Hello, Sushanim and Sushanod. Today I am joined by a special guest, Donald Duck. Many is on vacation or at least that's what I've been telling the police. Anyhow, ladies and a few gentlemen, today we are going to discuss fantasy and narcissistic elation. Yes, another concept that several self-aggrandizing, self-style experts are getting catastrophically wrong. We're going to ask the question, why does the narcissist choose fantasy over reality? What in fantasy caters to the narcissist needs and how do you fit in? Are you an inseparable part of the fantasy? Can the fantasy subsist and exist without you? Can it survive you? These are the questions we'll be dealing with today using the concept of narcissistic elation in its properly defined form.
Of course, talking about casting pearls of wisdom before self-styled experts.
Okay, Svanpani, Svanpani and the rest of you, my name is Samvatnin. I'm the blue professor of psychology, author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and currently on the faculty of CEOPS. Five years ago, I introduced the concept of shared fantasy into the study of narcissistic abuse and generally abusive relationships with narcissists.
Now the shared fantasy idea is not mine. It was first proposed in 1989 by Sander, but Sander did not link it obviously to narcissistic abuse because I haven't coined the phrase by that time.
Sander discussed generally interpersonal relationships and the role of fantasy within such relationships. I superimposed Sander's brilliant conception of shared fantasy onto narcissistic abuse and it took a life of its own.
Today, I'm going to discuss narcissistic abuse, fantasy, you and your role in the fantasy and the regulatory mechanism known as narcissistic elation.
Now fantasy is nothing is nothing new. Fantasy is not even unhealthy according to modern current psychology.
Fantasy underlies very important activities such as daydreaming and planning. Fantasy is not only a pathological defense mechanism as it is described in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic literature, but it is also a very important way to reconceive of the world, to develop some kind of vision.
Everything starts with a thought. Everything starts with a dream. The inception of everything is in a narrative. Everything. Buildings, books, films, wars, love, children, everything, reality itself. We are beings made of visions, made of dreams. We are storytellers whose natural habitat is their own minds.
And so fantasy is inevitable. That is not my view by the way.
Originally, this is the view of Melanie Klein. We'll deal with it in a minute.
But fantasy underlies more than anything the narcissistic defense.
Narcissism is actually a fantasy defense writ large in the narcissist or rye and out of control. It is even defined this way in the diagnostic and statistical manual, not one of my favorite books.
But before we go to fantasy and the role of fantasy, narcissism, your role in the fantasy in all this as promised, I would like to answer a question that deals with my latest videos, my last two or three videos.
In my last two or three videos, I explained that there are three types of objects, a good object, bad object, an idealized object.
Now, just to remind you, an internal object or internalized object is an object that is comprised of a voice or a group of voices acting in concert in order to produce a coherent and cohesive message. The message could be negative or self negating. You're ugly or stupid. You're a loser. You're inadequate. You're unlovable. Then it would be a bad object.
The message could be positive. You're amazing. You're God like. You're drop dead gorgeous. You're hyper intelligent. That would be an idealized object.
And the message could be realistic. These are your strengths. These are your weaknesses. And this kind of realistic nuanced shades of gray message emanates essentially from a good object.
So a good object is a realistic object, an object that is only good and does not contain any negative messaging is an idealized object. And it is very common among narcissists who have been raised as pampered spoiled idolized children.
And a bad object is the most common among narcissists and many other mental health disorders.
So I kept saying in my previous videos that the bad object and the idealized object are fantasy based. And then in one of the videos, I also said that a bad object is closer to reality than an idealized object. It maintains or helps to maintain a better reality testing, a more viable evidence based reality testing.
So what gives if both the idealized in the bad object, a fantasy based, how could one of them be closer to reality than the other?
And here's the explanation.
The bad object is a series of voices, a series of messages or signals. And what it says is what it says to its owner, unfortunate owner is it is best to avoid reality because you're likely to fail. You're unlovable, you're inadequate, you're a loser, you will fail. Don't try, don't even try.
