Now, of course, this is classic self-mutilation.

When we ask borderlines, people with borderline personality disorder and other mental health disorders, why they cut themselves, why they burn themselves with cigarettes, what is the pain doing to them? Why they seek pain?

They say, I feel alive only when I feel the pain. I feel alive only when I cut myself with a razor or knife, burn myself with cigarettes.

Only then the pain wakes me up. I feel alive.

And the narcissist’s mortification, I mean, for the narcissist to feel alive is not enough to cut or burn. We’ll do nothing. He needs something much more massive, much more all pervasive, much more ubiquitous. He needs his soul to be put into the machine.

So he needs something really bad and really total. And that’s mortification.

This is his self-mutilation.

He then feels alive. He then feels, and he then feels for the first time, or not for the first time, but every time that he has mortification, he feels himself. He feels a self. Who is feeling the pain?

There’s a core. There’s a nucleus. Something wakes up. Something steers up inside him. Is it a true self? Probably vestiges of the true self. I’m trying somehow.

The true self is ossified, paralyzed, fossilized, crying, small traumatized baby. And this baby wakes up and the narcissist finally feels himself.

This is why narcissists after mortification resemble children very much. They become childlike. They regress and they display extreme infantile behaviors and infantile defenses because they are infants.

The true self wakes up. There’s a chance. This false self is gone. The warden, the warden is gone. The prison is open. The doors are unlocked. He can walk out of the cell, walk out of the grounds, and he finds himself in a beautiful lush forest. It is a prison. The prison is a palace. It’s a wonderful prison, but still a prison. It’s a prison that the false self has constructed to keep the true self hostage, to keep him as a prisoner.

And here is the mortification, having freed him, the mortification is freedom. Freedom from any commitment, especially the primal commitment or the primary commitment to the false self.

Do you remember what I keep saying about narcissism? It’s a form of religion. It’s a religion with one worshiper, the narcissist, and his God, his divinity, his deity, the false self.

And the narcissist makes human sacrifice to the false self. He sacrifices his self, his true self. That’s a human sacrifice.

Narcissist strikes a Faustian deal with the false self. You will make me great again and I will give you my soul. I’ll give you my true self. I will slaughter it on the altar like Abraham almost slaughtered Isaac.

But the false self does not stay the narcissist’s hand as God, God’s angel, stayed the hand of Abraham. The false self encourages the narcissist to go ahead with the human sacrifice, to slit the true self’s throat on the altar.

It’s very, very primordial, primordial drama what’s happening inside the narcissist.

We think that narcissist is just an idiot, a jerk. It’s much more complicated than this.

And so the mortification allows the narcissist to feel alive, to feel himself, gives him the freedom, freedom from commitment. Of course, freedom from commitment is freedom from any commitment.

It also frees the narcissist from his relationship with borderline, with that specific borderline and allows him to look for the next borderline, the adventure of the next shared fantasy. It caters to his psychopathic, antisocial aspects of the personality, novelty seeking, risk taking, thrills, adrenaline junkie, etc.

Impulse, lack of impulse control.

At that moment, the narcissist becomes somatic because what is life?

According to Freud, Eros, erotic, Eros, the force of life, manifests in the libido. The libido is the sex drive, among other things. It’s a creative drive. Sex is one manifestation of creativity.

So when the narcissist becomes alive, when he finally can feel, and when he kind of gets in touch with his steering core inside him, and when he’s free, and he’s adventurous, and he’s in fantasy, and he becomes sexually aroused, becomes sexually active and aroused, and becomes a sexual being, unusual, unusual, sexual being, by the way. There’s nothing like the libido of a cerebral narcissist turned somatic via mortification.

And it’s true that the narcissist libido is always tainted with sadism, masochism, with unusual practices. Some would say deviant and pervert, not my style of speech. It’s true that it’s unusual, but it’s there. It’s there.

And it’s real, and it’s strong, and it’s overpowering because it’s an expression of life.

Narcissist is finally alive. The whole body is alive. His eyes, suddenly human, other parts of him come to life.

And it’s because he had been mortified. It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling.

Pain and sex, the two main forces in life, come together and create a self, create life inside the narcissist.

And only mortification can give him this, and only a borderline woman can mortify.

Do you see the chain of being?

He needs borderline women to mortify him to experience this, what I’ve just described.

The narcissist is preoccupied with being. He wants to be. He fails. He wants to be, and he fails to be.

But he wants to be, because he does not exist, because he is a void, because he is deep space. Because throughout his life, especially his childhood, he was told that he can be loved only conditionally, only if he performs, only if so. He didn’t fall, and he was not allowed to separate from the parent. He was not allowed to become an individual, separation and individuation.

So there’s no one there. So he wants to be, he’s obsessed with being.

And he wants to be so much that he, like a vampire, subsumes, consumes, extracts, sucks upon other people’s being. He takes away their being. That’s what’s so special about narcissistic abuse. It’s the abuse of the victim’s being, not some aspect.

And so narcissists want to be, they are preoccupied with it. Borderlines on the other hand, their preoccupation is to not be. They’re experts at disappearing, experts at vanishing physically, mentally. They commit suicide, 11% of borderlines end up committing suicide. They dissociate a lot. Association is very dissociation as a diagnostic criterion of borderlines. Forgetting, deleting, repressing, ignoring. Discontinuity, they are almost psychotic, as Kernberg observed, although I think the narcissists are more psychotic. But still, so borderlines are very concerned with not being. Their existence, I mean, they hate themselves. They are so fed up and disgusted with who they are. They just want to not be.

So they, for example, become alcoholics, or drug users, or engage in practices which negate boundaries, breach boundaries, such as, for example, promiscuous sex. They try to not be, the narcissist tries to be.

