Your Lure (Narcissist) or Cure (Therapist)? Regression (FULL LECTURE)

Basic fault is a brilliant concept, first proposed by Baylint. It refers to the structural deficiency in the personality of subjects who during their early stages of development in early childhood formed specific types of object relations.

So he said that depending what happened to you in early childhood, you are likely to develop specific types of object relations.

Now at the same time that Baylint was proposing the basic fault, Bowlby and later Ainsworth came up with attachment theory and attachment styles. And there's a lot of similarity between the work of Bailint and the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth.

Baylin said that your early childhood, if it is structurally deficient, impacts your personality, which also become structurally deficient.

If you are traumatized as a child, if you're abused as a child, if your boundaries are breached, if you're not allowed to separate, if you're parentified, if you instrumentalized, there are many ways to abuse a child, if you are exposed to all this mistreatment and inability to separate and become an individual, if your process of becoming is disrupted, if the integration and constellation of yourself and ego are disrupted, obviously your personality will be structurally deficient and so will your object relations.

In other words, your ability to interact with people, your ability to create interpersonal relationships, your ability to even discern the externality and separateness of other people to accept that they are not you, these abilities will be hampered.

Moreover, said Bailant, this tendency to have dysfunctional relationships in later life would become compulsive.

And this is of course, Bailant was not thelife would become compulsive.

And this is of course, Bailant was not the first to suggest this.

Zigmund Freud was, when he coined the phrase, repetition compulsion.

Bailant said that when you endure a really bad childhood, you have an initial what he called lack of adjustment between psychobiological needs and the care provided by a faulty environment devoid of love, acceptance, understanding.

So when you have a dead mother, metaphorically speaking, Andrei Green's concept of dead mother, when you don't have a good enough mother to borrow another concept from Donald Winnicott, then you would have severe problems to adjust. You would have an adjustment disorder, as it is called today.

The effects of the basic fault, this is the basic fault. This is the primal sin, a childhood that is not appropriate.

The effects of the basic fault on a person's character, structure of the personality, psychobiological dispositions, for example, certain mental illnesses, this basic fault is usually irreversible, and in the most optimistic scenario only partially reversible.

We know today, for example, that attachment styles are largely irreversible.

I know, I know, don't listen to the nonsense spewed out by self-styled and self-interested so-called experts online. They're bullshitting you because they want your money.

The fact is that attachment styles are irreversible. Largely, there are exceptions, of course, but largely.

Bailin said it as well he said that the basic fault is irreversible and he developed this concept much in 1957 in a book titled The Doctor, the Patient, and the Illness.

Bailant had an advantage similar to Winnicott. Winnicott, Donald Winnicott, you may recall, was a pediatrician. Only much, much later in life, he became a psychoanalyst. Most of his work, most of his observations were done as a pediatrician. He had to work with children. He couldn't help it. He had to make a living.

Similarly, Bailint collaborated with physicians. His expertise was neurology and more precisely psychosomatic medicine, psychosomatic disorders, conversion symptoms, hypochondriasis and so on. So he was, one could say, a half doctor, a half medical doctor.

In another book, 1998, titled The Three Areas of the Mind, it started off as an essay, Bailin developed the notion of the basic fault zone. He said that therapeutic processes are situated in this basic fault zone. And he said the therapy is impossible within this zone unless you regress certain patients. You have to induce states of regression in certain patients.

Bailin was not the first to say this actually. Sandor Ferenczi was. And Sandor Ferenczi went so far that Freud publicly excoriated him, criticized him, and there was a huge, huge fight between him and Ferency over this issue, whether regression should be induced in the patient deliberately, intentionally, and intensely, whether the patient should be coerced into a state of regression, which is a bit reminiscent of hypnosis.

I have another video which I made a few days ago about hypnosis.

Anyhow, Bailant reached a conclusion during his work in the 50s, the metapsychological theorization stage. So he reached a conclusion that regression is good, not for all patients, but for many patients.

And in a book in 1968, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression, he discussed what he called the zones of the psychic apparatus.

And in this book, he attacked Zygmone Freud frontally and harshly, I can say. He said there's no such thing as primary narcissism.