So the bad object raises awareness. It is skewed awareness. It is cognitively distorted, but it has to do with reality. There is an awareness of avoided reality and awareness of the act of avoiding it.
The bad object is closer to reality in the sense that it induces behaviors which are avoidant. And at the same time, the bad object enhances awareness of these behaviors and awareness of the alleged hostile reality out there.
In other words, the bad object fosters a choice.
And so it is best to avoid reality, it says, because you're likely to fail. Be aware of reality, as I see it, and be aware that you need to avoid it.
In short, the bad object is reality oriented, public facing. Whereas the idealized object, the compensatory false self, says you are already in reality. You're self efficacious, you're wonderful, you're successful, you're amazing. No need to study any further, no need to work hard. You're entitled to accomplishments without commensurate effort.
And everything you think about reality and about other people is true and correct, because your reality investing is wonderful and intact.
And of course, all these statements are wrong. They're counterfactual. The two statements of the bad object are, this is reality, and it's best to avoid it.
The two statements of the idealized object are, your grasp of reality is perfect, and you're doing well. And in both cases, the statements are wrong. But in the first case, the narcissist with the bad object is much more attuned to reality if only by avoiding it. He knows or realizes that he is avoiding something. Whereas the narcissist with the idealized object doesn't realize that there is a reality out there. He thinks his internal world, his mind is reality. He confuses reality with fantasy. He has no reality testing to speak of.
The bad object impairs reality testing. The idealized object removes it all together. There is no awareness whatsoever. No awareness of reality and no awareness of the actions taken within reality. Everything is unconscious. Everything is automatic and 100% fantastic.
This is the idealized object.
I hope I've explained the differences.
The bad object misleads its owner about reality, but causes the owner to avoid reality. And in this limited sense, raises awareness.
Whereas the idealized object deceives completely its owner. The false self is 100% self deceptive. It's 100% fantasy and yet it lies to the narcissist. The false self lies to the narcissist and says you're 100% embedded in reality. Everything you are doing is real and the outcomes are wonderful.
Okay. Hope you got it. This leads to the issue of fantasy.
These two, the bad object and the idealized object are fantasy based. Why fantasy? Why does the narcissist choose fantasy?
Now, if you watch YouTube's YouTubers and so on and so forth and other self style, that's because you might get the impression that fantasy is merely a counterfactual narrative. A story that the narcissist is telling himself that has little to do with reality and that is self-aggrandizing and inflating and fantastic.
Also, some would tell you that this kind of fantasy, especially the shared fantasy involves necessarily some form of manipulation and coercion. And to some extent, these views of fantasy are correct. However, they are very, very partial.
Fantasy is a total solution. It caters to all the psychological needs of the narcissist. Actually, it caters to many psychological needs of healthy people, which is why people are drawn to the narcissist, which is why they end up inside the shared fantasy, which is why they become members of the cult of the narcissist.
The fantasy is a regulatory mechanism. It helps the narcissist to regulate himself, his moods, his emotions. It's a form of internal regulation, but not true reality, which is a healthy form of regulation through alternative reality, the fantasy. It is a form of self-supply.
Within the fantasy, the narcissist is godlike. He's perfect. He's amazing. He's brilliant. He's a genius. He's drop-dead gorgeous. He's everything within the fantasy. The narcissist constantly derives supply from his own view of himself, from his own self-perception and self-image.
So the fantasy is a perpetual mobile, an engine of self-supply. In this sense, the fantasy is also regulatory because as external supply waxes and wanes, as external supply has tides and counter-tides, it becomes deficient. As external supply is irregular, the fantasy keeps providing a regular stream of internally generated narcissistic supply, self-supply, kind of endorphins.
Next is the role of defense against fragility and vulnerability.
The fantasy isolates the narcissist, not so much from external reality as from internal reality.
