Okay, mad madim, look it up.
Kiddos, I've received a series of missives from you regarding your role in the narcissist fantasy life, and it seems that two issues bothered you, or three actually issues, bothered you harshly, severely, and drove you to the edge of irreversible insanity.
And here I am, a healer by profession, to help you.
The first topic was, what do you mean I'm an internal object?
Second topic was, what do you mean I'm aiding and abetting the narcissist's latent homosexuality?
And the third question was, what's wrong with imagination and creativity? What's wrong with fantasy? Why do you keep chastising and castigating the narcissist for having a shared fantasy with me?
Well, that's quite a lot on my plate, so I don't know where to start, and therefore I will start unimaginatively from the beginning.
What do you mean I'm an internal object? What I mean is this, when the narcissist first sees you, he takes a snapshot of you, and what he does, he internalizes this snapshot.
Don't try to imagine it, it's nightmare stuff. He internalizes, he digests you, he assimilates you, he internalizes the snapshot that he had taken of you, and this snapshot from that moment on becomes an internal object.
Very similar, let us say, to his memory of his mother, or to his memory of his father. So these memories of role models, important peers in his life, caregivers, primary objects such as mother and father, parental figures, these memories are stored in all of us in the form of internal objects.
And when they have voices, and when these voices interact with us, when we have inner dialogues with these voices, these are what we call introjects.
So the narcissist takes a snapshot of you, interiorizes you, internalizes you, converts this snapshot into an internal object, and begins to accumulate your voice.
The more he interacts with you in real life, the more voice samples he has. And he collects and collects and accumulates these samples, so that ultimately he creates your own internalized voice in his head.
And now in his head he has an image of you, the snapshot, and an introject, your internal voice.
And from that moment on, he interacts only, that's a crucial point, he interacts exclusively with your avatar, with the icon in his internal operating system that represents you.
Clicking on that icon activates an internal you in his mind.
And all his conversations, all his arguments, his debates, his disagreements, his love, I mean his emotional investment, his neediness, his dependence, everything. Psychological, everything verbal, everything happens between him and your internal representation, the internal object that represents you.
He is not interacting with you, because in the process of internalizing you, he had also idealized you, he had changed you beyond recognition.
So that's what I mean when you become an internal object.
Now in this space, in this imaginary space that I described in the previous video that I made today, in this imaginary space, there is another internal object, another critical active internal object.
And that is, of course, the false self.
And within the shared fantasy, believe it or not, you have a power equal to the false self, you're both equipotent.
There is a tug of war between you and the false self. And anyone who has been in a relationship with a narcissist recognizes immediately what I'm saying, recognizes this ambient conflict between you and a part of your intimate partner, a part of the narcissist you've been with, that you were trying to reach, and another part that you were trying to eliminate.
Part of the narcissist acted as your enemy, and a part of the narcissist acted as your friend or lover, or truly intimate partner. And the part that acted as your enemy was your competitor.
This part was competing with you for control of the internal space of the narcissist. And this part is the false self. Unbeknownst to you, within the shared fantasy, you were the false self's biggest enemy.
And the false self is the narcissist's God. It's a God-like divine figure endowed with all the attributes of God. It's all powerful, it's all knowing, it protects the narcissist, it isolates the narcissist from hurt and pain and conflict.
It's a very important, crucial internal object.
And here you came into the narcissist's life, within a shared fantasy, and you were internalized, you were introduced into this space, which hitherto was utterly monopolized by the false self.
And you were like a new sibling, you know, sibling rivalry. You develop sibling rivalry with a false self, and you felt it.
As a narcissist's intimate partner, you felt this war, this tug of war. You felt that there was something going on, some tension, some resistance, some inability to move, some paralysis that you were kind of struggling with.
This was the battle with a false self. Got it? Pussycat.
Now we move on.
The second question you've asked is about the narcissist's latent homosexuality, et cetera, et cetera.
Here's something you must understand. The narcissist is autoerotic.
In other words, his sex drive, such as it is, what we call the libido or the libidinal investment, his sex drive is not directed outside, is not directed at objects. Objects are other people.
Remember in psychology, we use the word object to describe people, which tells you a lot about psychology.
Okay. So the narcissist doesn't direct his sex drive, his sexual energy, his psychosexuality, at other people, at objects. In other words, he doesn't have what we call object relations. Instead, he directs this tremendous energy.
It's a normal energy because the energy of sex is the energy of life. You saw the color changed. The energy of sex is the energy of life. It's arrows.
So he takes this tremendous nuclear grade energy, thermonuclear weapon, and he directs it at himself. He kind of redirects it rather than send it out into the world. Rather than invest this energy, this power, in others, for example, in his intimate partner, he invests all of it in himself. And because he invests his sex drive in himself, because he directs it at himself, the narcissist is in love, infatuated, sexually attracted to himself.
The narcissist is his own number one, two, and three sex object. The narcissist uses toys, like some people use dildos, some people use vibrators, some people use other sex toys. The narcissist uses humans, human beings as sex toys.
Rather than use a dildo, he uses an animated dildo. Rather than she uses an animated dildo or animated vibrator, he uses an animated sex doll.
So the narcissist uses other people, for example, his intimate partner, as a sex implement, as a sex toy, in order to induce self gratification with his only true lover himself.
The narcissist is sexually attracted very much to himself. Many narcissists find their own bodies sexually arousing. I'm kidding you're not. They can look at their bodies and they can react sexually. They can have all the sexual reactions that a typical man has with a naked woman.
So this is point number one. Point number two, if you are attracted to yourself, if a narcissist is attracted to himself, then he is attracted to someone of the same sex.
It's a crucial insight. Narcissist who is autoerotic is also homoerotic. Narcissist who is attracted to himself is attracted to someone of the same sex.
If the narcissist is a man and he's attracted to himself, he's attracted to a man. End of story.
Similarly, by the way, incest is autoerotic because when you're attracted to your daughter, you're attracted to half of yourself. You're attracted to your genes, but leave that aside.
So he's attracted to himself. In this restricted sense, in this restricted psychodynamic sense, all narcissists are gay. All of them are homosexual. All of them are lesbian. All of them are, you know, because they are all attracted to a same sex partner themselves. Because they don't have object orientation, because they don't invest their psychosexuality in other people, they are not active homosexuals. They are not actively gay. They're not active lesbians. They don't direct their sexual energy at a member of the same sex who is outside themselves, who is someone else, an object.
Instead, they direct this energy at a member of the same sex who is themselves.
So a narcissist has homosexual psychosexuality, but is attracted, and he is attracted to another man, to a man.
