Narcissists Uses You In Unfinished Mommy Splitting

Okay, let's get to the topic of today's video. And that is the Humpty Dumpty narcissist.

Let's start with some basic concepts.

Splitting.

First of all, splitting is confused. It's one of the most confused topics in psychology. It's a bloody mess. Even scholars, which I hold in extremely high regard, like Bromberg or Stern, even these scholars often confuse splitting with repression or even worse, splitting with dissociation. These are not the same things.

Now, there are two types of ego, of splitting, which makes it even worse, makes the confusion even worse and makes conflating splitting with other issues more palatable, however wrong. So there are two types of splitting.

There is ego splitting, and there is object splitting.

Ego splitting is when the ego or the self, constellated self, whatever you want to call it, this core, this core, which is you, this core, which includes your identity, your roles, your memories, this reservoir, container, repositories of your quiddity, of your essence. Let's call it ego for discussion sake.

So when the ego fractures, fragments and splits, one part remains conscious and the other becomes unconscious. That's the split of part. Let's call it split of part, and that was described by Freud in 1940.

Klein added to it and said that when the ego splits, one part is whole entirely good and the other part is entirely bad.

Bear this in mind as we continue a bit later.

Now, object splitting.

Object, remember in psychology, aptly, appropriately, we call people objects. So primary object is mummy. The primary object is caregiver, usually mother. That's the primary object.

Objects are people. So object splitting involves mechanisms like denial and projection and so on and so forth. It's what is known as a schizoid defense.

What does it mean?

Object splitting. It's when parts of the self, parts of our self, part of the self, and some internal objects we have are disowned. We can't accept them. We can't tolerate them. We're ashamed of them. They make us feel guilty. We don't want these parts.

So what we do, we take these parts and we throw them out. We project them, right? But we have to project them on a human being. We can't project them on a chair. If you project them on a chair, you're psychotic.

But you, so normal people, I mean, people who do this, object splitting, they use other people.

And this is the classic projection. We attribute to other people parts of ourselves actually that we're ashamed of or feel guilty about, or we don't want to acknowledge you, accept.

Object splitting, therefore, is a kind of schizoid defense. It's like these parts are not mine.

I am self-contained. I am self-sufficient. I don't need anyone. I don't need anyone because they are bad. They are evil. They're stupid. They are histrionic. They are oversexed. They're disgusting. They're hypocritical. They are, see where I'm going with this? It's a splitting because others are all bad. And so you are all good.

But if you're all good, why would you be with people who are all bad?

So it leads to a schizoid posture, schizoid position. We'll come to it a bit later.

I remember that Klein modified Freud and suggested that when the ego splits, there's a bad part and a good part. And Bjorn and Kernberg continued her work.

But the one who really revolutionized her work and forced her to revise it and to modify it was, of course, a British guy. No, not Grannon this time. Fairbairn. Fairbairn, who lived a bit before Grannon, suggested that there is a schizoid core in everyone. And this schizoid core is based on splitting. And it usually reflects or is mobilized or is created by childhood frustration. When we are frustrated as children, we withdraw.

The first thing we do, we project, you know, and then we withdraw and we develop a schizoid posture. We become self-contained, self-sufficient.

He suggested that when the frustration is seriously bad, when, for example, the child is abused, traumatized, neglected, parentified, instrumentalized, objectified, these are bad types of abuse, let alone classic abuse, like physical abuse, sexual abuse, when the child is exposed to these traumatic experiences, the ego, said Fairbairn, splits into three.

There's a central ego, the eye. This central ego is preoccupied with introspection, self-observation, consciousness.

The second part is the libidinal ego. That's the ego with the force of life. That's the ego that later develops a sex drive.

But not only sex drive. When the sex drive is sublimated, we have creativity. That's the ego that goes forth, goes out, is out facing. And that's the ego that leads us to create life, to create love, to create art, to create everything, science, you name it. That's the libidinal ego.

But in really, really impacted children, children who've been traumatized and abused, there is a third part. That third part is the anti-libidinal ego. That's an internal saboteur. It's an internal enemy. It's not the inner critic. It's an internal enemy. It attacks the libidinal ego. It's the force of death. And we call it the antonym of libidinal. We call it testudo or motido in psychoanalysis.

Each of these three parts of the ego is paired with internal objects. Each one of them has his own cult, his own following of internal objects. And these internal objects are like voices. And they encourage this particular ego to fulfill its functions.

