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Why Narcissist DISCARDS MEMORY of YOU (Having Idealized and Devalued It)

Uploaded 12/12/2024, approx. 15 minute read

Yesterday's video clearly provoked you. You want to be remembered by the narcissist. You cannot wrap your mind around the idea that to the narcissist, you will always dust, and to dust shall you return.

And with this religious metaphor, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever written on narcissistic abuse. I am also a professor of clinical psychology.

And today I'm going to answer several of your questions regarding yesterday's video. I'm going to expand a bit on the issue of memory. And why is it that the narcissist cannot remember you or anything else for that matter as you are? Why is it that the whole relationship has been a phantasm? Things you remember have no trace or imprint or recollection in the narcissist's mind. Why is his mind blank and yours so full of pain and sorrow and suffering and hurt, interspersed with a few episodes of elation and euphoria and incredible adventures and the fantasy, of course, forever the fantasy that had consumed you and made you who you today, not the same person that you used to be.

So stay tuned. I hope I can shed some light on some of the mechanisms involved.


First of all, we need to make a distinction between what is known as semantic memory and episodic memory.

If you know how to read a book, if you remember something you have read in an encyclopedia, or something you were taught at college, if you know how to fix, or how to change a light bulb, if you know how to fix something, if you're good at your job, all these tasks involve semantic memory. Memory, which has to do with skills and with education.

Now, the semantic memory of narcissists is intact. Nothing's wrong with it.

Narcissists study, they accumulate knowledge or information, they process the information, some of it becomes knowledge. They're good at gathering tidbits and data, exactly like everybody else.

And so their semantic memory is comparable to the semantic memory of healthy people.

Admittedly, there are biases involved.

The narcissist would tend to gather information, gravitate towards professions, and generally engage himself in anything and everything, in any pursuit that upholds and buttresses and supports and affirms and confirms his grandiose, inflated, fantastic self-concept, view of himself, self-perception.

So even the semantic memory is tainted and contaminated, but it is fully operational, fully functional.

Narcissists have gaps, only with what is known as episodic memory.

Episodic memory is autobiographical memory, recalling one's personal history without any discernible massive gaps. The continuity of this sense of I am who I am. I am me.

So this continuity relies crucially on the ability to join together apparently disparate memories within an overarching narrative. The narrative provides the glue, provides the cohesion and the coherence of the memory.

Narcissists don't have any of this.

They have gaps with their episodic autobiographical memory, and they confabulate to cover up for it.

They invent stories, pieces of fiction, scripts, narratives, intended to bridge over or paper over the memory gaps in order not to fall into the abyss.

Ever seen famous cartoons where this character is running in mid-air? Suddenly realizes, it's mid-air! There's no solid earth under my feet! And then the character drops like a stone.

That's the narcissist's eternal state of being, permanent existence. He's running in mid-air. and he needs to conjure up and imagine, and invent and create the solid ground under his or her feet.

This solid ground is neither solid, no, except in the narcissists' mind.

And that is exactly the essence of confabulation.

The narcissist believes his own fiction, believes his own inventions and confabulations and prevarications.

Other people perceive it as lying and gaslighting, but the narcissist is so immersed in his fantasy that he becomes very defensive when it is challenged, undermined, attacked and proven wrong.

Even when confronted with hard, hard, incontrovertible evidence, the narcissist would deny the veracity or the source of the evidence. He would stick to his utterly concocted out of thin air story.

This is the essence of the paracosm, the alternative reality that the narcissist inhabits.

So when the narcissist does recall something, anything, including interpersonal relationships, the narcissist superimposes on the recall, on the memory, superimposes a lens.

Now let it be clear.

When I use the word memory, I'm using it in a very qualified and limited sense. It's not exactly a memory. It's an imprint or a trace of an internal object that is no longer active. An internal object that has been vacated, de-cathected. An internal object that is deactivated, disabled, and placed in the corner, collecting dust.

So this is what the narcissist calls memory.

And when he does refer to these internal objects, and it's an entirely, entirely interior process. There's no reference to the outside world, to reality, to other people, to objects. Everything takes place inside.