Actually, we need to regress people. And when they regress, they automatically become narcissistic if we apply Freud's work.

But it's not narcissism, it's regression.

In short, what Baylain suggested is that the concept of narcissism is wrong. It reflects stunted development. It reflects regression, it reflects infantilization, it reflects inability to separate, I wish to go back to the womb, not something that has to do with the management of internal emotional energy, in other words, not something to do with cathexis, but something to do with fixation.

I'm not quite sure why he lashed out at Sigmund Freud. Freud said many of these things before, and I don't see why we cannot call this problem narcissism. I'm not quite sure what kind of provoked Bailin.

But Bailin's approach is different to Freud's and in many ways closer to Jung, by the way.

Jung suggested that narcissism is actually a very healthy process that involves introversion. Introversion is of course, by definition, a regressive dynamic. It involves regression.

Anyhow, Bailin and Jung were closer than Bailin and Freud.

And so Bailin said certain patients, patients with schizoid personalities, patients in narcissistic states, patients who are addicts, they're unable to tolerate the frustrations of classical treatment. They're inaccessible to interpretation. You can't talk to them. You can't create an alliance with them. You can't anything.

So he says you need to regress them. You need to modify the technique.

If you want to analyze these people, if you want to understand the interpersonal psychic processes, if you want to map out the basic fault zone, you need to regress them.

He said, the zone of the human psyche, which, by the way, is very reminiscent of Freud's concept of the ego.

But Bailin said the zone of the human psyche is more primitive than the area of Oedipal complex or other later developments in life.

It's very interesting because both Freud and Bailin and many, many other scholars, Ferenczi, I mentioned Ferenczi, there were many others. Everyone understood the importance of regression. Everyone understood that if you want to affect a patient, if you want to cure a patient or help a patient cope somehow, you need to regress the patient. You need to make the patient more available for influence, more malleable, less defensive, less rigid, less set in his ways. You need to, when you regress the patient to an early childhood stage, the patient is much more open, much more open to transformation.

Regression is highly therapeutic.

And ironically, when the narcissist regresses the intimate partner into the shared fantasy, in the shared fantasy, when the intimate partner becomes the narcissist child, there is a therapeutic opening there.

If the intimate partner is available, she could experience growth and development, not because of the narcissists, but because of the exigencies and vicissitudes and difficulties of the shared fantasy.

Shared fantasy is a traumatic or traumatizing environment. It's an abusive environment, but an abusive environment that regresses the intimate partner.

As a child, the intimate partner has a second chance to cope with abuse, with trauma, with pain, with hurt, with rejection. It's a second chance.

The problem is that the narcissist abuses the regression, leverages the regression in order to create an intimate partner dysfunctional dynamics, for example dependency or addiction.

The narcissist is a malevolent presence, not a therapist.

He wants the intimate partner to regress. He wants the intimate partner to become helpless. He wants the intimate partner to become infantile, childlike, or even childish, because he wants to gain control over the intimate partner. He wants her to get addicted to him. He wants her to become dependent on him.

And then, at the same time, he demands from the intimate partner to act as a mother, to become a maternal figure with unconditional love and acceptance.

And this conflict, this role conflict, because there are two roles. The narcissist messages, you should be my child. And the second message is you should be my mother.

This creates, of course, enormous tension and conflict. And vitiates, negates the therapeutic aspects of the regression induced by the narcissist.

Bailin said that in regression, the regression is a pretty well-defined process.

He said first of all, it has to involve two people. Regression happens in a two-person relationship.

Number two, there's a dynamic force there, other than conflict. There's a dynamic force, and that force is an anxiety which drives the patient to perpetuate old models, ancient models, early childhood models of object relations, which now indicate maladjustment, maladaptation.

So autopynephilia clinging to objects or to people, philobatic attitude attempts self-sufficiency by keeping away from supposedly dangerous objects this dynamic also drives the patient to establish a harmonious relationship with his or her environment at the end the end of the process is what is known as primary love, harmony, the oceanic feeling, narcissistic elation, if you wish.