The narcissist male is attracted to a man, but that man happens to be himself. He is attracted to one man himself, not to other men, to himself, but he's a man.
So all narcissists are latent homosexuals. And if they're women, they're latent lesbians.
By the way, homosexuality also incorporates lesbianism. Lesbianism is a form of homosexuality. This is an important insight.
Now, narcissists may behave and act heterosexually, but that's very misleading, exceedingly misleading, because they are not attracted to a member of the opposite sex. They're attracted to the ability to have sex with themselves using someone else's body as a sex toy, as an aid to masturbation.
So the narcissist wants to have sex with himself and to enhance the experience he can use and sometimes does use other people's bodies to masturbate with. He gratifies himself. He enriches his own sexual experience by introducing others as sex toys, as sex slaves, as sex objects. He objectifies others so as to use them in masturbating.
All sex with narcissist is masturbatory, all of it. The narcissist never has sex with you. The narcissist uses your body to have sex with himself. It's very important for you to understand what has happened in your sex life. And even when the sex is great and the performance is, you know, wow, and you wish to shout encore and bravo, and when the public is up and uploading and everything, and fireworks and orgasms, it was all accomplished and all orchestrated to obtain maximum self gratification.
Actually, these were the first observations of narcissism by Sigmund Freud and others. They started from the sexual point of view.
They described narcissism, they invented the concept of narcissism to describe autolibidinal investment, investment of the sex drive in oneself rather than in others, as an immature infantile regression, because this is what children do. Children are autoerotic. They explore their body parts. They must obey. They're autoerotic. They're self-contained. They don't need others. They don't direct their sex drive and they have a sex drive. They don't direct their sex drive with others, but themselves.
And when they play with each other, they masturbate in tandem. So it's a masturbatory action in a group.
That's why many, many children go through homosexual experiences as they grow up, because this is not perceived as a homosexual experience. It's perceived as self exploration, but adults get rid of it. They develop object orientation. They are attracted to the opposite sex or to the same sex, nevermind, but to others.
Let's redirect the sex drive, the libido, the eros part to others.
Narcissists in this sense and in many other senses is not an adult. It's a child.
Now to your last question, the côte de grâce.
What's wrong with imagination and creativity? You ogre, you troll, you etc.
What's wrong with that? You know, why not simply enjoy life with imagination, with flights of fancy? What's wrong with that? It's fun. People who make movies, people who produce theater plays, I mean, they produce fantasies and we all consume fantasies on a daily basis. Our society, you know, a thousand years from now, when historians would look back at the 20th century and the 21st century, possibly the 19th century, they would call this period the period of fantasy. Guy Debord call it the spectacle, society of spectacle. We live in fantasies, we inhabit fantasies, we create fantasies, generate fantasies. The biggest industries on earth are fantasy based, video games, movies, it's all fantasy based. We are so enmeshed in fantasy that we started to confuse fantasy with reality. We are electing reality TV stars to the presidency, not only in the United States but in Ukraine, for example.
Ronald Reagan was an actor. Schwarzenegger was an actor. I mean, we're beginning to confuse television and movies with reality, even reality with television. I mean, it's all one big reality solid.
So what's wrong with that, Sam? On the very contrary, maybe the narcissist is uniquely qualified to survive in such a world.
Having been involved and immersed in fantasy throughout his life, having established his entire psychology upon fantasy, maybe the narcissist is superbly adapted to modern life as some scholars seriously claim.
They call the narcissist high functioning.
Well, let's take a short comic break.
Part of the fantasy is that the narcissist reframes everything he does, including the abuse, as supportive of the fantasy.
And that reminded me of an excerpt from Giorgio Vasari. Giorgio Vasari wrote the Life of the Great Italian Artist of the Renaissance. And here's an excerpt.
Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel, the Silling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. And Pope Julius II was the one who commissioned the work. It took four years, by the way. And the Pope was very, very impatient because he was a bit on the dying side. He was dying. And he wanted to see the thing completed before he passed to a better world. So he was kind of pushing and pressing Michelangelo. He insisted to watch him work and he was putting pressure on him and so on.
So, Vasari. Later, Michelangelo refused to commit himself further than to say that he would finish the work when he could. When I can, when I can, he kept saying to the Pope. The Pope imitated him. He said, the Pope said, when I can, when I can, the Pope infuriated, shouted back at him. What do you mean when you can? When I can, I will soon make you finish it. The Pope was angry, Michelangelo. He hit Michelangelo with his stick. Then he threatened to hurt him, to throw him off the scaffold if he did not get on more quickly.
And now listen to the beat. So clearly, the Pope abused Michelangelo. He beat him up with a stick. He wanted to throw him off the scaffold. He harassed him. He stalked him throughout the work. He didn't let him finish his job. I mean, he was a pain in the artistic renaissance, but.
And now the segment from Vasari that I want you to listen to very carefully.
After these outbursts came apologies. Sounds familiar. The Pope's Chamberlain would call at Michelangelo's house with presence of money, with excuses, and with apologies. He explained to Michelangelo that such treatment by the Pope was meant as a favor and as a mark of affection for Michelangelo.
Did you all go through this when the narcissist misbehaves, abuses you, verbally, physically, cheats on you, steals from you, curses you, I don't know. And then he tells you the fact that I'm so excited, I get so angry and it's only because I love you, only because I care for you. The fact that we are fighting is a good sign. Didn't you? Didn't you? You? You all went through it, right?
Okay.
So now to fantasy.
I don't know how many of you have seen the movie, the amazing movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Secret Life, I think, of Walter Mitty with Danny Kay, who was, of course, needless to say, a Jew. So Danny Kay, one of the greatest comedians of all time, is Walter Mitty.
It's an inconsequential guy from Perth Amboy, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Everyone is handpacking. Everyone is harassing. Everyone is humiliating him. He has a bossy mother. He has an overbearing boss, Bruce Pierce, who steals his ideas all the time. He has a totally dim-witted fiancée, Gertrude Griswold, just the name should tell you everything.
And Gertrude has another guy who is all over her and all around her. And his name is Tubby Wordsworth. And he's obnoxious. I mean, as Gertrude is dim-witted, he's obnoxious. And Gertrude is a poodle, of course, because he's dim-witted. And his name is Queenie. And she has a loud-mouthed mother. Don't ask. Don't ask. It's the life designed in hell. And in it, smack in the center, is the poor Walter Mitty.
And how does he escape this kind of life?
He imagines all kinds of exciting and impossible lives for himself. His lives are like movies, these imaginary worlds that he creates in great detail. They're like movies. And they are borrowed from pulp magazines, the pulp fiction that he reads every day.