So there's a group of voices that tell you you're bad, you're unworthy, you're loathsome, you're disgusting, you're ugly, you're stupid. These voices collaborate, these introjects collaborate with the anti-libidinal ego.

And there's another group that say you're delightful, you're beautiful, you're creative, you're productive. And these collaborate with the libidinal ego.

And there's a group of voices that are self-referential. These are voices that talk about you. They say, listen, you did this because of that. That was your motivation. Maybe you did this because you were sad. They talk, they constantly does this constant habab monologue, dialogue inside between the internal objects and the ego, the ego parts.

Okay.

At an early stage of childhood, the child does not make a distinction between himself and mother. Cannot make a distinction. His brain is not insufficiently developed. Pregnancy continues for almost two years outside the womb because our brain needs to develop and our head needs to inflate. And had pregnancy been completed in the womb, we would have never been able to exit.

The opening is somewhat tight if we are lucky.

So children continue their brain development outside. And because the brain is highly underdeveloped when the child is born, the child is unable to tell that there is a reality that is distinct and different and outside and external to himself. The child is in a state of inflation. He subsumes the environment. He and the environment are one. It's a state of unitary. It's a state of union. It's a state of nirvana, if you wish. It's a state of vanishing and nothingness. It's a state of being one with everything and everyone and of course above all with mother.

So he cannot make a distinction. But mother is not always forthcoming. Sometimes she's absent. Sometimes she's sick and tired. Sometimes she doesn't want to feed the baby. He wants to eat. She doesn't want to feed her.

In other words, mommy from first minute sometimes is frustrating. Sometimes doesn't cater instantaneously to the needs and wishes and demands of the petulant spoiled brat that is the baby. He wants it now. And if not, he will cry for six days and nights.

But mommy is unrelenting. Sometimes she succumbs and fulfills the needs and gratifies the baby and sometimes not.

So gradually the baby begins to realize that there are two mummies. There's a good mommy and a bad mommy. Or as Klein called it, deliciously and pornography, there's the loved good breast and the bad hated breast.

What an image.

Anyhow, let me recover. Anyhow, the baby begins to separate mommy into two mummies.

But that's, of course, an intolerable, very threatening, terrifying horror movie stuff thing.

How can mommy be two people or two entities? It's really, really terrifying.

So what the baby does, the baby says it's actually not two entities. It's one. Mommy is all good. All the good things is mommy, gratification, mommy, satisfaction, mommy, warmth, acceptance, food, tasting, texture of the skin, everything. I love mommy. It's all mommy. Mommy is 100 million billion, zillion percent good and only good.

What about the frustrating aspects? What about when mommy is not so good? When she's absent, when she refuses to feed me, it must be me. I am bad. I'm unworthy. It's something in me, says the baby. I'm bad. I'm all bad. Mommy is all good.

Luckily for everyone, that's a transitional phase. It's transitional phase for all healthy and normal people. They get rid of this splitting. This is splitting. They get rid of this splitting a bit later.

So you remember that? Mommy split, baby all bad, mommy all good.

Gradually as the baby grows, cerebral neuronal pathways are formed. The baby begins to realize the existence of other entities.

He develops concepts of internal and external. He realizes the limitations of his will. He gets rid of magical thinking. He understands that if he wishes something, it doesn't always come true. That reality has its own rules, not subject to his thinking and wishes and will.

So he matures.

He matures and he begins to develop a realistic assessment of the universe.

He switches from the pleasure principle to the reality principle.

At that stage, he merges the bad and good aspects of mommy and he becomes with the nuanced version, a more subtle and much more realistic version of mommy.

And by the way, daddy and other figures, he is capable to see gray, not only black and white, good and bad, with me, with, against me, but he's able to merge these aspects and come up with something that allows him to function better and to feel a lot less frustrated.

He reduces his anxiety, his ecosystem, his discomfort, his unhappiness, his rage, his aggression. He reduces all this negative emotionality by simply accepting that the world is much more complex than it used to be a year ago when I was born. That is normal, healthy development, but narcissists and borderlines get stuck. They are incapable to transition.

Now, no one explained, convincingly, why? Why some babies remain stuck? Why don't they develop a reality testing? Why don't they introduce themselves into reality?

Well, here's the issue.

When the baby splits mommy into bad and good, good breast, bad breast, good mommy, bad mommy, it's because mommy has good aspects and it's easy to do.

When someone has good sides and bad sides, even today as adults, you can make this distinction. You can say, well, he's an asshole, but he's a great scholar. Me. So you can make this distinction or you can say, wow, he's seriously repulsive as a man, but his mind, his intellect is amazing.