And finally, Bailin said, regression involves the prevalence of non-verbal processes or language use. And this is non-typical of adults, there's a strong indication that the patient is actually a child again

And now just replace the word patient with the word narcissist, intimate partner, narcissist's best friend, the narcissist's counterpart, replace it and see that everything Bailin said applies to the shared fantasy.

It is a two-person relationship. It involves anxiety. It generates dysfunctional behaviors like clinging, like addiction, like attempting self-sufficiency, paranoid ideation. And it creates a fantasy of harmony and love.

And within the shared fantasy, there are many non-verbal, infantile, primitive processes and defenses that are activated.

Baylin himself used the term psychological mothering. He said that regression involves a kind of psychological mothering, which makes it possible to avoid reproducing the traumatic situation.

Object relations rather than interpretation provide the therapeutic leverage, but this is exactly what the narcissist makes sure doesn't happen in the shared fantasy.

The narcissist not only seeks to avoid the traumatic situation, he inflicts it.

It's not that the narcissist regresses the intimate partner in order to avoid early childhood traumas or adult trauma.

On the very contrary, the narcissist regresses the partner so that he has absolute power over her and the capacity to traumatize her, including trauma bonding.

So the narcissist seeks to traumatize. And the object relations within the shared fantasy are maladjusted, are maladaptive, the object relations are dysfunctional.

Regression said Baylin is also a function of the responses of the therapists.

And of course in the shared fantasy, regression is a function of the responses of the narcissist.

It is the other party, the therapist, the narcissist, they decide if the regression is benign, aimed at producing recognition of previously unacknowledged needs, even if they're not satisfied, soothing some forms of satisfaction, maybe libidinal contact, maybe physical, or if the regression is malignant, terrifying, insatiable.

So the belief in Bailin's work is that in therapy it's possible to re-establish the primary love relationship, the relationship with the mother that has been disrupted, to somehow try to fix the basic fault.

Baylin said that for some patients this is possible.

Many others it's not.

He actually hinted that you could never really heal the basic fault. You can never really change it. It's pretty irreversible he hinted at this it was not bonton it was not politically correct at the time to say this but for example throughout his texts throughout his books Bailin refuses to use the words heal or cure he says neutral neutralize. We can neutralize the basic fault.

In other words, the basic fault is going to remain there. The primary archaic wound, the disrupted, insecure attachment style, they're going to remain forever for the lifespan. Nothing we can do about it, but we can somehow neutralize it. We can somehow teach the patient to let go of compulsive object relations, to break the chain of repetition compulsion.

Now, Baylin's work has dealt mostly with schizoid and narcissistic patients. At the time, this was the hot button topic. Guntrip did the same. He also worked. His main work was schizoid, same. Seinfeld, the same.

Everyone was focused on schizoid, Schizoid Empty Core, Schizophrenics and so on so forth.

And today we know that when they were using the word schizoid, in many cases they actually meant narcissists.

Similarly, Harvey Cleckley, in his book, Masterpiece, the Mask of Sanity, uses the word psychopath when actually he means to say narcissists.

So Baylin focused on schizoids, schizoids and people would not, what he called narcissistic states, because he refused to accept primary narcissism and so on he called it narcissistic states anyhow the irony is that balin's work is actually much better suited for borderlines. These borderlines have some of the equipment left.

Narcissus have nothing.

Narciss has no self.

Narciss has no ego.

Narciss has no positive emotions.

Narciss has no empathy.

Nothing to work with.

While the borderline has a modicum of empathy, positive emotions, very strong, disregulating, overwhelming positive emotions. She has a self, she also has a false self, but she does have a rudimentary kind of diffused self. She has an identity, however disturbed. She has, in the borderline patient, there are elements you can work with as a therapist, not so in narcissism.

So, Bailin's work applies to borderlines much more than it does to narcissists.

The early distortion in the ego should also take into account the pathogenic processes stemming from the patient's family, cultural context, society, period in history, life circumstances, environment, others, other people, and so on so forth.

Baylain's mistake was to focus on the internal processes only and to neglect, ironically, because it was in the object relations school, to neglect to a large extent everything outside the patient, as if the patient was some kind of abstract entity, not embedded in any context.