Now, of course, the fantasy is a firewall. Reality pushes back. Reality is harsh and challenging. Reality can can produce shame and humiliation. The fantasy protects the narcissist from all these possible adverse effects of reality.
But the more important role of the fantasy is to isolate the narcissist from his own shame, from his own fragility and vulnerability, from his own propensity for self-destruction and so on.
The fantasy creates an environment within which the narcissist never comes across the negative emotions that he is capable of experiencing.
Through the fantasy, the narcissist avoids the more virulent forms of envy. Through the fantasy, the narcissist regulates his rage and anger. Through the fantasy, the narcissist shuns any contact with a life threatening reservoir of shame and guilt within him.
Fantasy, therefore, is a kind of solution to potentially borderline like emotional dysregulation.
The fantasy is also a time machine. It allows the narcissist to regress into a symbiotic, womb-like state back to the time before he was born when everything was oceanic and perfect and wonderful.
And this is narcissistic elation.
I'm going to talk about, discuss it in a minute.
Fantasy is the vehicle that leads to narcissistic elation via regression, chronological regression, mental regression into a symbiotic state with a womb representative, representative of the womb, which is the maternal figure in the shared fantasy.
The fantasy also allows the narcissist to ignore the bad object if he is in possession of a bad object.
The fantasy provides a fake good object or actually an idealized object, which is the false self.
The fantasy, therefore, is a defense against bad object dynamics and bad object introjects and voices.
Fantasy is a cognitive distortion or at least colludes and collaborates with cognitive distortions, such as grandiosity in the distance. It is self-enhancing. It amplifies and magnifies cognitive distortions so that they become so intense and deceive the narcissist into believing that it's reality.
The fantasy convinces the narcissist by sheer force of its potency, by the sheer amount of power and energy deployed in the fantasy.
And finally, the fantasy is what is known as pseudo emotion. It's euphoric.
Now don't confuse narcissistic euphoria with narcissistic elation. And don't confuse narcissistic dysphoria with narcissistic depletion, as many self-styled experts do. They usually get things wrong.
Narcissistic euphoria is when the narcissist succeeds, when he is self-efficacious, when he is able to secure narcissistic supply, to convert people into sources of narcissistic supply, to create a cult-like ambiance within which he can leverage his fantasy and sustain his inflated grandiose self-image. When he creates a shared fantasy and is able to rope someone into the shared fantasy, etc, etc.
Whenever the narcissist succeeds in somehow buttressing, enhancing, supporting, proving to himself and to others that the false self is not false, that the idealized self is actually real, that creates narcissistic euphoria. It enhances the narcissist's self-confidence and self-esteem. It disinhibits the narcissist and he becomes much more psychopathic, much more antisocial, for example, reckless, defiant and unable to countenance the consequences of his actions morally unbounded and so on and so forth.
So this is the situation with and the opposite of course is narcissistic dysphoria, which occurs when narcissistic supply is deficient or when the narcissist has experienced narcissistic injury, let alone narcissistic modification.
So narcissistic euphoria and narcissistic dysphoria and these should not be confused with narcissistic elation and narcissistic depletion, which are totally different mechanisms with a totally different etiology.
In a minute, I will discuss narcissistic elation and depletion, but let me just wrap up the fantasy part.
In psychoanalytic theories, fantasy is a figment of the imagination, a mental image simply, even a dream or even a daydream, where a person's conscious and unconscious wishes and impulses are fulfilled.
So in classical psychoanalytic theory, a fantasy is a form of wish fulfillment.
This is a very primitive view of fantasy, which is largely, I would think, discarded, especially owing to the work or due to the work of Melanie Klein and the Object Relations School.
Melanie Klein came with the concept of fantasy with PH, PH fantasy, in her version of Object Relations, of which I'm not a great fan by the way. But according to Melanie Klein, a fantasy with PH is an unconscious construction, unconscious wish, unconscious impulse that underlie all thinking and all emotions, even healthy ones.