Again, me.

But what to do when the person you're faced with has no mitigating circumstances, no attenuating and ameliorating aspects, nothing good about him, only bad.

If the mother is dead, and Ray Green's concept of a dead mother, the mother is emotionally absent, narcissistic, selfish, depressive, parentifies the child, instrumentalizes the child, uses and abuses the child, does not allow the child to separate individually, breaches the child's boundaries, objectifies the child, etc.

This kind of mother stunts the growth of the child, arrests the development of the child. It's a bad mother and there is nothing good about her.

How do you split? How do you split an object that is all bad with not a single aspect of good, doesn't even feed the baby? How do you do that?

You don't.

Children who become later narcissists and borderlines could not split their mother, mothers, because the mothers were all bad. There was nothing there to split.

And yet the mechanism of splitting was there, you know, raring to go, eager to act. The mechanism was activated, turned on, enabled, and was looking for a target. And there were only two targets, money and me.

Now, I couldn't split mommy, so I split myself. Splitting has been inverted. Instead of externalized, it became internalized.

You can't split an old bad mother because she's all bad. You can't break her into good and bad. There's no good.

So you split yourself. You split yourself into true self and false self. The true self is all bad. It's unworthy. It's helpless. It's hopeless. It's stupid. It's inefficacious.

You don't want the true self. It's weak. It's vulnerable.

Now you understand why narcissists hate weak people. It's projection. They hate the weak part in themselves.

So they say, you're weak. I'm not weak. You're weak. I'm a strong man. I overcome even COVID-19.

Right. I have already. So the true self is everything the narcissist doesn't want to be. And the false self is everything the narcissistic child wants to be.

The false self is God. That's the invention of private religion.

Initially in early Christianity, in Judaism, of course, and in Islam, there was the assumption that man is all bad. There was the fall from grace when men had been expelled from the Garden of Eden.

Men's desires and drives were all malevolent, corrupt. It was through God's grace that men redeemed and absolved himself by obeying God, by adhering to the son of God, by interaction with God. God was the redeeming principle because men was hopelessly, hopelessly beyond hope.

So the child does the same. The child cannot split mummy. So he splits himself.

And there's a God-like element, the false self, and a corrupt, hopeless, doomed, expelled from Garden of Eden, true self. And it is the false self who is going to save the saviour, Salvato, like Jesus. The false self is going to save the child. He's going to redeem the child. He's going to absorb the child. He's going to uplift the child into the kingdom of heaven.

Okay. A quote suggested a vertical split. He said that in narcissists especially, they are contradictory self-states.

Today we know that the same exists in Borderline, even more so. Borderlines have more demarcated and pronounced self-states to the point that Borderline is very reminiscent of dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder.

But a quote in 1971 suggested that they are contradictory self-states. And he gave an example of grandiosity and despair. He said these self-states exist simultaneously when healthy narcissistic needs are frustrated by caretakers like mummy and later daddy.

When the caretakers of the child do not allow the child to gratify legitimate narcissistic needs, the child is desperate. He represses this despair and to compensate for it, he creates grandiosity.

He says, okay, I don't need you, mummy. I don't need you, daddy. I have my own imaginary friend and he's got like he's stronger than you or powerful than you. He knows more than you. He's omniscient. He is brilliant. He's perfect. He's beautiful. He is accomplished.

So the false self is compensatory.

And when children are frustrated and traumatized and abused by caretakers, caregivers, parents, they react this way by creating vertical splits, co-existent contradictory self-states.

Okay. You follow me until now. It's not an easy topic.

Let's talk about the introjects. Introjects are part of the fantasy defense. Introjects are fantastic. They're not real.

When you're faced with a parent, with a role model, even with a peer group, which you admire and want to belong to, you internalize these voices, but you know that they're not real. You know that these people are not inside you.

So it's a fantasy. You fantasize that their voices are still in your head. Your mummy is long dead. Your mother is long dead, but her voice is in your head. Do you really believe her voice is in your head? Do you really believe she's talking to you?

If you do, you need medication. You're psychotic. Most people don't.

And yet they conduct dialogues with a dead mother in times of stress and anxiety. So it's a fantasy. It's a fantasy.

And these fantasies are not just, you know, pieces of fiction.

The introject of mummy represents a real person with a real history, real mentality, real character and temperament and personality, memories.

So it's a very, very super complex fantasy grounded largely in reality.