But today, Bailin's work has been expanded and focus on the non-verbal, today we realize, should not allow the underestimation of the crucial role of everything else. And that includes language and signifiers.

The ego is actually everything. The ego is an organizing principle of the world, of your you in the world, the self. So the ego is a kind of internal object or introject because it includes self representation, other representation and world representation. This is the insight that was yielded by Baylain's work.

I would like to read to you a great summary and encapsulation of regression, the concept of regression.

It was published in an article titled Regression, Diagnosis, Evaluation and Management, Primary Care Companion, was authored by Loco, Stern, Loco, but it's L-O-K-K-O, Stern and others. You can find a link in the literature.

Here's a segment from this article.

What is Regression?

According to Simon-Froid, say the authors, regression is an unconscious defense mechanism, which causes the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development, instead of handling unacceptable impulses in a more adult manner.

Regression is typical in normal childhood, and it can be caused by stress, by frustration, or by a traumatic event. Children usually manifest regressive behavior to communicate their distress. Addressing the underlying unmet need in the child usually corrects the regressive behavior.

Regression in adults can arise at any age. It entails retreating to an earlier developmental stage, emotionally, socially or behaviorally. Insecurity, fear, and anger can cause an adult to regress.

In essence, individuals revert to a point in their development when they felt safer and when stress was non-existent, or when an all-powerful parent or another adult would have rescued them.

Regression becomes problematic, especially, for example, in a hospital, when it is employed to avoid difficult adult situations or stressors.

Managing regression is resource intensive and can prolong treatment.

Regression has been portrayed in a more positive light by others, psychologists like Carl Jung, who have argued that an individual's regressive tendency is not just a relapse into infantilism, but an attempt to achieve something important. For example, a universal feeling of childhood innocence, a sense of security, reciprocated love and trust, and so on.

What are the manifestations of aggression? I'm continuing to read from the audit.

Many psychoanalysts have observed that behaviors associated with regression are correlated with the psychological stage at which the person is fixated.

For example, an individual fixated at the oral stage might suck on a pen, eat impulsively, vomit or become verbally aggressive, while an individual fixated at the anal stage might be messy or untidy, and an individual fixated at the phallic stage would revert to physical symptoms or to a state of conversion hysteria.

Sometimes a regressed patient might stop talking and give all the signs that a distressed baby would show during a pre-verbal stage.

In adults, regressive behavior is manifest in myriad ways.

Here are some common regressive behaviors.

For example, engaging in quiet baby talk, being incontinent, crying, sucking on objects or body parts, masturbating, verbally abusing stuff, whining, being mute, needing a comfort object like a stuffed animal, playing possum or dumb, being physically aggressive, hitting, scratching, biting, kicking, assuming the fetal position, rocking, pacing, having temper tantrums, bedwetting.

Many children, example given when they are tired, angry or afraid, have temper tantrums, expressions of strong emotions, on a daily basis until they are three or four years old.

In fact, preschoolers with the DSM diagnosis such as depression displayed significantly more violence during tantrums with a difficult recovery compared to healthy preschoolers.

Moreover, temper tantrums are a frequent reason for referral to behavioral therapies and are among the most common behavioral problems of childhood.

Some of the behaviors associated with childhood tantrums include shouting, screaming, crying, falling to the floor, flailing their extremities, hitting, kicking, throwing items and having breath-holding spells.

Tantrums may also start with shouting and angry outbursts, followed by sobbing, withdrawing and seeking comfort.

Adults with temper tantrums have them for the same reasons as children. They are distressed. Being in a stressful situation can fuel tantrums.

Adults with temper tantrums exhibit some or all of the behaviors exhibited by children.

Unfortunately, temper tantrums can be disruptive and pose problems for other people.

Engaging in quiet baby talk also referred to as infant-directed speech can be a manifestation of regression in adults.

Compared to adult-directed talk, baby talk has higher mean fundamental frequency, a wider range, and a more musical rhythm.

While some scholars consider baby talk as a universal and species-specific adaptation, others find it to be more prevalent in certain cultures.

Baby talk is often employed by adults when communicating with babies and infants, and it can serve various functions, including communication of effective intentions, essentially in the emotional bonding between adults and babies.

