During the devaluation phase of the shared fantasy, it is very common for both parties to experience hallucinations, sensory misperceptions, misapprehensions and misattributions.
Now these hallucinations are the outcome of what we call psychotic microepisodes.
The evaluation phase is exceedingly stressful. It triggers anxiety. It triggers a re-evaluation of one's sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
Reality testing is put under torsion and pressure and very often crumbles, so both parties develop impaired reality testing.
The whole situation is nightmarish, surrealistic, and hallucinations are one way of trying to make sense of what it is that is happening.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I'm a professor of clinical psychology.
Now, you know, the famous alleged phenomenon of black eyes?
That's a hallucination.
Or his face changed and became demonic.
That's a hallucination. Or my abuser or my intimate partner even smelled different.
That's a hallucination.
Hallucinations are false sensory perceptions that have a compelling sense of reality, despite the absence of any external stimulus.
Hallucinations affect all the senses, but auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, and olfactory smell-related hallucinations are the most common.
Now, hallucinations, as I said, are typically a symptom of a psychotic disorder or a psychotic break or a psychotic microepisode.
In schizophrenia, patients with schizophrenia have a lot of hallucinations.
But hallucination can also result from other factors, substance abuse, neurological abnormalities, sickness, and as I said, extreme stress, rejection, shame, humiliation, anxiety, deterioration, deterioration in the sense of self-worth and self-esteem, lack of safety, a sense of impending doom, threat and menace, the whole situation is outlandish, alien, nightmarish and surrealistic.
Under these conditions, some people with a weaker constitution, shall we say, develop psychosis, but very brief psychosis, psychotic microepisode.
And during these micro episodes, which could last anywhere from a few minutes to a few days during these micro episodes they misperceive the partner, the narcissists misperceives the partner in his shared fantasy and the partner in the shared fantasy misperceives the narcissists.
It is important to distinguish hallucinations from illusions and both from delusions.
Illusions are misrepresentations of real sensory stimuli.
Delusions are beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.
Hallucinations have nothing to do with reality.
So, when the intimate partner of the narcissist or the friend of the narcissist or anyone involved with the narcissist in the shared fantasy has to undergo the excruciating, hurtful, anguish-ridden process of devaluation, when the intimate partner is converted into a persecutory object, becomes an enemy devalued when there's a transition from idealization to devaluation, sometimes this stress, this tension, this conflict are too much.
And then the partner is perceived as the source of the aggression, the source of the frustration. The narcissist's intimate partner perceives the narcissist as frustrating, justly perceives the narcissist, as frustrating, as aggressive.
And so in her mind, she converts the narcissist into a demonic entity, into a devilish emanation. He even smells different. His eyes turned black, his face contorted and became demonic.
But why does this happen? Why do partners in the shared fantasy react this way to the narcissist's inexorable cycle of idealization devaluation.
Remember that the narcissist idealizes and devalues because he is reenacting early childhood conflicts with his biological mother of origin.
Has nothing to do with you.
This is a process that is utterly automatic, compulsive, emanates from the inside, immune to external stimuli and cues. Even your presence is not recognized. You're merely an internal object. Freud called it repetition compulsion.
Anyhow, why does this happen? Why do partners react with micro psychosis or pseudo-psychosis to distresses and so on?
Because they are no longer adults.
Within the shared fantasy, the intimate partner is actually a child. The intimate partner is regressed to infancy.
Now, why is that?
Because of the idealization and devaluation.
In the shared fantasy, both partners idealize each other and then both partners devalue each other.
But in order to idealize the partner, one needs to accept the partner in a parental role. The partner becomes a substitute or surrogate parent, usually a mother.
That's my principle of dual mothership. Both partners become mothers to each other, and both partners become children to each other, each other's children.
So co-idealization and co-devaluation, by the way, which is also an infantile process, they regress both sides of the equation. They regress the narcissists and they regress the intimate partner and they become infants, babes in the wood, their children.
Now, why is that important?
Because in early childhood, in infancy, the child misattributes sensa. The child misattributes sensory inputs. The child sees, of course, the child hears, the child smells, but the child is not aware of the full panoply of manifestations of the external world. The child is aware, dimly, of the existence of mother, a bit later the existence of father, and its own existence.