So fantasy in Klein's work, PH, is not the same as fantasy in Freud's work, for example. The fantasy in Klein's work is actually a fundamental force that could become pathological and could be utterly healthy and normal. It's not the everyday form of fantasy, which can include, for example, conscious daydreaming.
Okay, let's discuss a bit narcissistic elation and narcissistic depletion.
Narcissistic elation is also known as narcissistic, co-anesthetic expansion. Sounds like surgery.
These phrases were coined by a Jewish, of course, Hungarian psychoanalyst, Bela Grunberger, and he defined narcissistic elation as the narcissistic situation of the primal self in narcissistic union with a mother.
So narcissistic elation is the way the infant experiences the symbiotic bond with a mother. That's why narcissistic elation is crucial in the shared fantasy. It is actually the fuel, the motivating force that drives the shared fantasy humming along its path or trajectory.
The narcissist experiences narcissistic elation within the shared fantasy because it allows him to merge and fuse with a maternal figure to create a wound-like symbiotic state with an intimate partner or a friend or whatever that stands in for a mother figure and allows the narcissist to go through the phases of separation and individuation later.
Narcissistic elation has nothing to do with success, nothing to do with narcissistic supply, nothing to do with attention, nothing to do with any of this nonsense online. Narcissistic elation is exclusive to the relationship between the baby and his mother and later between the adult narcissist and his mother's substitute. And so Grinberger's definition is very crucial to the comprehension of the shared fantasy. He described a kind of prenatal stage, a kind of the attitude. The fetus according to Grinberger is in a state of megalomaniacal or narcissistic happiness or grandiose happiness more precisely. It's a kind of perfect homeostasis, no needs and therefore no frustrations, no desires and therefore no sense of loss. Perfection, the ideal in the in-laws of articulation is a kind of bliss but the bliss is the outcome of withdrawal, of avoidance of objects in the outside world.
So that's why narcissistic elation has nothing to do with narcissistic euphoria. Narcissistic euphoria is public facing outward. The narcissist secures narcissistic supply, Ghana's attention, has successes, accomplishes things and then is euphoric and becomes a bit psychopathic.
Narcissistic elation is exactly the opposite, withdrawing from the world, avoiding reality, ignoring all others except a maternal figure with whom the narcissist seeks to merge and recreate the blissful early experience of baby and mother.
So narcissistic elation is a memory as an adult. The narcissist has a memory of this unique and privileged state. It's a sense of such complete holistic well-being that it renders the baby omnipotent, all-powerful because what is to be all-powerful? It's to need nothing.
When you don't need anything, when you don't want anything, when you don't lack anything, then you're all-powerful. You're totally 100% self-sufficient and this is why I have a whole channel dedicated to nothingness as the antidote to narcissism. It is by shedding this need to consume that you can counter your narcissism and you can become totally god-like without the grandiosity attached to it.
So the baby has no awareness of the outside world and when he does he renounces it for a while and instead he experiences narcissistic elation. The baby regards itself as the world. This is known as hyper-reflexivity and if it persists in adulthood it becomes psychosis.
Anyhow there's a sense of completeness, a sense of all-encompassing, as if the baby all encompasses the world, as if the baby is ubiquitous and omnipresent and omnipotent and this memory persists even in healthy people. The difference between healthy people and narcissists is that narcissists get stuck in this memory. They develop nostalgia when it comes to this memory and they want to recreate it again and again and again because the experience with the original mother has been really terrible.
And so there's a pride involved in having experienced this state in the oneness, however illusory oneness with the mother because the mother is the world.
Early on the baby perceives mother as the world and because he perceives himself and mother as one he is the world. This is a god-like view of the universe in effect.
Now, statistic elation is characteristic of an object relationship that is played out in its negative version as a state of splendid isolation in the positive version as a desperate quest for fusion with the other, for a mirror image relationship.
