothingness, a chaotic nothingness that produces something that can only be described as ultimate impenetrable darkness. ###