And so when the child is bombarded by sensory stimuli information from the environment in the form of auditory input, visual input, or factory input, the child doesn't know where this is coming from. He doesn't know to what or to whom to attribute this sensa, this sensory information, this sensory input. He doesn't know what to do with it. He says, who is this coming from? Is it coming from mother? Is it coming from myself? Is it coming from our combination, our symbiosis, our merger and fusion?
The child is very confused initially. This is typical of the first few months of life, six months, maybe up to 12 months. The child is very, very confused with regards to sensa, input from the environment mediated via the senses.
And so the child misattributes the sensa.
In many respects, the child in the first few months of life is psychotic. The child is unable to tell the difference between internal and external, out there and in here, and outside and inside.
And so the child often mistakes sensory information, information mediated via the senses, often mistakes these bits and pieces of information and considers them coming from the inside, considers them internal.
Or sometimes the child considers these external correctly, but misattributes them. He thinks the noise is coming from mother. The smell is mother's smell when actually it's not.
So sensory misattribution in infancy.
And because the participants in the shared fantasy are regressed to infancy, it is very difficult for them to manage sensory information, sensory data, sensory stimuli, sensory cues. Very difficult for them to manage these. Very difficult for them to attribute these appropriately to the correct sources.
And consequently, the outcome is illusions and hallucinations.
When sensory inputs are misperceived, when they come from the outside, and internal psychological processes are misperceived as sensory inputs.
In a way, what happens here is that the introjects, the internal voices and the internal processes are misperceived and mistaken for external sensory inputs.
The infantilized partner in the shared fantasy, and of course the narcissist who is constantly infantilized, but definitely the infantilized partner in the shared fantasy mistakes the voices of introjects, visual cues, internal visual cues, memories, for example, mistakes them for external, for input, information, and data coming from the outside.
And so this creates the ground for hallucinations.
When the intimate partner says, my abuser even smells different, what she is saying actually is the introject of my abuser is undergoing a transformation, a transformation that is frightening and incomprehensible to me.
When she says his eyes turned black and his face contorted and became demonic, what she is saying actually is, I perceive now the introject of my abuser, I perceive the internal object that represents my abuser as persecutory, as evil, as demonic, as an enemy.
And so this induces, via the process of sensory misattribution, this induces the belief that these internal convictions, these internal processes, these internal voices are not internal they are actually external and they're happening in reality.
It's a form of introject projection, if you wish. The introject is projected outward and attributed or misattributed to the narcissist or to the intimate partner.
So this is the groundwork. This lays the groundwork for hallucinations.
There's none of the process involved and there is synesthesia.
Synesthesia or synesthesia is an interesting condition. It's a condition in which stimulation of one sense generates a simultaneous sensation in another sense.
These are concomitant sensations and they are automatic, they are not intentional, they're not controllable, they're not conscious, and they're highly efficient. They're vivid and they're consistent over time.
So originally synesthesia's, depending on the country, were believed to be asymmetric, but bidirectional, kind of associations which are not symmetric, but two-way associations. Either sensation could induce the other and so on and so forth.
Now there are more than 50 different types of synesthesia.
Most common are what is known as grapheme color synesthesia, in which someone sees colors when viewing letters. When someone is presented with numbers on a page, they see colors. When someone is exposed to words, known clinically as graphemes, they see colors. Words on a printed page.
There's also time space synesthesia. When the person experiences the duration of time, months, days, hours, other units of time, as occupying specific spatial locations, locations in space.
So for example, January 30th is 30 degrees to the left of January 29th.
Other types include mirror touch synesthesia. A person is watching another individual being touched and that person feels a tactile sensation in their own body, as if they are being touched.
There's lexical gustatory synesthesia, or word gustatory synesthesia, word taste synesthesia, in which individuals experience flavors, they experience tastes, when they hear certain words.
About 5% of people have some form of this neurological blending or misattribution or misconnection or misjunction of the senses.
Now there are various explanations offered for the phenomenon.