When it is not a show of regressive behavior, adults can also employ baby talk when characterizing victims as weak or cowards. For example, during bullying.

Adults who need assistance with grooming or feeding may also be considered as regressed.

Among hospitalized patients, for example, being incontinent bedwetting can also be a manifestation of regression.

An inability to perform basic activities of self-care is often highlighted during periods of stress, even if the underlying disability is caused by a medical or psychological illness.

While some acutely distressed individuals, for example, people in pain, can assume a fetal position and cry in response to their suffering, physical or emotional, other people prefer to cuddle with a stuffed animal, a teddy bear.

It is important to note that crying can communicate distress caused by a variety of challenging situations, including loss, pain, anxiety or fear, or in response to positive emotions, such as joy and the news of a good prognosis.

Now, I mentioned Freud, and I mentioned others, and I would like to give you an overview of the scholars that have dealt with regression.

So in psychoanalytic theory regression is a defense mechanism. It's when the ego reverts to an earlier stage of psychosexual development because of some overwhelming external problems, some internal conflict, and so on so forth.

In 1900, Sigmund Freud described regression in the context of dreams and the interpretation of dreams. In 1905 he incorporated the concept of regression in his discussion of sexual perversions but the first time he really dealt with it as it is was in a paper titled the disposition to obsessional neurosis in 1913.

In 1914, he modified the text of the book, Interpretation of Dreams, and he distinguished between three types of regression.

He called it topographical regression, temporal regression, and formal regression.

All in all, Freud regarded regression as a type of inhibited development, a fixation. It's a formative element in the creation of what at the time was called neurosis.

Freud said that, and I'm quoting, the libidinal function goes through a lengthy development.

He said that a development of this kind involves two dangers.

First of inhibition and secondly of regression.

So he regarded regression as all negative thing. It's a bad thing.

He said that inhibitions produce fixations.

And I'm quoting, the stronger the fixations on its path of development, the more readily will the function evade external difficulties by regressing to the fixations.

Freud regarded neurosis as the product of an escape from a reality that is intolerable, burdensome, unbearable.

So when someone confronts reality and can't cope with it, he becomes neurotic.

He said that along the path of involution of regression or a return to earlier phases of sexual life phases from which at one time satisfaction was not with hell that's how we cope with unsatisfactory reality this regression appears to be a twofold one, a temporal one, insofar as the libido, the erotic needs, hark back, go back to stages of development that are earlier in time, and formal one in that the original and primitive methods of psychic expression are employed in manifesting these needs.

And so he said that regression has a behavioral dimension.

And the behavior crucially depends on what stage of fixation, what stage of psychosexual development, the regression occurs, takes you back to.

What is the destination of the regression?

It's like a train going backward.

Which station does it stop it?

And so this oral stage, anal stage and so on will not go into it, into all of this.

You remember Chris, the Swiss American psychoanalyst who came up with the idea of regression at the service of the ego? And he said that regression in the service of the ego, the specific means whereby pre-conscious and unconscious material appear in the creator's consciousness.

And so he had a much more positive view, of course.

Carl Jung argued earlier prior to Greece that, and I'm quoting, the patient's regressive tendency is not just a relapse into infantilism, but an attempt to get at something necessary, the universal feeling of childhood innocence, the sense of security, of protection, of reciprocated love, of trust.

So, Young regarded regression as a positive thing in effect, potentially positive. It could lead you to an earlier stage of development where you felt safe, where there's been a secure base, the oceanic feeling, a sensation of unity and harmony.

But Chris, in the wake of Jung, wanted to make an important distinction.

He said that inspiration in which the ego controls the primary process and puts it at the surface of the ego, needs to be contrasted with the opposite condition in which the ego is overwhelmed by the primary process.