This is not something he prefers to do. His job is an editor at Pierce Publishing Company. And he has to read this pulp fiction.
But then once he has entered the specific issue or magazine on his desk, he leaves the narrative. He enters the narrative. He imbues himself. He becomes one with the narrative. And he becomes his fantasy.
It's more than dreaming. It's a little like flashback in PTSD. You know, flashback in PTSD is when you relive the experience. It's when you hear the same sounds, smell the same smells, and your physical environment changes. You have auditory and visual hallucinations in flashback.
By the way, that is the only form of flashback. Any other use of the word flashback is wrong. The only clinical definition of flashback is this, what I've just described.
So Walter Mitty's dreams and fantasies, they are a lot like flashbacks because he totally renounces, ignores, and confuses reality. He is in the fantasy. And he is so much into the fantasy that he wounds himself, injures himself. I mean, he pays a big, it's very self-destructive.
And then you should see the rest of the movie. Something real happened. A real adventure happens to him and brings it with it, love.
And this you need to see.
But the movie's main lesson is if you want an adventure, if you're looking for love, you need to forget fantasy. Fantasy is not the way. You need to go back to reality. You need to embrace reality. You need to immerse yourself in reality. It's the only way to find happiness, love, truth, and you know what?
Adventures and interest in life. That's the movie's lesson.
And of course, a narcissist lesson from his life is exactly the opposite. If you want adventures, risks, thrills, adrenaline, excitement, arousal, love, caring, empathy, you need to give up on reality. You need to delete reality. You need to ignore it. And you need to become an integral part of a fantasy. You need to internalize this fantasy and you need to act as though it is reality to the point that you finally believe that it is reality.
In other words, the narcissist choice is what we would call in clinical terms, a delusional disorder.
All narcissists are delusional.
And so it raises the question, of course, what's the difference between fantasy and reality?
First of all, to be clear, narcissistic personality disorder is a fantasy disorder. It's a fantasy based disorder.
Among the diagnostic criteria, there are nine diagnostic criteria in the DSM-4 and they were migrated to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 5 in 2013.
And among these nine, two of the nine deal with fantasy, a pervasive pattern of grandiosity in fantasy or behavior, and a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
We could say, therefore, that the narcissist has a fantasy prone personality. It's known in clinical settings as FPP, fantasy prone personality.
It's a disposition, a tendency, or an entire personality trait where the person has lifelong, very extensive and very deep, profound involvement in fantasy to the point that the resources that he invests in fantasy far outweigh the resources that he invests in reality.
It's not overactive imagination. That's not the case. It's simply relocatingand living in a dreamscape and a dream world.
The Surrealistic Movement in Art, they based their entire work on dreams. They claimed that there is no ontological argument. There is no philosophical, rigorous way to claim that reality is preferable to dreams or more real, so to speak, than dreams.
They derived a lot of unconscious material via dreams onto their works of art. Of course, the most famous of them is Salvador Dali. You should see his work in Hitchcock's film. I think it was Vertigo. He made drawings for the film. Amazing. Dreams and fantasies are a legitimate part of human existence.
It's a question of balance. If you spend most of your life in dreams and fantasies, or in a shared fantasy, then you're a fantasy-prone personality.
This kind of person is called a fantasizer, or a fantast.
The previous term was fantasizer. Why is that a problem?
Because the brain is neuroplastic. The more you do something, the more the brain changes, rewires, and adapts itself to what you're doing.
We say that in the brain, if it fires, it wires. If it fires, it wires.
So if you force the brain to do something repeatedly, it will change, it will rewire, it will change its shape, literally its shape. The connection between neurons will change to accommodate your choice of what it is that you want to do most.
And so fantasizers begin to have difficulty telling apart fantasy and reality to the point that many of them develop hallucinations and even psychosomatic symptoms.
So daydreaming, absorption, and something called idiotic memory, they are all forms of fantasy, one way or another.
But in none of them do we have total confusion between reality and fantasy. They are all dissociative, in the sense that, for example, when you daydream, and by the way, when you watch a movie, and when you drive, you are in another reality, an alternative reality. But you know that you are in an alternative reality, and you do not confuse it with real reality.
When the short break ends, when the commercial break ends, you go back to the movie, you go back to the TV series. You don't confuse the two.
But a fantasizer, someone with fantasy prone personality, does confuse the two.
American psychologist Sheryl Wilson and Theodore Barber were the first to suggest fantasy prone personality in 1981. And studies since came up with the amazing fact that something like one out of every 25 adults has a fantasy prone personality.
It is not an accident that this is exactly the same number that applies to narcissists cluster B. If you put all cluster B disorders together, except psychopaths and histrionics, or even with histrionics, you get something like four or five percent.
Wilson and Barber treated the fantasy prone personality to childhood. They said that it would require a special setting in childhood. They said that a parent, I'm quoting, a parent, grandparent, teacher or friend must have encouraged the child, reinforced the child's fantasies and treated the child in ways that encourage a child to believe that his, for example, dolls or stuffed animals were really.
And they think that such children developed a rich fantasy life that in adulthood became essentially a form of auto suggestion, auto hypnosis.
That's very interesting because when the narcissist creates the shared fantasy, he is in a hypnotic state. He is in a hypnotic state, but he is not controlled by an outside hypnotist. He is controlled by an internal object. It is an internal object that gives the suggestions and directs the narcissist on what to feel, how to think and how to act the same way a hypnotist would do it on stage to a member of the audience.
Again, we see this split.
There are so many splits in narcissism that are strongly indicative of severe dissociation to the point of dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality, if you wish. There are self-states and these self-states have hierarchy and they interact. It's an exceedingly complex mental health condition, as complex as borderline, if not more.
Kernberg said this, not Sam Vaknin. Kernberg suggested that narcissism, borderline, psychosis, they are all very close members, first cousins in the same family. So it's a kind of hypnotic induction.
In the 1980s, there were psychologists such as Judith Rue, R-H-U-E, Rue, and Stephen J. Lynn. Then there was Dardred Barrett, B-A-R-R-E-T-T. She was from Harvard. They studied people who were fantasy-prone. They were the ones who pointed out that actually fantasy-prone people are the same ones who get easily hypnotized. They are suggestible and hypnotizable, and the same ones who had a traumatic childhood. They were the first to link trauma, hypnosis, trauma in childhood, hypnosis, and fantasy, time.
They identified various types of fantasy, and they were the first to point out that one of the most common forms of fantasy is actually what we call spacing out.
So what's the difference between people with great imagination, active imagination, creative people, and people with fantasies?