There's a theory called the cross-activation theory, and it proposes that synesthesia stems from increased connectivity between neighboring sensory cortical areas as a result of incomplete developmental pruning of synapses.
There is a disinhibited feedback theory that proposes that synesthesia arises when the feedback that develops postnatally after birth from higher cortical areas onto lower sensory cortical areas is too weak to inhibit effects from connections between these sensory areas.
And so on and so forth. There are various forms of synesthesia, as I said.
There's chromatic audition. Chromatic audition is a type of synesthesia where color sensations are experienced, where sounds are heard. This is also known as phonopsia.
There's chromesthesia. Chromesthesia is a type of synesthesia in which perception of non-visual stimuli, I don't know, sounds, tastes, smells, odors, this sensation is accompanied by color sensations.
Now, strictly speaking, chromesthesia is not a conscious juxtaposition of two different sense perceptions. The two perceptions coincide as responses to the same stimulus.
So a musical note may be consistently experienced as blue. And this is known as pseudo-chromesthesia.
Now, phosphenism is a form of synesthesia in which a sensation of hearing is affected through another sense by something that is seen, smelled, tasted or felt.
So as you see, there are numerous forms of synesthesia.
I think synesthesia is involved in the devaluation phase of the shared fantasy.
I think there are two processes at play.
The partner in the shared fantasy who is being devalued is an infant. She has been regressed into infancy by the abuser or by the narcissist.
As an infant, she's unable to tell apart the sources of sensory inputs. She gets very confused. She misattributes information from the environment, data stimuli. She misattributes them.
And this leads to illusions in the case of in the devaluation phase.
Similarly, because the partner is infantilized, because the partner is regressed, she projects her internal processes, her interjects, the voices in her mind, images, memories. She projects them outwards. She confuses internal with external. She believes the things that are happening in her mind are actually happening outside, which is a great definition of a hallucination.
This process is known as hyper-reflexivity in psychosis.
All in all, the partner undergoes a psychotic micro-episode, a very brief period of psychosis in reaction to extreme stress, tension, humiliation, anxiety, shaming, rejection and abandonment.
Now, the second process is synesthesia.
I think what happens is the partner conflates sensory inputs. The partner synthesizes data, stimuli and information from the outside.
In a way, that triggers other stimuli and cues and data inside.
So it's not classical synesthesia in the sense that it's not a color that provokes sound or a sound that provokes a color or whatever, it's synesthesia across the divide between internal and external.
When the intimate partner within the shared fantasy, when the friend within the shared fantasy, when a participant in the shared fantasy is exposed to adverse, hurtful, humiliating, dangerous, threatening, input and stimuli from the outside, mediated usually via the obnoxious personality of the abuser or the narcissist. When the partner in the shared fantasy comes across these adverse stimuli, they usually connect these external stimuli to internal stimuli.
And so this gives rise to sensations, sensory input, sensa, that are actually not external, but internal.
So if the abuser provides an external stimulus that is perceived as threatening, as difficult, as hurtful, external stimulus that is best avoided, this triggers in the intimate partneranother stimulus, internal stimulus.
It's a form of defense, actually. It's converting the external stimulus, which is unbearable and intolerable, into an internal stimulus that is controllable.
So the abuser's voice would trigger internally an olfactory change, a change in the perception of smell.
As the abuser verbally abuses you, you may suddenly believe or convince yourself that his smell has changed.
As the abuser challenges you, threatens you, humiliates you, shames you, etc.
This external input, this sensory input would be converted internally into an image, a visual stimulus, and you would convince yourself, you would hallucinate that his eyes are becoming black, or that his face is becoming demonic.
This is synesthesia, but across external internal, the external internal divide.
So we have regression and synesthesia.
When you put the two together, we have psychosis, albeit limited in time, and hallucination as to sensory inputs, as to sensa, misinterpretation of senses, wrongvisual, olfactory, auditory, and in very rare cases, tactile misinterpretations and misattributions of what's happening.
And this enhances and increases the surrealistic, dreamlike, not to say, nightmarish quality of the devaluation and discard phase of the shared fantasy.