And this fantasy has a life of its own. It has its own motivations, its own intentions. It has a life of its own. It's important to understand.

Introjects continue inside the mind to have independent dynamics, which are independent of the person. That's the process of snapshotting.

When the narcissist meets, comes across someone who can serve as a narcissistic supply, is not a source of supply, or when he comes across someone who can become an intimate partner, the narcissist takes a snapshot. He creates an introject.

Now this introject has a life of its own. The narcissist continues to interact only with the introject, ignoring the real object out there.

And the more the introject diverges from the real object, the more pissed off the narcissist is.

And that's the main reason for discard. This is what leads to discard.

When the divergence is too much, when the snapshot no longer resembles even remotely, the real life person, real life people go through changes. They evolve, they grow, they develop new interests and new friendships.

And yet the snapshot is stable. The snapshot is firm, never changes. And it creates a divergence.

Okay, all the introjects are like this.

But the narcissist does not regard the introject as a fantasy, but as a reality. So remember, everyone is introjects. Everyone interacts with introjects. Everyone talks to introjects. Everyone argues with introjects. Everyone is angry at introjects.

For instance, the girlfriend who dumped you in favor of another man, you're very angry at her. You have her introjecting, you're fighting with her years later, in an attempt to obtain closure.

I mean, it's normal. But you know that the voice is fantastic, it's not real. The narcissist doesn't.

The narcissist confuses, introjects with reality. As his introjects interact, the fellow, I mean, are dynamic, he thinks it's real. He actually thinks that his introjects are much more real than you. His introjective view is much more real to the narcissist than you are.

You don't have real existence in his mind, because you're not in his mind. What's in his mind has supremacy over reality. It's supreme to reality. This is the real reality, his mind.

And so in normal people, the introjects interact with the ego, because the ego is the reality principle. The ego tells you, hey, listen, call it. That's a fantasy. Or don't do this. If you do this, you'll be punished. It's the ego that keeps giving you reality testing. Keep telling you, listen, wake up. I mean, consider this is reality. Take reality into account. It's the function of the ego.

And some introjects interact with the ego so much that they become a part of the ego. And they're known as ego nuclei.

Here's the problem, narcissists have no ego. They don't have a functional ego, at least. They don't have an ego.

The narcissist outsources ego functions. He has no reality testing. He needs you to tell him what is reality. He has no access to reality because he has no ego. He doesn't have an ego to tell him, don't do this, do this, this is real, this is fake, this is real, this is fantasy. He doesn't have this voice, so he needs you to tell him. And he's compulsive about it. He needs it every minute. Can you survive in reality without reality testing for one minute? Of course you can't.

Now you understand the narcissist's compulsion, coercion, insistence, persistence. He needs you every minute. He outsources ego functions. He has a hive mind. He incorporates other people in order to form clunky, on the fly, just in time, improvised ego states. One ego after another, and because each ego created this way depends on another, on a separate group of people.

Ego number one will not be the same like ego number seven. Ego number one will depend on three people, one, two and three. And ego number seven will also depend on three people, 14, 15 and 16. Of course the input from one, two and three will not be the same like the input from 14, 15 and 16.

So the ego seven will not be like ego one. That's why the narcissist is dissociative and dysfunctional and discontinuous because his ego states, his successive ego states, sometimes very often actually, have little to do with each other. That's why he's shocked when he's confronted with the consequences of his actions. He doesn't feel he did anything. Definitely he doesn't feel he did anything wrong. That's why he confabulates all the time. He's trying to bridge the gaps between ego one and two and three and four and seven. He's trying to create some continuity. He confabulates, and many people perceive this as gaslighting, which is actually a psychopathic behavior, not a narcissistic one.

The narcissist does not exist. It's an emptiness. It's a void. He exists by aggregate, by assemblage.

And now the ego idea, what you want to be when you grow up, that's an introject. The superego, including punishing superego, inner critic, sadistic, super ego, that's an introject.

You see the critical role of introjects, and if you have introjects that cannot talk to the ego because you have no ego, you have no core, there's no whole. They also cannot talk to themselves. They also cannot communicate with them among themselves.

This introjects communicate with each other via the ego. The ego is like a switchboard. You don't have an ego. They can't talk to each other.

So the narcissist experiences some inner objects is good and real. These are egosyntonic objects. And when he idealizes you, he converts you into an egosyntonic introject and also into a real one.

Your introjects, your introject becomes the only reality. And it's a good one. It's egosyntonic.