As I said, the first critical difference, fantasy is divorced from reality. If you don't know the difference, if you can't tell the difference, something's wrong with you. You're delusional.
That's the first critical.
The second thing is resources.
The fantasizer and the narcissist is the mother and father of all fantasizers. He's the epitome and the quintessence and the poster child of the fantasizer.
A typical fantasizer spends 50 to 60 percent of his time or her time fantasizing, just sitting and fantasizing, or interacting with other people within a fantastic space, like, for example, the shared fantasy.
I encourage you to watch a previous video, which was a video I made about imaginary worlds created in childhood.
So it's cancerous. It's malignant. It takes over the totality of life.
And these people confuse fantasies with realities and even with reality and even with memories. That's why narcissists have very bad retroactive memories. That's why they have to confabulate because they have dissociative, no dissociative gaps in the memory. And it stands to reason that many of these gaps in memory, they're induced by transition to a fantasy state.
So the narcissist is in reality. Then something triggers him. He switches to fantasy.
While he's in fantasy, in the alternative universe, he is not in reality. So he doesn't know what's happening. He doesn't accumulate memories.
His hypo-hypo-couples is not active, doesn't generate long-term memories. It's very, very similar to black-out, alcoholic black-out or even brown-out. It's like a state of coma, a vegetative state.
But the narcissist does exist in an imaginary, fantastic space.
Now think about it.
Your entire relationship with a narcissist is a shared fantasy.
That means the narcissist cuts out, scissors out, removes, dissociates his entire relationship with you. All of your relationship with a narcissist is totally fantastic. He's not interacting with you. He's interacting with an idealized internal object that stands in for you, represents you.
And when he interacts with this internal object, it's according to a script or a screenplay, which is utterly divorced from reality, which is totally fantastic and imaginary and impossible.
And then he takes all this package and he kind of dissociates it. He lives inside it and he's not in reality. He is never with you in reality. He's inside his head, cavorting and frolicking and making love to and joking with and talking with.
Your representation, the internal object that he thinks fantastically is you. He's never been there with you. You have never been there for him or with him. You have nothing in common, not a single memory, not a single touch, not a single look or love or gaze or nothing. Everything.
And this is the, I think the most harrowing, shattering, heartbreaking discovery of victims of narcissists, former intimate partners of narcissists, when they discover that it's all been a sham, that it had never happened, that it was a movie gun or eye, that there was nothing there.
The narcissistic's internal emptiness is externalized and you inhabit this void, this deep space as he fulfills the void inside himself with a fantasy.
So he prefers to keep you at arm's length trapped, trapped in his deep space, in the darkness of his shadow. He prefers you there. Instead, he kind of inverts himself into a fantastic space here in his chest.
And within this space, he lives happily ever after with the idealized you. And if you dare to diverge from the idealized you, if you dare to be independent and autonomous, if you dare to disagree and criticize or suggest or try to help, then he wakes up.
He says, what's going on here? What is this discrepancy?
I've just been talking to her, but it's not her. You look like an alien, like an apparition, like a body snatcher to him.
He says, who took over my beautiful wife's body? Who is inside her now? She's possessed by whom?
Because he has not been interacting with you. He didn't see you changing and growing and developing and evolving, having new friends, getting a new job, starting to study a new topic, traveling. He didn't see all this. He's been inside himself, blind, blinded by his own fantasy.
You must understand this. You never had him. He has never been there.
The narcissist is not a presence. He's an absence.
It's critical that you understand this. This is the narcissist fantasy, and I connected it in the previous video to Paracosm.
Paracosm is a detailed and structured fantasy world. It's created originally by children, and usually they introduce an imaginary, powerful, all powerful, God-like imaginary friend into the Paracosm.
But many Paracosms survive into adult life. For example, the narcissist has a Paracosm. His Paracosm is an imaginary world. It's a holy trinity. It's a holy family. There's the father, which is the false self. There's the mother, which is your role. You should be the mother, and he is the son. It's a family. It's a family loving, caring family at peace. That's his shared fantasy. In many ways, it's mystical. It's almost religious.
In the previous video, I mentioned the Kabbalah. It's very, very powerful. The narcissist is Paracosm into which he drags you.
Another thing you should understand. Be truly, seriously careful. You're in big danger, because as you bleed into the shared fantasy, as you merge with it, as you disappear into it, as you become an integral part embedded in the world, like as you lose your third dimension and you become a two-dimensional symbol, the reification of the narcissist concept of a mother, hallowed, sexless, unconditionally loving mother, you disappear. You do become a figment of the shared fantasy. You are converted. You lose your humanity, let alone your femininity, and you become a part of his fantasy.
So, I mentioned, for example, the narcissist's autoreroticism. His autorerotic drive, because he's in love with a single love object, which is himself, and it's a same-sex object. His only way to experience femininity, his only access to femininity, is you.
He needs, because he has a love affair, he has a love affair, love relationship with himself. It's a homosexual relationship. He is in love with a same-sex object himself, but he is, by orientation, heterosexual.
So, he needs to change this object. He needs to change the self he's in love with into a woman.
This is very complex.
Listen again. The narcissist loves himself. I mean, the narcissist is sexually attracted to himself.
Narcissist is a man. His self is a man. He's sexually attracted to himself, so he's sexually attracted to a man.
But wait a minute, he's heterosexual. He's not sexually attracted to men.
So, he needs to convert himself into a woman. For him to be sexually attracted to himself, he needs to perceive himself as a woman, because he's heterosexual. He needs to change his gender. He cannot be sexually attracted to other people. He has no object relations. He's attracted to himself, but he must be attracted to himself as a woman. He must perceive herself as a woman, a sexual target that is feminine.
So, he takes you. He takes you and he uses you. He merges you with himself. You become a part of him.
The minute you became a part of him, he had converted himself into a woman, and then he can legitimately be attracted to himself. He can have sex with himself, because now he's a woman. And now he is a woman because he had merged with you. You brought your femininity to the equation by becoming one with him, by fusing with him, by establishing a new single organism. You had rendered him androgynous. You had made him also into a female.
So, now when he's attracted to himself, when he wants to make love to himself, when he's aroused by himself, he's aroused by himself as a woman, but only because you are there.
This means that you can't have an autonomous independent existence. It's a threat. It's a threat to identity determinants, for example, to gender role differentiation. It's also a threat to the sex drive of the narcissist, which is possibly the most fundamental primordial psychological force there is.
So, he needs you, he needs you to disintegrate and reintegrate with him like a cloud. He needs you to be a cloud. He needs you.