Chris's approach is problematic in many ways, because for example, it's not quite clear how the ego gains control over theprimary process if it is sidelined by the regression. We regress sometimes into pre-ego states unless you accept the work of Fairburn and others, Klein, Melanie Klein, who say that we're born with an ego. But otherwise, we regress to a pre-verbal or non-verbal stage prior to the ego. And so it's not quite clear how the ego makes use of this. But Chris regarded regression as the essence of art, the crux, the gist of being an artist. An artist is someone capable of regression at will. Someone who regresses beyond or around the ego accesses primordial, atavistic, early archaeological layers of childhood. And from this access, unmitigated access, to primary processes, primitive layers layers early childhood memories and experiences creativity erupts uh isaac suggested that creativity is somehow connected to psychoticism and we did see that a primary process taken to extreme is actually psychosis. So we see the links here. Chris said that the creative process is only in the fiery storm of a profound regression, in the course of which the personality undergoes both dissolution of structure and reorganization, that the genius becomes capable of wrestling himself from the traditional pattern that he had been forced to integrate through the identifications necessitated and enforced by the Oedipal constellation and I may add socialization.

Here we begin to see a similarity, superficial similarity between Dambwowski's concept of positive disintegration and Chris's concept of regression in the service of the ego, but the similarity is superficial and wrong. These are not the same things. While in Chris's concept, regression is a totally positive process, utterly controlled by the ego somehow, inexplicably by the ego, but utterly controlled, and leads to outcomes such as creativity and so, so forth. In Dombrovsky's work, positive disintegration is triggered by a crisis, is triggered by negative externalities, events, failure, defeat, humiliation, shame, rejection. It's triggered by negativity, and it is a process of disintegration. And the outcome of the disintegration is not necessarily reorganization, but change. So whereas Dabrovsky's approach is post-crisis, the disintegration brought on by a crisis, which could lead to positive outcomes via personal growth, development and transformation, increases work. The process is positive from A to Z, has nothing to do with personal growth and development, it has to do with creativity, and does not involve necessarily a crisis or a trauma or whatever. In the 1960s, Chris' work was so influential that regression became a positive good. Everyone was talking about regression. It's a wonderful thing. I'll read to an accent. In this particular type of journey, the direction we have to take is back and in they will say that we are regressed and withdrawn and out of contact with it true enough we have a long long way back to back to contact with reality and so there was a glamorization of glorification of regression. Jungians were a bit more reserved. They said that romantic regression meant a surrender to the non-rational side, which had to be paid for by a sacrifice of the rational and individual side. Freud, of course, was totally against. He said this extraordinary plasticity of mental developments is not unrestricted in direction. It may be described as a special capacity for involution, regression, since it may well happen that a later and higher level of development once abandoned cannot be reached again. He warned in other words that regression could be irreversible and have horrible after effects. Anna Freud, his daughter, regarded regression as the number one defense mechanism, the most important one. She suggested that people act out behaviors from the stage of psychosexual development in which they are fixated. So she believed that all people are fixated. She believed that fixation was a universal phenomenon in effect. And therefore regression was inevitable. As a defense mechanism, totally automatic, similar to, let's say, rationalization. Baylintrationalization.

Bailyn, we mentioned, distinguished between nasty, malignant regression and the benign regression. We discussed it at length.

And there were others. And they highlighted the dilemmas of dealing with regression. How to control it? How to induce it? Should we induce it? What to do when it is induced? Or triggered or provoked? And so and so forth.

They warned against making premature assumptions about the patient's state of regression in the therapy. They said that regression might block awareness of more adult functioning.

So as the 60s progressed, there was a backlash. People began to be wary of regression. They were beginning to be afraid of regression.

Some scholars said that regression is justifying a retreat from regressive material and it has disturbing aspects and so on so forth.

There was a psychoanalyst, Peter Blos. He suggested that revisiting of early psychic positions helps the adolescents come out of the family envelope. Regression during adolescence advances the cause of development.

Stanley Olinick. He spoke of regression in the service of the other. Ego regression is a precondition for empathy, he said.

So he said that demonstrating pain impairment is also a form of regression.

When regression becomes the cornerstone of a personality and the life strategy for overcoming problems, it leads to an infantile personality.

But otherwise, it could be leveraged positively in personal development and in therapy.

The debate, as you see, is still ongoing.

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 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 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 Bailin'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 internet 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 narcissist.

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, is 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 regress 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 it become again an individual.

Separation of individuation is possible only subject to regression, only in the wake of regression.

Ironically, by regressing the intimate partner, the narcissist provides her with a 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.