When he devalues you, or when he has introjects that he's not comfortable with, they are egodystonic. They are egosyntonic.

Or at any given time, the narcissist has both these groups, ego-syntonic, good, real objects, and ego-alien, egosyntonic, disturbing, discomforting, and ultimately projected introjects, internal objects.

And this creates a process called ego congruence, incongruence. Ego-incongruence, despite it's very misleading because it's not ego.

But ego-incongruence in principle means that some things, some events, some occurrences, some people, some places, some memories, some will create such extreme discomfort that actually they will divorce the narcissist from himself. They will create a process called estrangement.

This is very, very common in borderlines. That's why borderlines act out. That's why they go crazy. That's why they behave in ways which are at once abrupt and unpredictable and shocking.

And on the other hand, very self-damaging and self-trashing and so on. What they do, borderlines especially, narcissists also, but borderlines especially, they externalize introjects.

Because of ego congruence, because of ego incongruence, the internal level of angst, anxiety, and discomfort is such that the inability to tolerate, the intolerance of egodystonic objects, alien introjects, becomes, reaches such a level, such a burden, that the borderline or the narcissist just take these internal objects and they throw them out. They don't even project them. They don't attribute them to other people. They just throw them out and it's like explosion.

These are externalizing introjects and because these objects are alien, discomforting, disturbing, frightening, menacing, destabilizing, dysregulating, beyond horrible introjects, when they are externalized, the borderline or the narcissist is feeling one step removed.

They feel that they are outside observing what's happening. They feel like they are autopilot. During the acting out, when introjects, uncomfortable introjects, bad introjects, hated introjects, rejected introjects are externalized, it's like taking a part of yourself and throwing it out.

And of course, that minute you cease to exist because you're not you anymore. Part of you is gone. It's like being amputated. You're not you anymore and you're not you anymore and you're still observing the process of becoming not you. You're observing this process of partial vanishing. It's like your upper part had evaporated, like spontaneous combustion.

If you saw photos of spontaneous combustion, only part of the body is burned. The rest is intact. Same process. This is spontaneous combustion of a part of you that you hate, that you want to reject at any cost, at the cost ofacting out.

And this creates estrangement. That's the clinical term.

But it also creates dissociation. You don't want to remember that you repress it, you deny it, you forget it. You become depersonalized.

It's like you're not there. As I said, you're an autopilot. You're just watching. You're an observer. Or you become totally derealized. The whole thing feels nightmarish, surrealistic, not real.

So dissociation, amnesia, amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, all this phenomena, dissociative phenomena have to do with externalizing alien egosyntonic, ego congruent, incongruent objects, externalizing them.

How do you expel something? Aggression. These externalized objects come with a huge dose of aggression.

And it feels like these interjects somehow projectiles like guided missiles, like they have their own mind, like they act. They are the ones who are acting and operating. The agency is transferred from the individual to these interjects.

They feel autonomous. They feel independent.

And the person, the borderline person or the narcissist, they sit back and say, what on earth is happening to me? What is happening here? And who is me?

It looks like you are actually not in control, not in the driver's seat. Something, someone took over you.

And that's, I think this is the source of the many metaphors of possession, demon possession and so on.

Of course, narcissists use, and borderlines use two important mechanisms, projective identification and introjective identification.

In projective identification, the narcissist places himself inside an object. Remember object is a person, another person in psychology.

The narcissist places himself inside an object.

Now why would he do that? Why would he export his being, export his essence, export himself? Why would he teleport, teleportation?

Because it gives him an illusion of control over the object. If there is an object that the borderline or the narcissist is afraid to lose, there is abandonment anxiety. There's object inconsistency. This is intolerable. It enhances anxiety to levels that can no longer be coped with.

And in order to cope, the narcissist identifies himself with the object. He says the object is me. I am the object.

It's a mechanism also used by codependents, merger and fusion.

Projective identification is when the person finds himself inside another person and gives the narcissist an illusion of control, a denial of helplessness and impotence. And the narcissist and borderline gain vicarious satisfaction from the activities of the object.

So covert and inverted narcissists use projective identification endlessly, relentlessly, callously, automatically, unconsciously, compulsively, all the time, all the time.

Of course, projective identification has very strong passive aggressive elements.

The second mechanism is introjective, introjective identification. It's identified with an introject.

You remember, some introjects are good, perceived as good, as real. The narcissist confuses internal and external objects.

So the internal object, your representation in the narcissist is mine is more real than you and it's good in the idealization phase. In that phase, the narcissist identifies with you, identifies with the object.