So now, statistic elation involves regression, a return to paradise lost and everything connected to this paradise that has been lost. Fusion, self-love, omnipotence, grandiosity, or megalomania, omnipotence, immortality, invulnerability, hyper-reflexivity, you name it.
So after birth the infant enjoys this protonal statistic experience and people around the baby, in particular the mother, but doesn't have to be the mother, any maternal figure, genitalia are not relevant to you. Anyone who fulfills the maternal figure.
People meet the baby's needs, cater to the baby's wishes. They are on alert, they are on standby, they are on call. The baby is the king, the baby is the world.
This is very intoxicating even for a baby and this state of illusion is of course untenable and unsustainable.
Reality intrudes and the illusion then crumbles.
This self-delusion is compromised and this leads to frustration which later creates aggression.
We're not going into it right now.
I recommend that you watch the videos in the From Child to Narcissist playlist on this channel.
There's a playlist of this channel titled From Child to Narcissist and there are three dozen other playlists thematic, organized by themes. They're very useful tools for study.
So here is the baby in a state of narcissistic elation then reality intrudes, destroys the elation and baby separates from mother.
This mother becomes a source of frustration.
Rather than elation, mother begins to be a source of depletion.
So the baby wants to withdraw and that's one of the major engines of separation, individuation.
But the traces, the memories of this primordial oceanic kind of nirvana enlightenment state of mind, if you wish, these traces remain and they're grandiose.
The adult kind of has this vague memory, especially in the unconscious, of having once been the universe, of having once controlled everyone, of having once been omnipotent and the center of everyone's attention as a baby.
These memories are there and they are interlinked intimately with notions of perfect harmony, but not the kind of harmony that is the outcome of consensus and negotiation and compromise, the harmony that is autocratic and dictatorial, the kind of harmony that prevails in prisons and cemeteries.
So it is a dead kind of harmony, a harmony that is an outcome of kind of hierarchy where the baby is on top.
And nevertheless, this remnant of narcissistic elation is active throughout life, provides a lot of energy to the adult and especially to the narcissist.
And the narcissist seeks to recreate this. He wants to go back to this narcissistic mode of being what is called primary narcissism or narcissistic libido.
And the narcissistic adult tries to do this by simply physically recreating a proto-family or the family of origin.
He finds a mother figure and he becomes his self-infantilizer, Puer Aeternus. He regresses and becomes a child within the shared fantasy.
It's a deep regressive promise of happiness within recreation or reenactment of early childhood.
So psychoanalytic literature describes a honeymoon period where the narcissist tries to bring together the narcissistic elements of the self by integrating them into interpretations of reality.
And this is again a recreation of early childhood.
Concepts such as ego libido and object libido and so on and so forth are the outcomes of this process of integration, constellation, realization of external and internal.
The child makes sense of the world, realizes its own separateness and externality to the world, begins to notice other people go through the process of othering, which is a healthy process and is described extensively in Lacan's work.
And the narcissist hasn't gone through any of this because narcissists did not succeed to separate and to become an individual. There's no self there to do all these things. There's no agent of change.
So the narcissist is stuck in a repetition compulsion, constantly trying to experience narcissistic elation as a condition for moving forward into separation, individuation.
Freud used the term oceanic feeling. He described it as an early phase of ego feeling, the oceanic feeling which might seek something like the restoration of limitless narcissism.
That's a good description of the narcissist's initial approach to the shared fantasy.
Another one of my favorite authors is Andrei Green of Dead Mother Fame. Andrei Green actually collaborated with Bela Grunberger and they wrote an article and they said, "We trace narcissism to prenatal states of elation, making it biological and drive driven.
Building on the state of prenatal beatitude, which according to him characterizes the life of the fetus.
According to him, that's Andrei Green writing about Grunberger.
So Grunberger said that narcissistic elation is at once the memory of this unique and privileged state of elation, a sense of well-being, of completeness and omnipotence linked to that memory and pride in having experienced this state, pride in its illusory oneness.