There are these horror movies where people become two-dimensionally embedded in walls, you know, and he needs you to be like this. He needs you, he needs you to become a painting, an overlay, a makeup layer. I don't know what other words to use, but to in the process give him your properties.
I'm an astrophysicist by training. So, black holes, for example, when they absorb objects from the outside, when objects fall into the black hole, the black hole preserves the information contained in the object.
It's the same with the narcissist. When he's a black hole, when he absorbs you, he preserves the information that was reified and embedded in you, reified by you. So, he preserves your femininity and he needs your femininity. He consumes it. He consumes it to transform himself into a female figure so that he can legitimately have sex with himself.
You see how complex this is.
Wilson and Barber described the fantasy-prone personality and I want to read to you some of the characteristics which emanated from the studies.
Excellent hypnotic subject, having imaginary friends in childhood, false self. Fantasizing often as a child, having an actual fantasy identity. That's the false self, of course. False self is divorce from the narcissist. It's a separate identity.
Experiencing imagined sensations, Israel having vivid sensory perceptions, receiving sexual satisfaction without physical stimulation. This is Barber and Wilson.
Now, there is a test, by the way, called Inventory of Childhood Memories and imaginings and another test, creative experiences questionnaire, and they measure fantasy, propensity for fantasy.
So, we had agreed, I mean, we, the profession, had agreed that the propensity to develop fantasy life has to do with problematic childhood, probably traumatic, probably abusive, and so on. But it doesn't have to be, I mean, there are many forms of trauma and abuse. Remember, I've been saying it in many, many videos. There are many forms of trauma and abuse.
For example, if the parent encourages the child to inhabit a fantastic space. Imagine a parent who had dreamt, dreamt, all his life he wanted to be a famous musician, but he failed because he had a mediocre talent. And then he pushes his son to be a pianist, and his son becomes one of the greatest pianists on earth.
Actually, this kind of father, he created a shared fantasy with the son. He forced the son into a fantastic role. He encouraged the son fantasy life. It's a true case, by the way. You can watch it in the movie. I think the movie is called Shine. And this pianist, he ended up in a mental assignment. He had a nervous breakdown, schizophrenic, paranoid ideation, ended up in a mental assignment.
So parents who encourage children to live in fantasy, especially if this fantasy has to do with gratification of the parents' unfulfilled wishes, with parentifying, forcing the child to act as a parent in a fantasy. All these are very unhealthy, and they're very abusive.
When the child is encouraged to believe that fantasy is in some crucial ways preferable to and superior to reality, that's very detrimental to the child's development. And that includes telling the child the toys are living creatures, or encouraging the child to have imaginary companions, or forcing the child to read only fairy tales, and to reenact things they had read.
And so parents play with fantasy, and they think it's fun. They think they're encouraging the child's imagination and creativity, but they're playing with fire.
When they tell the child to play act as another person in another character, that's great. But if they do it too often, the child will get confused. Children don't have boundaries, well-developed boundaries, and they don't have an identity yet. And they easily form false memories. It's a dangerous game.
And so we need to be very careful when we encourage the fantasy life of children.
At any rate, with some Barrett, numerous others, they found that exposure to abuse, physical or sexual, caused children to develop a rich fantasy life. They also found that exposure to severe loneliness and isolation also drove children to develop fantasy life.
And Sigmund Freud himself said that fantasy is unsatisfied wishes. He said unsatisfied wishes are the driving power behind fantasies. Every separate fantasy contains the fulfillment of a wish and improves an unsatisfactory reality.
And so childhood-abused loneliness results in children creating a fantasy world. And this fantasy world is happy. And it's happy because it's protected. It's safe.
You must understand that the false self is the good enough mother. The false self is a safe base. The false self imbues the child with the grandiosity that the child needs in order to take on the world and explore it fearlessly.
The false self is a driving engine of development and growth.
And in this sense, early on, it's a positive adaptation in a very adversarial and sick, dysfunctional environment.
Only later when the child becomes an adult, and because the false self is fantastic, the false self becomes a problem. Because it forces the adult child, the child turned adult, to interpret everything as a fantasy, to impose fantasies on everything, including on romantic relationships.
People with fantasies, people who are fantasizers and narcissists, they have some good, there are some good aspects to the fantasy life of a narcissist.
For example, narcissists are much more open to experience. It's one of the five domains that we use in the five-factor model of personality.
They are much more open to experience. They have active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to some inner processes, preferences for variety, electro curiosity. When it's taken to extreme in the psychopath, it becomes novelty seeking, risk taking, recklessness, and so on and so forth.
So it's not all negative. And as I told you, it's a question of measure and whether there is a confusion with reality.
And of course, in this critical issue, the issue of absorption, issues of absorption and of dissociation.
Absorption is when you become absorbed in something, a mental imagery or a fantasy.
And Auke Tellegen was the psychologist who first described absorption and then watched.
And they established conclusively that when you're inside a fantasy, you're absorbed. It's very vivid. It's very realistic mental imagery.
This is why I keep telling you, the narcissist has never seen you. He never even noticed that you're there.
When you're inside a fantasy, your intimate partner is not intimate and not apartment. It does not exist. No one exists. Only the fantasy exists. This is called absorption.
And the second mechanism is dissociation.
We discussed dissociation numerous times at very great length in many videos. And please, I encourage you to go and watch these videos before you post 246 identical questions online.
But dissociation can cause someone to feel that the world is not real, derealization, to feel that he is not real, depersonalization, or to lose memory segments, amnesia.
Dissociation, as measured by, for example, dissociative experience scale and others, dissociation and fantasy are highly correlated.
It seems that when a person fantasizes, the self is dissociated. They are dissociated selves.
And it raises a fascinating question.
We know that the narcissist has two selves, true self and false self. We know that the borderline has many self states. One of them is a secondary psychopath. I'll come to it at the end of the conversation.
But are these selves real? Or are they fantasy?
It is such a mess. The internal world of the narcissist and the borderline is such a bloody mess that even clinical psychologists of the first rank find this issue intractable.
Is the borderline fantasizing her self states? Or are they real? Are they coping responses to trauma? Or are they there, regardless of stress and anxiety? We know that they are provoked. These self states come to the surface. Under stress and anxiety, the borderline becomes a secondary psychopath when exposed to humiliation, to abandonment and rejection, real or imaginary or anticipated.
But are they real? Or is she just fantasizing that now she's a psychopath, now she will punish, now she will take revenge, now she will behave any way she chooses, now she will be reckless, now she will be promiscuous. Is she just conforming to an inner fantasy?
Same with the narcissist. The false self is a background process, but it becomes hyperactive, very discernible and visible when the narcissist's grandiosity is challenged.