When I say identify, it's not that he has sympathy for you or he has empathy for you. He is you. It involves processes such as assimilation, incorporation, don't ask. It's simply confusing his non-existent self and ego with your very much existent self and ego. He identifies with the introject, with a fantastic representation of you inside himself and he imagines you as being inside himself, being a part of himself, being an extension of himself, an organ.

So these are the two mechanisms.

Either the narcissist teleports himself, exports himself into you and becomes one with you. That's the codependent strand in narcissism.

Many narcissists do that or he brings you into himself. He assimilates you, digests you and identifies with your representation in his mind, with your introjects and imagines that he is one with the introject or the introject is part of him.

Here's the crux. The narcissist could not split his mother. She was all bad. She had no good or positive aspects. She was not a good enough mother.

Helen Deutsch coined the phrase false self, which Donald Winnicott later popularized.

And so maternal splitting is a crucial phase in avoiding the need to develop a false self.

Why does a narcissist develop a false self?

Because he needs to split something. He can't split mummy. So he splits himself. So there's false self and true self.

And that's a temporary measure that keeps him alive. It's a positive adaptation.

And then he meets you, comes across you, you know, and you're perfect. You're his intimate partner. He wants to complete the process of maternal splitting with you. That's why he has to convert you into a mother.

He needs to finish the unfinished business, the unresolved conflict of the inability to split his original mother. He needs to split you.

We call this repetition compulsion. He needs to split you.

Now he couldn't split his mother. She had no good aspects. So what he does in your case, he idealizes you so that you have only good aspects. You're all good.

That allows him to regress to very early childhood. You remember the baby, what the baby does? The baby splits mummy. Mummy is all good. The baby is all bad.

Narcissus goes back to that period, believe it or not. I don't know, six months old, one year old. He goes back to that period and he forces you to become his mummy so that he can proceed with the unfinished business of splitting.

Render you all good, render himself all bad. At that stage, you become all good. He becomes all bad.

Now, that is not a tolerable state. Even the narcissist can tolerate it.

So he begins, he begins to test you. Co-idealization, the process where he idealizes you and through this process, idealizes himself.

In projection, the process where he internalizes you and incorporates you. These are the ways in which he annexes, appropriates your goodness.

So when the narcissist meets an intimate partner, immediately it triggers the early, unfinished, unconcluded maternal splitting. He then must convert you into a mother to complete the splitting.

Splitting has several phases.

Phase one, he makes you all good, he makes himself all bad, which he couldn't do with his original mother. His original mother was all bad.

He could not idealize her, but he idealizes you. He makes you all good, which makes him all bad. That is intolerable.

He moves to phase two.

In phase two, he uses your goodness, your alleged, imputed goodness, your idealized, non-realistic goodness, your idealized, non-realistic goodness.

Because remember, he's interacting not with you, he's interacting with your idealized introject in his mind. So he then uses your goodness to idealize himself.

He says to himself, if I'm with such a good, perfect, brilliant, amazing, beautiful, talented, intelligent, super incredible woman, it must mean that I'm the same. I'm also amazing, super incredible, talented as that. She would have never been with me. She would have never loved me. She would have never stayed with me had I not been equally perfect, equally brilliant, equally handsome, equally everything. So he idealizes you and then the process of idealizing you is uncomfortable because the more he idealizes you, the more he devalues himself. This is completing the classic maternal splitting, which he couldn't do when he was one year old.

But it's a temporary state because it's very uncomfortable.

So what he does, he co-idealizes, he says, she's ideal, that means I'm ideal. And then he introjects you, internalizes you, incorporates you, he metaphorically swallows you, he digests you because in primitive people, they eat the liver in the heart of warriors. They had a war and then there are prisoners of war and they eat the heart and the liver of the prisoners of war because this way they believe they can digest or absorb the courage and the bravery of the enemy combatants.

And the enemy combatants, their traits and properties reside in body organs.

The narcissist is the same with you. He internalizes you, he incorporates you because this way he can absorb your goodness and become good.

Stage one, you are all good, he is all bad.

Stage two, co-idealization, if you are all good means he is all good.

To prove this to himself, stage three, he internalizes you, he incorporates you, he swallows you, he digests you, he makes you disappear, absorbs your goodness, thereby becoming an entirely good object. He now becomes all good.

So in this process, which is an intricate dance, two steps forward, one step back and so on, he needs to test you. He needs to make sure that you are all good.