But from time to time as the narcissist moves along the dark pathways and hallways of the mansion that is his fantastic mind. As the narcissist trudges and weaves his way, he bumps into, you know, things that go bump in the night, he bumps into internal objects, discarded internal objects, suppressed, repressed internal objects, internal objects that are dissonant, internal objects that are challenging, etc. So he bumps into them.

When he bumps into them, this triggers the equivalent of memory in healthy people.

There's this emanation, this miasmic emanation. It's like an operation comparable to a ghost. So it's the ghost of people past.

And when he comes across these ghosts, he superimposes on them a lens. It could be a dark lens or a rosy lens. Dark retrospection or rosy retrospection, what I call nostalgic recall.

Dark retrospection, negative, attributing negativity to the object, rendering the object an enemy, persecutor, unpleasant, uncomfortable, challenging, hostile.

So when the object is perceived this way, through the dark lens, through dark retrospection, what the narcissist is actually doing, the narcissist is devaluing the memory, devaluing the memory of the object.

When the object is perceived through a rosy lens, rose-tinted glasses, when the object is perceived as ideal, perfect, when the object is perceived as positive, totally positive, it's a splitting defense, of course.

Remember, the splitting defense is always in operation. Some objects are all good, some objects are all bad.

So when the all good object is perceived via rosy retrospection or nostalgic recall, what the narcissist is doing is actually idealizing the memory.

So the narcissist can either idealize a memory of an internal object, which represents a real person, an external object, or a relationship, or a belief, or an idea or whatever and the narcissist can devalue an internal object via dark retrospection and this internal object represents a person, an idea, a belief, a group, a collective, an institution, whatever.

And this is an important insight.

The process of idealization, devaluation and discard is applied equally to internal objects as it is applied to you, the external object.

The narcissist idealizes you. You're in the love bombing phase of the shared fantasy.

Then he devalues you inexorably. You have nothing to do with it. It's a process. It's a reenactment of early childhood conflicts.

And then he discards you. You're an external object.

But the narcissist does exactly the same to your memory.

At first, the memory is idealized. Then it is devalued. And finally, the memory is discarded, which is a process we call dissociation.

Narcissists treat memories the way they treat people, exactly, which proves conclusively that narcissists make no difference between memories of people and the people who triggered the memories, the people who gave them the memories. People and memories are the same.

Internal objects. Memories are internal objects, internal objects and external objects. People are the same in the narcissist's mind.

That's why he's unable to tell the difference between internal object and external object. And that's why he treats all objects, internal and external, identically.

What he actually does, he interjects external objects. He creates avatars or representations of external objects.

In his mind, he snapshots external objects and continues to interact with external objects. In his mind, his snapshots, external objects, and continues to interact with internal objects.

But in his convoluted mind, in his demented, delusional mind, the internal objects are external. It's a form of psychosis. The management is of the internal objects.

The narcissist's main concern is to render the internal objects conformant, to make them conform to narratives, narratives such as grandiosity, which is a cognitive distortion, narratives such as shared fantasy, which is a reenactment of childhood, early childhood.

These are overarching, these are overriding, these are narratives, they're organizing principles, they make sense of the narcissists' life and imbue it with meaning, as far as the narcissists is concerned.

So he is very hell-bent on shape-shifting, distorting, mutating the internal objects, like patty, so much patty, rendering them malleable and mutable so that they can fit into these narratives, these organizing hermeneutic narratives, narratives that explain the narcissist's life.

And this is why the narcissist cuts you off. This is why the narcissist refuses to engage with external objects, because they are not controllable.

They are not 100% manipulable. They are not a million percent submissive, they are not mutable, they are not permeable, they are not, in other words, he cannot do with them as he wishes.

External objects have a mind of their own one way or another.

You, for example, is an intimate partner. You have your own life, your own family, friends from the past. You make decisions and choices. You're alive. You get up in the morning. You wake up in the morning. You're alive. You change all the time.

Transformation is the core element. Change is the core feature, what we call life.

And so the narcissist cuts you off because you threaten the integrity, the cohesion, and the immutability of the internal object.

External objects in the narcissists world have no impact on internal objects. They're separated. It's a Chinese wall, a firewall.

External objects are relegated to the outer recesses, to oblivion, to the darkest recesses of the mind.