But we do know that the false self is highly fantastic. So is it a fantasy that is provoked by the challenge to grandiosity?
The shared fantasy, for example, is it real? Or is it total fantasy? Are you there at all as an intimate partner? Or are you an excuse? Was the shared fantasy in existence long before you came on the scene and you were just a trigger or something added kind of like spice to the main dish?
But did the main dish precede you? Was the shared fantasy there with a hole in your shape just waiting for you to fit in? Was the jigsaw of 999 pieces put together missing piece number thousand? Or was it you with your presence, personality, character, vivaciousness, sense of humor, looks and other parameters? Was it the specific you who provoked the generation and the creation on the fly of a totally new shared fantasy customized to fit you, tailor-made?
We don't know. We don't know.
There is strong empirical support. The dissociation is caused primarily and directly by exposure to trauma. And that dissociation is a primary process and fantasy is a secondary process.
But we're not going to do this. This is really delving very deep.
And, you know, if you want to listen to me talk about these things, you have to travel all the way to Russia or Nigeria or Macedonia. Or, or.
So I want to mention the work of another Israeli. He came up with the idea of maladaptive or excessive daydreaming. It's a form of absorption that is associated with excessive fantasy. And it was first described by Ella Sommer of the University of Haifa, where I was born. He described it in the year 2002.
I think that maladaptive daydreaming has a lot to do with narcissism and vice versa. I think vice versa, anything narcissism, sorry, is founded on a form of maladaptive daydreaming.
And daydreaming is normal. It's a dissociative process, but it's normal. It's actually very healthy.
But some people daydream so vividly, so powerfully, that they lose touch with reality. The reality testing gets impaired and they also become compulsive about it. Daydreaming is so pleasant that they keep repeating the experience.
And that's, of course, ultimately that we had described. Sommer suggested that the stimuli for maladaptive daydreams has to do with triggers, like locations. So if this is true, this is highly post-traumatic. Traumas generate triggers. Traumas paint, I call it traumatic imprinting. Traumas imprint everything.
When you have a trauma, when you endured or experienced a trauma, places, names, smells, everything gets stamped, imprinted with a trauma. And these things become triggers. They can revive, resuscitate, recreate the experience of the trauma.
And Sommer says that daydreaming, this kind of maladaptive daydreaming, is also triggered. It's very interesting because it connects it intimately to post-traumatic conditions.
Freud, Freud was not the first to, he didn't coin the word fantasy, but he was the first, as usual, to describe. The fantasy is a defense mechanism. And German fantasy is fantasy. And Befried in German is Befei. Will you get off my back?
I did not mispronounce the word. I was mocking the German language.
Okay, enough.
So Freud said, men and women cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction which they can extort from reality. We simply cannot do without auxiliary constructions and without dwelling on imaginary wish fulfillments.
He is quoting, actually, Theodore Fontana.
Okay, never mind.
So Freud, at the very very beginning, Freud said that everything in childhood is motivated by the pleasure principle. The child is a hedonist, he pursues pleasure wherever he can find it, in whichever way he can secure it.
And it leads children, especially babies, to very peculiar places. They eat all kinds of substances which we generally tend to refrain from eating. And they taste all kinds of things which we don't anymore.
So babies seek pleasure everywhere.
And then later, as his thinking developed, he introduced the reality principle. And then he had come here, the dilemma, pleasure or reality, then he said that actually, you know what, maybe the reality principle is reality and fantasies intend to gratify the pleasure principle in adults.
Brilliant, brilliant Jewish way of reconciling opposites. So he says that as childhood adaptation to the reality principle develops, so too one species of thought activity was split off. It was kept free from reality testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is fantasizing, that's his word, continued as daydreaming.
And he said that fantasizing is in a way a nature reserve. It preserves its original state where everything, including what is useless and even what is noxious, can grow and proliferate there as it pleases.
So Freud considered daydreams, which when they coalesce and ossify and sort of fit into a framework, they become a fantasy.
Freud thought about the precursors of fantasies, daydreaming. He thought that they have a valuable function.
He said, these daydreams are confected, invested with emotional energy. These daydreams are confected with a large amount of interest. They are carefully cherished by the subject and usually concealed with a great deal of sensitivity.
Such fantasies may be unconscious as well as conscious.
And Freud thought that fantasies include a great deal of the true constitutional essence of a personality and that the energetic man is, I quote, one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful fantasies into reality.
While the artist said Freud can transform his fantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms.
The doom of neurosis. One of the greatest thinkers, I would like to mention a few more thinkers, Klein, Bjorn and Lacan.
Now Lacan and generally French psychologists, I almost want to call them pseudo psychologists. All these Frenchies, they are not my cup of absent, they're not my cup of tea, British tea.
But in this particular case, in the case of fantasy, I think Lacan has some brilliant things to say.
Okay, start with Melanie Klein.
Melanie Klein took the concept of Freud, fantasy as wish fulfillment, realizing the pleasure principle when you grow too old and you adhere to the reality principle.
She took this and she said that the child has a relationship with his internal objects.
Now we come close to the narcissist.
The child has a relationship with internal objects. She said that when the child interacts with internal objects, it's like playing with friends. It's like playmates. The internal objects become like playmates.
She said it's a kind of play activity inside the person and it's known as unconscious fantasy. And these fantasies are often very violent and aggressive. They are different from ordinary daydreams or fantasies.
So there was a big debate. Nevermind, psychoanalysts love to debate.
And Susan Isaacs in 1952 summarized this debate in a seminal paper, the nature and function of fantasy.
By the way, Kleinians spell fantasy with pH to distinguish it from Freudian fantasy.
Because Freud's fantasy is wish fulfillment. It's acting upon the world in order to realize wishes and goals in accordance with the pleasure principle. Klein's fantasy is acting upon internal objects in order to generate essentially gratification, happiness, joy, cheer.
Klein's perception is much closer, much better explanation of narcissism. That's what the narcissist does.
Remember, the narcissist is a child. It's an infant, never grew up, does not want to grow up. He wants to continue to play with his playmates. And all his playmates, luckily for him, are inside his head. He wants to continue to play with his internal objects.
Mommy, mommy, I want to play. That's what narcissists do. They're kids and they want to play with internal objects. And when they see you and you're so beautiful and you're so motherly in principle and you're so sexy, they want to convert you into an internal object also because they want to play with you.
So then they play with you here, not with you, but with the internal object that used to be you. They convert you into a symbol. They dehumanize you. They make you two dimensional. They stick you on a page, your gun, your gun there and reappear here inside the narcissist's mind.
From that moment on, you are his captive playmate.