Exactly what the narcissist is after in when he creates a shared fantasy, time and again by the way, he keeps failing because it's a faithful reenactment of the relationship with the original mother.
The outcomes are guaranteed. Again, there's a failure of separation, individuation and narcissistic elation is preserved by failing to separate and individuate.
The feeling of narcissistic elation is preserved. This is the irony of narcissistic elation. Narcissistic elation fails in the relationship with the original mother because the mother begins to frustrate the baby. Baby cries, the mother goes away. Baby wants food, the mother is not available.
So there's a lot of frustration and narcissistic elation breaks down with the original mother.
And that is good because it pushes the baby away from mother and facilitates separation, individuation, which is a very healthy, the fundamental of mental health.
Narcissists fail in this. They remain stuck in the symbiotic state with the mother because the mother is overprotective or because she's absent and the narcissist creates a substitute mother in his mind.
Never mind all this. It's explained in detail in the videos of this channel.
From child to narcissist playlist. But whatever the case may be, the narcissist remains stuck. He remains stuck in narcissistic elation with the original mother and he fails to separate and individuate consequently.
So now when the narcissist seeks to separate individually from a new mother, from the maternal figure, the intimate partner, the good friend, whoever, the narcissist again again, recreates narcissistic elation. He merges and fuses with the new maternal figure.
And again, it's the same outcome. This is why the narcissist is crazy. He's doing the same thing over and over, expecting different outcomes, different results, some of the work.
Freud explored in his work issues of ego or ego ideal. He said that in cases of mania, the ego and ego ideal have fused together in a mood of triumph and self-satisfaction.
And Gruenberger suggested that this is actually a form of regression, a form of re-experiencing primal narcissistic elation, drawing, as he said, on traces of this state of elation and megalomania based on the notions of harmony and omnipotence.
Janine Chassegouen Smirgel, in French, continued the work of Gruenberger and she said that it is indeed therefore narcissistic elation, the meeting of ego, an ideal that dissolves the superego, which is why in this condition of narcissistic elation, the narcissist is actually devoid of morality or conscience or there is no internal object, even positive internal object like conscience.
The narcissist is empty inside, so he has to import internal objects, he brings them into himself. But the only way he can substitute for the missing internal objects is through the shared fantasy.
The only way he knows to generate internal objects, the process of snapshotting or interjection, the only way he knows how to do this is when the other party is initially a maternal figure because only then does he experience narcissistic elation and consequently considers himself sufficiently omnipotent to be able to generate objects.
The process of generating objects is god-like, it's like creation. The narcissist needs to believe himself to be divine so that he can convince himself that the internal objects inside his mind are reality and there are no external objects out there. That he is these objects, that he is you, you don't exist, you exist only in his mind, as a figment of his imagination, if you wish, within his shared fantasy.
It's an amazing mechanism, narcissistic elation is super complex, amazing mechanism.
So the feeling of triumph said, the feeling of triumph brings with it oceanic feelings because it represents reunion with the omnipotent one, mother world, mother is the world. Reunion means you become the world, you become your own mother in effect.
Let me summarize this for you because it's not easy.
The narcissist, like every other human being, experiences narcissistic elation as a baby. He is merged, infused with mother.
Narcissistic elation renders the child or the infant or the baby renders him or her omnipotent god-like. The baby is the world because the baby is mother.
Baby and mother, one entity and mother is the world so the baby is, contains the whole world inside himself. He is god-like in this sense.
And this is narcissistic elation.
And then gradually there are frustrations and so on and so forth and the baby loses this feeling of narcissistic elation, realizes that he is separate from Mami and which seeks to separate from her and individually.
This is the healthy trajectory.
With the narcissist, this fails. The narcissist cannot get rid of the narcissistic elation on the one hand and on the other hand his mother is so frustrated, so hurtful, so painful, so dead, so absent that the child's narcissistic elation remains without its target, without its goal.