Only internal ones bear energy. Only internal ones are dynamic. Only internal ones interact between themselves and with the narcissist.

The self, of course, is an internal object. In the case of the narcissists, it's fragmented and fractured and immature, and so on, but it's still an internal object.

Narcissists seek to modify external objects via coercion, if necessary, in order to match internal objects.

Each external object, you as an intimate partner, you as a friend, you as a colleague, you as a boss, you as a narcissist child, you as a narcissist pastor or rabbi, every external object has a corresponding internal object in the narcissists mind that represents this external object.

And the narcissist forces you, seeks to modify you, to change you as an external object, so that you do not contradict the internal one, so that there's no friction, no daylight, no grating of the two.

And so this is a narcissist's source of compulsive behavior.

He needs you to not be. He needs you to cease to exist as an independent autonomous agentic entity. He needs you to become a protagonist in his work of fiction, an actor in his movie or theater production.

And when this fails, when you refuse to comply, you refuse to de-animate and suspend yourself, or when you do something which demonstrably is independent, autonomous and so on, when the narcissist fails to match the external object with the internal object that represents it, 100%.

The narcissist discards the external object.

But it's not of much help.

Because even having discarded the external object, the narcissist discards the external object as a way to reenact the separation from the mother.

So there is a big psychological need there, a psychological dynamic that is independent of you.

It is when you do not conform to this ideal mother who loves unconditionally no matter what.

When you don't conform to this narrative, there is a gap that opens between you and the maternal internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind.

When you diverge, when you deviate from this maternal role, the narcissist discards you as an external object, but he remains stuck with the internal object that has represented you, or two, in his mind.

What to do with this object?

Having devalued you and discarded you, this object is now corrupted.

It's like a corrupted zip file, you know. It's corrupted, it's tainted, it's contaminated, it's devalued, it's evil, it's malevolent, it's persecutory. It's an enemy.

Having discarded you in real life, the narcissists remain stuck with your shadow, with the ghost that you used to be, with your apparition, with your echo.

And this is your memory in his mind, a trace, an imprint, not linked to anything, utterly disjointed, wandering the halls of the haunted walls of the narcissists mind.

I've dealt with the narcissists' way of resolving this conundrum in the shared fantasy playlist, and I encourage you to watch it.


Someone asked me, what about borderlines?

Borderlines also go through idealization and devaluation cycles. Borderlines are also highly dissociative. They're actually more dissociative in some ways than the narcissist.

And yet, their selective surviving memories are way closer to reality.

Why is that?

If both narcissists and borderlines go through the same cycle of idealization, devaluation, discard, the borderline does this because of her anxiety, engulfment anxiety. It's an approach avoidancekind of repetitioncompulsion.

Never mind the reason. She idealizes, she devalues, she discards exactly like the narcissists. And exactly like the narcissists, she has huge gaps in memory. She doesn't have a core identity. There's an emptiness there because there's no ability to put memories together in a coherent narrative.

The similarities are so striking. How come the borderline does maintain continuous memories, which are very, very close to reality, whereas the narcissist is utterly divorced from reality. He has totally compromised reality testing.

How come this difference? How come the narcissists reside 100% in fantasy, whereas the borderline has one leg in reality.

Emotions.

The answer is emotions. Narcissists are unable to tap into, to access, positive emotions. Borderlines can.

And we know in psychology that memory, the ability to retrieve memory, the ability to store memory, the ability to manage and manipulate memory, crucially depend, these abilities crucially depend on emotions.

Your memories come in packages. Each memory is attached and linked to an emotion, the emotion you have felt when you have created the memory or have experienced the memory.

Borderlines have access to these emotions. Because they have access to these emotions, they can retrieve memories much more efficaciously and the memories are more authentic, more genuine, more real.

Narcissists do not have access to positive emotions. Their memories are utterly improvised on the fly, concocted, unrealistic, fantastic, counterfactual, crazy.

In this sense, borderlines have an advantage of a narcissist because they retain the affective correlates of their experiences, which allows them to have a much more efficient memory system than the narcissists, despite the identical gaps in memory.

So I hope I gave you kind of context to yesterday's video and feel free to write to me and if your questions are intelligent, I will answer, I promise.

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