The dynamics of the narcissists' shared fantasy resemble very much certain types of psychotherapies, certain treatment modalities.
In a way, the shared fantasy is both a traumatizing experience and a therapeutic one.
The narcissist's intimate partners undergo tremendous change, torsion, transformation, and to some extent, personal growth and development.
The narcissist does not mean of course to act as a therapist. It doesn't mean to apply to you anything like compassion or empathy or understanding or acceptance. It doesn't mean to heal you. It doesn't mean to cure you, it doesn't mean to help you. That's all these are ulterior motives alien to the narcissists.
But the shared fantasy is structured in a way that again, as I said, it replicates very important dynamics in therapy.
And the reason the shared fantasy resembles therapy to that extent is because it is founded on the relationship between a child and a mother.
You are the mother, the narcissistis the child.
And a mother child experience, a mother child liaison, a mother child dyad is at the core of most schools of psychotherapy.
The mother child experience, or at least the parent-child experience, is replicated sometimes intentionally and knowingly in the therapeutic session in therapy.
In therapy, the therapist acts as a parental figure.
Therapists like Sandor Ferenczi, for example, did it on purpose, acted as a parent on purpose.
Others were more reserved. They were not quite sure it's a good idea.
And a notable example is Sigmund Freud, who has had a very bad relationship with his father.
And so now that we begin to understand the commonalities between the narcissist's interpersonal relationships and the interpersonal relationships which develop in therapy we can focus in home in on the common denominators and today I'm going to discuss one of them and it is regression.
But we should not confuse the shared fantasy with therapy in this sense.
Even if the dynamics are pretty similar, the intentions of the narcissist, unconscious as they may be, the motivations of the narcissist, hidden from himself as they may be.
The narcissist self-deceives, but still, this is not a good setting.
The shared fantasy is a malevolent, malicious theater of the absurd, where the intimate partner is driven to regress so that it can fulfill a role in the re-enactment of the narcissist's early childhood.
In other words, the intimate partner is instrumentalized, parentified, abused yet again, all over again.
This is not therapy.
Yes, the intimate partner is regressed, the narcissist is regressed as well.
In order for the intimate partner to become the narcissist's mother, he needs to regress.
Regression is a key feature, critical feature of the shared fantasy.
But there are therefore three types.
There is positive regression which leads to growth and so on so forth.
There's negative regression which leads to an infantile state and is largely irreversible.
And there is a instrumentalized regression which is used in order to foster addiction and dependency and to assert control over another person.
And that is the type of regression used profusely in the shared fantasy.
As to concepts like post-traumatic growth and positive disintegration, they do involve to some extent regression, but they have nothing to do with regression as a goal in itself.
Because they emanate from a traumatic background or context or a life crisis or failure or defeat, they emanate from a traumatic background or context or life crisis or failure or defeat, they emanate from negativity.
They are much closer ironically to the shared fantasy than to regression at the service of the self, which is about creativity, or benign regression, or even malignant regression in Blaylin's work.
The intimate partner is disintegrated in the shared fantasy. It's taken apart. It's broken. The damage is huge.
But it is true that the intimate partner gains the potential and the possibility and the opportunity for positive reintegration.
So positive disintegration does not exist in the shared fantasy. It's negative disintegration, but it could lead to positive reintegration in the healing aftermath after narcissistic abuse.
And during this healing phase after narcissistic abuse, the regression induced in the intimate partner by the narcissist can be leveraged therapeutically in order to create separation individuation and to say a final goodbye to the Narcissus.
Let me explain this because this is a very crucial insight and a therapeutic technique.
The narcissist regresses the intimate partner. So now she's a child, an infant.
And the narcissist does horrible things to this infant, abuses the infant, cruelly, sadistically, tortures, torments the infant, it's horrible.
But then it's over. The relationship is over. The narcissist has discarded this infant, this intimate partner.
Now the intimate partner, in her state as an infant, in her regressed state, she has the possibility to reintegrate herself, to reconstitute herself, and to experience separation individuation, separate from the narcissist in her mind, the introject of the narcissist, and to become again an individual.
Separation individuation is possible only subject to regression, only in the wake of regression.
Ironically, by regressing the intimate partner, the narcissist provides her with the capacity to separate from him and to become the individual that she used to be, to reconstitute herself, to rebuild herself.
It is the regression in the shared fantasy that makes it possible after the shared fantasy is long over.