I'm quoting, Karp and psychoanalysts regard the unconscious as made up of fantasies of relations with objects. These are thought of as primary and innate and as the mental representations of instincts, the psychological equivalence in the mind of defense mechanisms.
Isaac said that unconscious fantasies exert a continuous influence throughout life, both in normal and neurotic people, the difference lying in a specific character of the dominant fantasies.
And so this developed further and Isaac's, for example, wrote that Freud's hallucinatory wish fulfillment and his interjection and projection are the basis of the fantasy life.
And it created a whole debate and there's something known as the paradigm.
We're not going to into all this.
Now, remember that Kleinians use fantasy with a pH. It was Klein who coined the word fantasy with pH because she tried to say that fantasy with pH was instinct aspect and aspect of instinct unconscious, the instinct unconscious fantasy.
Fantasy is an element of psychic life which moves towards the world. These are like potentials because they're fantasies. They're not real. So they have a potential to become reality.
They go through another stage. They become an image and from image, they become reality.
So fantasies are very powerful because they are the precursors. They are the antecedents. They're the preconditions of reaching out into the world.
So they make use of the drives. And they are the ones who help to create complex internal mental life.
The environment modifies the infant's mental life. Reality modifies it, but it is all mediated via actually fantasies.
When the infant, when the child starts to interact with the outer world, he is testing his fantasies in a reality setting. And even cognition is about testing fantasies because when you think about something, it has to conform with reality.
But long before you get into reality, it's here. It has to get from here to there. And then from there back to here, there's a feedback loop. There's a kind of neurofeedback of feedback loop that modifies your thinking.
But your thinking starts here.
Well, those of you who have a brain, thinking starts here.
So all thinking is fantasy. It's based on fantasy. It's derived from fantasy.
The role of unconscious fantasy in line in psychology is essential for the capacity to think, not only to imagine, beyond who was a psychologist. He said that the fantasy image is a preconception. And it will not become a thought until it combines with experience.
He said that there is first a preconception, a kind of template, if you wish, a template. Then experience comes in, combines with this template, and this together creates thinking. It's very, very, it's very empiricist.
There's a school in philosophy that said essentially the same, Hume and others.
The first bodily experiences build up the first memories. External realities come in, and then you add them to the body experiences and you add them into the memories.
And together they create a fantasy. And the fantasy is tested against reality again and again, and then creates thinking.
One thing they're missing, all of them, is the connection between cognition and emotion. It was a very early phase in modern psychological thinking. And at that time, there was a clear separation between thought and emotions.
Today we don't have this separation. We consider emotions subspecies of cognition, subspecies of thinking. So we should add emotions to the mix.
There is body. First there is body, experience of the body as a baby, as a child, experience the body.
Then you begin to have memories. Once you have memories, there is external realities, very traumatic. You discover that mother is separate from separation, individuation, external reality.
Then you take all this mess, you mix it in a big primordial soup, and what comes out is a fantasy. Then you test fantasy is an organizing principle. It's a narrative. It's a story. Then you test this fantasy against reality. And if it resonates, good. And if it's not, it doesn't, you modify the fantasy.
Until at some point, the fantasy becomes a thought. It becomes conscious. It becomes a thought. A thought is final. A thought represents a theory of the world, and a theory of other minds, and a theory of your mind.
What makes people tick? What makes the world function and operate? And who am I? That's a thought.
But thoughts are constructed on fantasies, and thoughts generate emotions. The child's fantasies draw on images, on sensations, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, touch, taste, smell, everything. These images, these dramatic representations, they are elaborated into the fantasy, and they create articulated perceptions of the external world.
The child is able to tolerate increasing awareness of experience only because of the fantasy. The world is threatening. The world is frightening.
Separating from mother is traumatic, is a horror movie. It's unsafe. You need a lot of grandiosity to take on the world, to assume this risk, to experience the new, to seek novelty. A lot. And you need to tolerate this. It's intolerable.
And one way of doing this is pretending the world is not there. Denying reality, repressing portions of reality, renouncing it sometimes.
You need fantasy. Fantasy is the bridge that allows you to gradually dip your toes in the water, expose yourself, until finally, somehow, you venture out.
And all of us, when we are confronted with pain, with trauma, with intolerable negative emotionality, with abandonment, with humiliation, with rejection, with stress, with anxiety, with depression, all of us result to fantasy.
Ask yourselves. Be honest. You will see. You all result to fantasy.
So personal growth and personal development are crucially dependent on fantasy.
Lacan, by the way, Lacan is a spitting image of me, or vice versa, actually. I'm the spitting image of Lacan. We could have been identical twins. I'm not talking about, you know, just twins, identical twins. I look exactly like him, and he looks exactly like me. Brothers in arms. Amazingly, he was also into narcissism. I mean, he studied narcissism. I studied narcissism.
And it's like, you know what? It could make you believe in reincarnation. Absolutely breathtakingly stunning. Have a look. Go online. Look for his photos.
Lacan. OK.
Lacan also dealt with fantasies. He said that he prefers the fantasies revealed by Melanie Klein, the imago of the mother, the shadow of the bird internal objects, what he called the imaginary.
He at first supported Melanie Klein. But gradually he drifted back to Freud's idea of fantasy as a kind of screen memory. I'm quoting Lacan. Screen memory representing something of more importance with which it was in some way connected.
And he asked himself, OK, what is fantasy connected with?
And he said, the fantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinant in the function of repetition.
OK. Now, there's no time right now to delve deeper into this tiny bit of text which conceals mountains. I could talk about this bit of text 10 hours, 10 hours and I'll never repeat myself. But important is the image of the screen. It's a screen. You know, the Wizard of Oz.
Those of you who have seen the movie or God forbid read the book. There's a tiny wizard. There's a tiny, not wizard, a tiny operator, machine operator, hiding behind the screen and pretending to be the giant Wizard of Oz, the great, invincible, dangerous, all powerful Wizard of Oz.
And when they pierced the screen, when the curtain, they pulled the curtain, they discovered this pseudo midget there.
As impressive as the moon, you know, and he's operating a huge machinery, which is actually the Wizard of Oz. That's a perfect metaphor for narcissism.
Indeed, there's a book, the Wizard of Oz and other narcissists.
So, Lacan implied that the curtain behind which the operator is, the curtain, this screen is the fantasy.
Fantasies link the individual's unconsciousness with his consciousness, but they also block it off. They are like on off switch. If they're on, the unconsciousness interact with the consciousness. If they're off, unconsciousness is sealed off.
He wrote about the real core, the kernel. He wrote, subject and real are to be situated on either side of the split in the resistance of the fantasy.