A healthy baby fuses with a secure base, good enough mother. A healthy baby experiences narcissistic elation with a good mother, but a baby who has a bad mother, an absent mother, a metaphorically dead mother, such a baby experiences narcissistic elation but without a mother.
And so the baby fuses and merges not with a mother because she's not there. He fuses and merges with himself and this is narcissistic libido.
Narcissistic libido is narcissistic elation inwardly directed.
And now then this baby grows up, becomes an adult, at least physiologically and chronologically, albeit never mentally and emotionally.
Okay, but it's an adult and still this baby in an adult body is stuck in that early phase of narcissistic elation and a bad mother.
He wants to fix this. It knows that he can't fix it. It's horrible, a horrible feeling. It's intolerable. He wants to fix this. So he finds a mother's substitute. He idealizes her. He tells himself this is a good mother.
Now I can experience narcissistic elation safely and freely with this new good mother that I found.
And now, even if she were to frustrate me, this would lead to a healthy separation, individuation.
All this is, of course, unconscious. And of course, it never works.
Slightly later, Margaret Marley described, Margaret Marley was a brilliant child psychologist. She actually worked with children for many years, decades. She observed them all the time and so on, like Jean Piaget said.
Marley described something and I'll quote, she says, "There's a later phase of early development and it describes the practicing junior toddlers' omnipotent exhilaration, excitement and narcissistic elation and joy at learning to walk.
Walking is the physical or bodily embodiment of separation individuation. She wrote, "The tremendously exhilarating, truly dramatic effect that upright locomotion has, it is precisely at that point where the child is at the peak of his delusion of omnipotence that his narcissism is particularly vulnerable to deflation."
This is healthy deflation. It's a kind of deflation of narcissism that pushes the child away and renders the child an individual with clear boundaries. To have boundaries is to know your limitations. Boundaries tell you where you stop and the world begins. Boundaries are healthy in this sense because they're anti-narcissistic.
In the wake of the toddler's new accomplishment of walking, she says, "From dawn to dusk, the toddler marches around in an ecstatic drunken state, stance, dance, I'm sorry, quiet in love with himself for being so clever." So narcissistic elation is a remnant of early childhood that in most healthy people has been negated or restrained via the formation of healthy boundaries, individuation, losses and disappointments in life, and so on and so forth.
But with the narcissist beings who remain stuck in early childhood, it's still very much valid and a very crucial force that pushes him to relate to other people via shared fantasy where he could experience narcissistic elation once again.
And therefore, he has to convert all people, everyone around him, into a maternal figure.
There have been other scholars that have dealt with narcissistic elation. Edmund Burglar, for example, Herbert Rosenfeld, and so on and so forth.
Lacan spoke, he called it "ebriety," spoke about elation and so on and so forth.
One last comment. When we fall in love, there is briefly, even in healthy people, stage of regression, infantilization, and narcissistic elation.
Lacan said that the adult seeks to return to this narcissistic mode of being true love or mystical ecstasy.
For some people, the whole purpose of love is equal exchange in an atmosphere of shared narcissistic elation.
And so Lacan was very close to the concept of shared fantasy. Had he taken one more step, Sander took this step. And then I came along and implemented it with a narcissistically abusive relationship, the shared fantasy.
This search for pure narcissistic exaltation, the elation procured by the imaginary contemplation of the object, yet still recognizing the power of the enchantment of love as the exaltation of the other, this breathlessness which with the other has created the most false of demands that of narcissistic satisfaction, wrote Lacan. He was one centimeter removed from the brilliant construct or concept of shared fantasy. He took Sander to take, to complete this leap.
Okay, I hope I clarified more or less what is narcissistic elation and what it is not.
So next time you hear this concept, feel free to correct the self-styled expert who misuses the term. And I'll see you tomorrow.
Tomorrow is something very surprising. Has to do with the psychology and not really. You will see.
Stay with me.
Narcissistically elated. I say goodbye to you.