This is post-traumatic hyper vigilance. Maybe you are like his mother, maybe you are all bad, maybe you are just pretending to love him. So he needs to test you all the time. He tests you by abusing you.

This is narcissistic abuse type one. He abuses you to test you. He pushes you to the limit. He creates elaborate situations to trip you up, sets you up for failure. I want you to understand that very often this masquerades as benevolence, as love.

So someone who gives 100% of himself to you is setting you up for failure because you cannot give back 100%. Someone who is too good to be true is setting you up for failure. You cannot be that good, ever.

He sets the bar so high that you will never make it, your fail. It's an example of testing. He puts you in situations where you will end up drunk and with another man. That's testing.

He constantly criticizes you and challenges you. That's testing. He wants to see, are you truly a good object?

Because his mommy deceived him. He thought his mommy loved him. He thought his mommy accepted him. He thought her love was unconditional. He was wrong.

And consequently, for the rest of his life, decades, he could not complete the splitting process and could not grow up.

Now you are his last chance, his second chance, his last chance. It is through you that he will experience parenting and mothering, proper, good enough mothering.

And to accomplish this, he needs to split you and then needs to interject you, to absorb you, to incorporate you. You need to become one. He needs to become one with a good object, but it's very terrifying because becoming one with an object is disappearing. He needs to sacrifice himself. He's used only to sacrificing himself. He sacrificed himself to the false self.

So he wants to sacrifice himself to you, but he wants to make sure that you're worthy of the sacrifice, that you're truly good. So he has to test you. When you fail his test, the whole thing reverses. He splits you again, but now you're all bad. You're all bad. And he avoids code evaluation because look, if you're all bad and you're still together, means he's an idiot, means his judgment is poor, means he is not omniscient. If you're all bad, it challenges the grandiosity of his false self.

So he needs to discard you. The minute you fail his tests, and they are very, very surreptitious, stealth, subtle, occult tests. You don't even know that you're being tested. You don't understand what are his expectations. What does he want?

So very likely you're going to fail. The likelihood of failure is enormous. You fail. He devalues you. He devalues you. He has to discard you because if he devalues you and you stick around, you're challenging his grandiosity and his false self. And that is absolutely intolerable.

Okay. I hope you got the picture. I want to make, I want to finish by, as usual, mentioning literature, and this time a classic.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you know, we are so brainwashed by messages propagated, promulgated via the education system, mass media, experts, authorities, that we don't, it's extremely rare that we stop to think, actually, critically think. For example, we all believe that Dr. Jekyll was the victim of Mr. Hyde.

To remind you, Dr. Jekyll was a very vulnerable, well-respected, renowned doctor in the story by Stevenson. And he invented a potion, a concoction, a kind of medicine that he would swallow. And when he swallowed this medicine, he became Mr. Hyde. Not Dr. Jekyll anymore, but Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde was a psychopath, sadistic, killer, horrible man, rapist. I mean, you name it. You name it, he did it. Horrible person.

Dr. Jekyll, lover of humanity, medical doctor, savior of bodies and souls, swallows the medicine or the potion, becomes Mr. Hyde.

Exact opposite. A psychopath, if ever there was one.

So everyone says, poor Dr. Jekyll. He clearly is Mr. Hyde's victim because he had to pay the price, of course. Once the potion wore off, he reverted to being Dr. Jekyll and he had to pay the price for the misdeeds and misconduct in criminal activities.

Mr. Hyde. So everyone says, Jekyll is Hyde's victim. I'm saying exactly the opposite. Mr. Hyde is Dr. Jekyll's victim because the control was with Dr. Jekyll.

Dr. Jekyll could have decided to not drink the potion. Hyde had no control over it. It was Dr. Jekyll who always invariably made the decision to manifest, actualize and realize the poor Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Hyde couldn't help it. He was a psychopath. There's nothing he could do about it. Dr. Jekyll could help it and he made choices and he victimized.

Hyde, Dr. Jekyll says in the book, I knew before I left the hospital that I was not straight. That despite all that was available there, nobody was sharp enough to pick up my secret and I didn't want anyone to learn my secret.

That sounds pretty psychopathic to me.

Lamb in 1996 analyzed this argument and the complexity of the argument and he asked the question, could it be that the individual perpetrator is not blameworthy? Could it be that Mr. Hyde is actually not to be blamed?

Because you know his actions, he was Dr. Jekyll's alter ego. His actions were not his own. They were fully controlled by Dr. Jekyll.