And so he said that fantasies are situated at the center of the individual's personality, splits, conflicts. He said the subject situates himself as determined by the fantasy, whether in the dream or in any of the more or less well developed forms of daydreaming.
And as a rule, a subject fantasys are close variations on a single theme, the fundamental fantasy, minimizing the variations in meaning, which might otherwise cause a problem for desire.
So he invented the whole therapy. He believed that the main goal of Lacanian therapy, by the way, is what he called to bridge or to cross over, to traverse the fundamental fantasy.
Lacan said the traversing of fantasy involves the subject's assumption of a new position with respect to the other, his language and the other, his desire.
I repeat the traversing of fantasy involves the subject's assumption of a new position with respect to the other, his language and the other as desire.
So the other is two functions, language and desire. You notice the other is you.
He's talking about you. You are the other in the narcissist side and you have two functions.
You're a language element. He can express himself through you, but only by converting you into a language, into a word, into a symbol.
And also you are the desire. He desires you, but he doesn't really desire you. He desires what you can facilitate for him. He desires the services that you can give him sexually.
What are these services? You can help him make love to himself. You can help him make love to himself by rendering him more of a female.
He said that a fantasy is a utopian moment beyond neurosis.
He said the question is what then does he who has passed through this experience, who has traversed the fantasy, what does he become?
And there's a question I faced when I had developed cold therapy. If I get rid of grandiosity in the false self, what had the narcissist become?
The narcissist who graduated cold therapy and is ostensibly changed. Changing to what?
So you see fantasy is a very complex topic because it relates to the conscious and the unconscious. It's imagined and includes desires or aims or wishes, but equally it interfaces with reality and with your consciousness. It is created, but from the moment it's created, it takes a life of its own and it can even finally control you. It's unrealistic. It contains many situations that are unlikely, but it always ends up with impact on reality. It is sexual. Some of it is sexual. Many of it is not, but ultimately is sexual.
And fantasy cannot be perceived by the senses. It's an imagined situation, but it's an imagined relationship between object and subject.
While the senses are not involved directly, there's no sensa. There's no sensory input. The senses are very active.
The simulations of senses, the renditions of senses are very active within the fantasy because within the fantasy, in dream, for example, in a dream, within the fantasy, we feel, we touch. We can even get sexually aroused by imagining touch or taste or smell.
In everyday life, thoughts, I quote, pursue a series of fantasies concerning things they wish they could do or wish they had done. Fantasies of control or of sovereign choice, daydreaming.
Georges-Gymain-Vallin studied defense mechanisms, and he took fantasy. He thought fantasy was an immature defense.
He wrote, as an example of immature defense, I will give fantasy, living in a Walter Mitty dream world where you imagine you're successful, popular, instead of making real efforts to make friends and succeed at a job.
By the way, he made a study that showed that because narcissists have fantasy, they're based on fantasy. They don't have friends.
It's a very interesting study. Vaillant. Vaillant is V-A-I-L-L-A-N-T.
Georges-Gymain. In his study, he discovered that not one person who used fantasy a lot had any close friends, I'm quoting from the abstract.
So fantasy has beneficial elements. It provides small regressions and compensatory wish fulfillments which are recuperative in effect, but it can separate you from reality.
And depending on your intelligence and your creativity, fantasies are different in how vivid they are, for example, how productive they are, how imaginative they are, how innovative they are, and shared fantasies are no exception.
Some narcissists have fantasies which are very, very basic.
Meet Thugs and Eugene. You know, these are much more somatic types. Some narcissists are super highly intelligent, 190 A.Q.
And so their fantasies are exceedingly elaborate. They are like whole worlds, entire imaginary worlds.
And when you fit in, you have entered a movie set. You've entered an amazing, lavish, circular, elaborate movie thing, dreamscape world.
And so it crucially depends on personal parameters.
Freud thought that fantasies constructed around multiple repressed wishes and employs disguise and masks to mark the defensive processes by which desire is realized. He thought that people want to maintain distance from the repressed wish, but simultaneously experience the repressed wish.
He said, okay, that's where fantasy comes in. fantasy actually is a third person, third gender, a third pronoun, syntax. It's like fantasy is not mine. I can disown the fantasy. I can say, ah, I'm just, you know, I'm just daydreaming. Don't take it seriously.
So fantasy is what we call in intelligence work or military plausible deniability.
Yes, I'm fantasizing about fulfilling this and this wish, but I'm just fantasizing. It's harmless.
The vision is multiplied. And you can see the fantasy from more than one position at a time.
And therefore, you have multiple selves within a fantasy. You can have multiple selves because there's no self.
Freud himself suggested that in a fantasy, there's no I. There's a later Jung supported him also said there's no self in a fantasy. It's a space that depends crucially on the creative center.
Freud, that's why Freud thought that fantasy is linked to sexuality because sexuality at his time in Vienna in the early 20th century was no subject like taboo, forbidden, dirty, yuck, no way sex, no sex.
Thank you. We are civilized.
So he thought he thought that this sexuality was a perfect pretext for fantasy. So he wrote the object to be rediscovered is not the lost object, but it's substitute by displacement. The lost object is the object of self preservation, of hunger. And the object one seeks to refined in sexuality is an object displaced in relation to the first object.
So the initial scene, the initial fantasy, according to Freud is created out of frustration.
Melanie Klein agrees with him, bad breath, good breath. The child is frustrated. He's frustrated. His instinct, for example, to breastfeed is frustrated.
And so he begins a process called phantasmization. He begins to convert some basic objects like the mother's breasts into fantasies. He begins to fantasize on the mother's breasts.
Depending on the mother, I can fully sympathize with him.
So, pleasures, real life bodily pleasures now is now a displaced, but strongly experienced in the fantasy. It's a perfect substitute. The fantasy is a perfect substitute for reality.
I want you to understand this as the unfortunate intimate partners of narcissists. When they are in fantasy, it's as real to them as when you are in reality.
The child cannot experience reality. So he re-inscribes it into a scene in his mind. He experiences fantasy and remember the narcissist is a child.
Freud wrote, the finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of an object. So the narcissist moves towards you, moves away from you.
The desire is constituted, mobilized, withdrawn. The narcissist prefers the fantasy because it's safe, because he can control it, because he can fully script it, because within the fantasy he is omnipotent and omniscient and all his wishes come true, because you can never abandon him as an internal object, though you can as an external object.
These are major advantages when you're a child, when you're four years old or maximum nine years old, not a single narcissist on earth is older than nine years old.
And don't, don't ask me how old am I, because I have dined with the dinosaurs. Look what happened to them.