And of course, what they do when they come together, they trade. The narcissist helps the borderline to not be. How? He ignores her. He rejects her. He abuses her, violating her boundaries. He helps her to not be. He doesn’t love her in the proper sense of the word. He abandons her. He goes away. He helps her to not be. And the borderline helps the narcissist to be.

To be, how? By modifying.

This is the deal they strike. I will cause you pain. You will love me.

So this is the title of the video. Title of the video is, why narcissists love borderlines and why they hate them back.

And this relationship is very familiar to both parties because it recreates what Freud called the unresolved primary conflict.

First conflict with a primary object, significant primary object, which is a long way of saying mother.

The narcissist has a conflict with his mother, which has never been resolved, but the mistake that many scholars make is that they think the narcissist teams up with the borderline.

The borderline is like his mother. Borderline is capable of causing him pain, capable of humiliating him, capable of ignoring him, using him, rejecting him, abandoning him like his mother.

Exactly. So he teams up with the borderline. And many scholars say that he’s doing this in order to replay, to reenact the unresolved conflict with a different outcome. Like this time the borderline will love him. He’s looking for unconditional love and the borderline will give him unconditional love. This time his mother substitute the borderline will behave like a proper mother. That’s of course wrong, utterly wrong. They got it totally wrong.

The narcissist does not team up with the borderline in order to resolve the primary unresolved conflict. The narcissist teams up with the borderline in order to experience it again.

Don’t forget, narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a reaction to the unresolved conflict.

The mother mistreated her child to an extent that the child needed to divorce himself. He needed to create a decoy, a piece of fiction, so that this piece of fiction can absorb all the hurt and all the pain and he himself needed to disappear, which is the narcissistic solution.

That’s why he’s so preoccupied with existence and being, because as a child he chose to not be. He chose a kind of borderline solution.

Only by going through the conflict again can he feel alive, because before he created, before he had created pathological narcissism, the child did feel alive. There was a child there. There was a lovely, cute, wonderful, smiling, bright-eyed child there.

And in the first four years, first six years or first nine years or the first nine years before that child became a narcissist, he existed. He felt he was alive with curiosity, with hope, with amazement, with wonder. He was there. He was alive. He was free.

And when the narcissist teams up with the borderline, he doesn’t want her to be a good mother or a good enough mother. He wants her to be his mother, but he wants her to be his mother because his mother mortified him and he wants the borderline to mortify him again.

Why?

Because he wants to go back to being a child, the child before the narcissism, the child who used to be alive.

In other words, the narcissist wants the borderline to resurrect him. It’s totally religious.

Because he had been crucified by his mother and three days or three years or three decades later, he goes to his God. Mother was God. He goes to another God and he asks that other God to cause him the pain, the kind of pain that will resurrect him.

Because when we are dead, we don’t experience pain. When we experience pain, we are alive. That’s indisputable. No one can argue with this.

In the mortification crisis, the narcissist sees himself through other people’s eyes. He stands a chance to free himself of the shackles of this slave owner, taskmaster, cruel God, the false self.

And his only chance at achieving this is via re-traumatization, when there’s no protection, when the pain is so excruciating that you can’t but admit that you’re alive.

These women are, of course, the narcissist pawns. He uses them. He uses projective identification and projective interjection to force them, to coerce them to behave in a way that will mortify.

He selects these women in order to fulfill roles. It’s a theater play. It’s production. And there’s a script. And they have roles. And if they don’t comply, sure, for instance, he pushes them. He tortures them until they do. There’s a shared fantasy, and then there’s a liberating anti-fantasy mortification, and she needs to go through the motions. She needs to hurt him.

These women need to integrate into shared psychosis, and then they need to re-traumatize the narcissist. They need to hurt him badly. Never mind how much they think they love him. If they love him, they need to hurt him.

That’s the amazing mind-blowing sadness in the relationship between narcissists and borderline. That’s why everyone is so obsessed with these relationships, because you see two people who love each other, beyond words, love each other, not in the healthy, normal sense. But I would say love each other existentially. The cores, the cores love each other, not the persons.

So they bond in a way, they become, you know, it’s like fusion, it’s like fusion reactions, like two atoms colliding in a lot of energies released in a nuclear explosion.

So the borderline, the more she loves her narcissist, the more she will hurt him. She understands intuitively that she has to reenact the unresolved conflict with his mother and mortify her. She needs to free him. She needs to make him feel alive. She needs to allow him to move to the next shared fantasy. She knows what she’s doing, this act of selfless love, disguised as rage or hurt or abandonment anxiety. She knows that she will never see him again. But she also knows that this potentially is the only gift she can give him.

And when you talk to these women, they protest, they say, but we cheated on you because we felt that this is what you wanted. We did it to please you, prove you’re right.

The narcissist does not push these women away. He cajoles them to push him away.

And this modification could lead to finally forcing the narcissist to accept and to internalize the insight that is very sick. That in itself is a modification.

Who wants to admit that they’re sick if you are told tomorrow that you have terminal cancer that’s modified?

Narcissism is the terminal cancer of the soul, stage four, stage five, and it exists.

But narcissist has to accept exactly as a neurotic patient has to accept the character neurosis in order to heal. Narcissist has to accept it.

And then it’s a gamble. It’s speculation. It’s the first step in a therapeutic process of healing or the first step in giving up on himself and on life. It’s a gamble.

The narcissist takes every time he’s modified.

But every time he’s modified, he is alive to take this gamble. He is free to take this gamble.

And he has emotions that guide him in taking this gamble.

And what more can anyone ask of life?.