Dr. Jekyll took a drug that required premeditation, planning, preparation of the potion. It took a long time. It was a conscious act and he took the drug and he transformed him into Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Hyde was an addict in a way and he was created by Dr. Jekyll's need to continue his experiment. He was an experimental creature. Hyde was a villain. He committed heinous, horrible acts. There's no dispute in this, but who is the moral responsibility?

Dr. Jekyll recognized, knew about Hyde. He knew about Mr. Hyde. He knew that Mr. Hyde is hiding inside himself. He could not refer to Hyde as I because Hyde was, yes, an ego-alien, egosyntonic, egotistonic introject. So he disowned Hyde. He rejected Hyde. He hated Hyde. He was referring to him in third, you know, he used to call him Hyde, as though it's not himself, but it was a part of himself.

And to have continued the experiment, inflicting untold damages over hundreds of people, strikes me how to put it gently, is extremely psychopathic.

Perhaps after all, there was not much difference between the unscrupulous, relentless, ruthless, callous, disempathic Dr. Jekyll and his mirror image Hyde.

Perhaps Hyde was Dr. Jekyll's dark side, but definitely a part of him, an integral part of him, a perfect reflection of him.

Dr. Jekyll was Mr. Hyde in hiding. That's all.

As Dr. Jekyll himself states in the book, I know I'm he, but he is Hyde.

Yeah, very convincing.

There was a guy called Dr. Hans Renschorn. He wrote interesting works in art history and psychiatry. He sort of conflated art history and psychiatry. And he wrote a book. He studied the art of the mentally ill, art created by the mentally ill. Bill Niedegeistes Grönken, it's called, was published in 1923. He studied the psychology of expression. He came up with a fascinating list of six fundamental impulses regarding self-expression.

He believed that people create art in order to make contact with other people, that art is an interface, a communication interface between people like the ancient moderns.

The fifth impulse of six, he attributed to psychopaths. He said, the fifth impulse is the tendency to imitate or copy. And he said, this undeniable pleasure involved in this achievement, McGregor analyzes it in 1989. And it's very interesting that he believes that psychopathy consists of imitation or copying.

Because when we act out, what is to imitate, to copy, is to not be ourselves. When you imitate, you are not yourself. When someone makes an impersonation of me with meaning, he is not being himself in that moment.

So imitation, copying, is denying yourself. That's really the crux of psychopathy.

Remember what I said earlier?

Externalizing, introjects.

He, Menninger wrote in 1963, the aggressive instincts lack discrimination, lack judgment, lack perspective, lack everything but power and a destructive goal.

Ted Bundy, the serial killer, you know, he was interviewed by Stephen Michaud and Hugh Ainsworth in 1999. At least they published the interviews in 1999.

And they tried to talk to him about the murders, but he wouldn't. He didn't want to talk about the murders. He talked about everything under the sun, politics, history, art, you know, he was, he was, by the way, a genius. He had, as far as I remember, 160 IQ. But he wouldn't talk about the murders.

And so the interviewers were at an impasse. They were like a dead end and didn't know what to do.

And suddenly it occurred to them. They said to him, Ted, would you like to talk about the murders in the third person? Like it's not you, it's someone else.

Use he, don't say I killed her, say he killed her.

And Bundy agreed immediately to this arrangement and opened up and discussed the murders in full detail using he, third gender pronoun.

Everything he said was clearly about himself, but it was presented in the third person, depersonalization.

Narcissists, anyone, everyone who has come across a narcissist or many psychopaths and many border lines, they talk about themselves in the third person.

They don't say I did it. They say Wagner did it. Or Wagner is the victim of coaches in substance violence or Trump is hated. Trump would say about himself, Trump is hated. Third person.

Okay. I will take this opportunity to answer a question of yours in a single sentence and I'll dedicate a whole video to this.

Contempt. Contempt is a driving emotion sentiment in narcissism, in psychopathy. Contempt.

It's a crucial element of grandiosity and there's contempt for weakness, perceived inferiority, inadequacy, emotions, vulnerabilities, neediness, clinging, attachment and bonding, empathy and altruism.

How many? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, six, seven, eight, nine, nine or 10 types of contempt?

And I will analyze this in my next video.

You have my full contempt and I wish you full recovery from this video if you made it to the end.

YouTube provides me with an amazing statistic. Half of all viewers sign off after the rant and the jokes. They are utterly uninterested in the topic.

So how can I give you my respect? Contempt. Contempt it is.

Stay tuned for the next episode.