My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and I am also a professor of psychology.

Like all the other videos, long videos on my channel, this video is divided into parts. Each part has its themes, so these are thematic parts.

And you can choose to watch one or more themes. You don’t have to watch the whole thing. You don’t have to watch the whole 90 minutes.

But on the other hand, it’s equally unwise to give up on the video after 10 minutes, as the vast majority of you do.

You may wish to scroll back, scroll forward, rewind, etc. until you find a theme which suits you.

A typical video has well over 20 themes, and it’s a pity to miss out on many of them.

So I will start by apologizing in my interview with the clinical psychologist from Poland.

I have made a concluding statement which had misled many of you.

I said that splitting the primitive defense mechanism, the infantile defense mechanism of splitting, appears only in narcissistic personality disorder and in psychopathy.

That is untrue. It, of course, also makes a prime appearance in borderline personality disorder.

We can even say that borderline personality disorder is splitting writ large.

The reason I did not mention borderline personality disorder in my comment is that I was trying to make an equation between self-styled empaths and other grandiose characters and narcissists.

And so I said that both of them engage the mechanism of splitting.

But of course, borderline is founded on splitting. And borderline, people with borderline personality disorder, split the world. They have dichotomous thinking. And most importantly, they split their intimate partner.

So I encourage you to watch videos on borderline personality disorder, which I have on this channel, where I explain how splitting operates there.

Today we are going to delve even deeper to the issue of shared fantasy. And I’m going to introduce you to many concepts, religious, technological, literary, etc.

So it’s going to be a very thrilling ride, a kind of Disney world of the narcissist’s shared fantasy.

But I want to open with a quotation from Marcel Proust.

Marcel Proust was a French Jewish, of course, author, and he had written the longest novel ever, Remembrance of Things past. It’s about 3000 pages. Every page is a masterpiece. It’s an amazing novel. And he wrote there, it is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play, not with a woman of the external world, but with a doll fashioned in our brain. The only woman moreover, that we have at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess. That is an excellent insight into the narcissist’s shared fantasy and how the narcissist idealizes you, transforms you into a toy, a doll, during the love bombing and the grooming phase.

Generally speaking, if you want to study psychology in depth and its totality, if you want to have a look at the human animal as a whole, as a Gestalt, all you need to do is read three authors, Robert Musil, M-U-S-I-L, Marcel Proust, and of course, Fyodor Dostoevsky. All of psychology is in their books and nothing new had ever been discovered afterwards.

As you’ve just seen, Marcel Proust had written about the narcissist’s shared fantasy well over a hundred years ago.

A shared fantasy is an imaginary world and therefore, it can be easily conceived as a type of Paracosm.

Have you heard of Paracosm? P-A-R-A-C-O-S-M, Paracosm? Paracosm is an imaginary world, but a very, very detailed one.

Paracosm is usually originating childhood and the child invents this kingdom, this imaginary space, this galaxy far away, where gradually over a long period of time, sometimes years, the child develops this imaginary world, introduces characters, geographical and topological features, all kinds of habits and practices, social interactions, and the thing grows and grows and grows.

The creator of the Paracosm, remember it starts as a child, the creator has a very, very intimate, deeply felt relationship. It’s a subjective universe. It’s a universe in the creator’s mind, of course, but it does have some connections to the real world because most of the imaginary characters, their behavioral conventions, they are borrowed from the real world and the Paracosm has an interface with the real world. Paracosm has its own geography, its own history, sometimes its own language and within the Paracosm, the child has imaginary friends. These are friends who come to the child’s aid, help and assistance. They are everything the child is not.

Yes, it rings a bell, doesn’t it? It rings a bell because the false self is such an imaginary friend.

The child creates the false self because the child is immersed in an environment of abuse and trauma and trying to fend off the pain, trying to fend off the hurt and the fear and the anxiety that his environment creates with a dead mother, with a mother who is not good enough, not a safe base, trying to insulate himself from the pernicious and deleterious effects of not being loved unconditionally, not being accepted, being castigated as a bad and worthy object, exceedingly excruciatingly agonizing.

And so the child invents an imaginary friend. That’s the false self.

And the false self has all the elements of God. And of course, everything the child would like to be in his magical thinking, he imbues the false self with.

The false self knows everything, is capable of anything, or powerful, or knowing, or initiate, or nippet, the false self is brilliant and perfect and good, utterly good, and lemishless.

The false self is an outcome of splitting.

When the child puts everything that’s good, everything that’s strong, everything that’s resilient and hopeful and protective and loving and caring into this imaginary friend, gradually this imaginary friend comes to acquire the attributes of God.

Indeed, we can conceive of the kingdom of heaven as a paracosm with God or Jesus, if you’re a Christian, as imaginary friends.

The forthcoming kingdom of heaven is an imaginary world invented by humanity at its infancy when humanity was a child.

And humanity needed an imaginary friend because nature was brutish and nasty. There were famine, there were diseases, there were wars. I mean, humanity needed a friend badly.

So they invented God. And then God had a child, his son, so to speak. So these two became imaginary friends. You could safely say that God and Jesus and other religious prophets and religion in general is humanity’s false self.

These imaginary characters, they are everything that humans wish they were and can never be.

If you look at the narcissist shared fantasy, it’s very religious.

I said before in many other videos that narcissism is a private religion.

The false self is a Godhead, it’s a divinity, it’s a deity.

And then there’s a worshiper, an adherent, a single believer, that’s the narcissist.

The narcissist worships the false self. And the narcissist makes human sacrifice. He sacrifices his true self to the false self.

There’s a lot of religion in this.

And the narcissist shared fantasy involves you in a religious role. Listen well, you become a religious artifact within the narcissist’s private religion.

Because what is the narcissist shared fantasy?

It has a trinity. There’s the father, the mother, and the son.

No Holy Ghost, but father, mother and son.

The father is the false self. Mother is the intimate partner. You, you are the mother.

The false self is the father and the narcissist is your son. He is your son.

The false self provides paternal roles, paternal roles of socialization, of protection, of provision, etc.

And you, you as a mother, you are supposed to provide unconditional love and acceptance and support and support and to help the narcissist grow and to overcome crisis and challenges. It’s a holy family. It’s a holy trinity, exactly like the mother, the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost. This is a trinity that is founded on a maternal or shall we say feminine principle.

Now the narcissist shared fantasies, therefore a form of mysticism. It’s a mystical experience.

This is why the narcissist is seriously mortifying when the shared fantasy disintegrates.

And it’s a mystical experience founded on femininity on you. You’re the pivot and the axis of the narcissist’s shared fantasy.

We find similar, we find other mystical schools which place femininity at the center.

For example, the Kabbalah, which is a 13th century Jewish mystical school, the Kabbalah says that many of God’s attributes, the attributes of God, the attributes of creation, they are feminine. Shekhina is a feminine name for one of the attributes of God, Yetzirah, etc.

Jung himself had used archetypes. Many of these archetypes were feminine archetypes.

So we see the feminine at work.

Narcissism is not only a mental health illness. It’s not only a mental health disorder. It’s a disruption of the most fundamental, rudimentary processes of identity formation, of socialization, of functioning, of ego and self constellation.

This is a very foundational, profound, profound interruption and intervention in processes which are very, very primordial processes which are very, very akin to nature, natural processes.

So while other mental health disorders have to do with internal objects, external objects, misbehavior, this then, narcissism is about interference with the core and the core is in some ways divine.

The core is in many ways animalistic and in other ways natural. Narcissism permeates all these dimensions and the narcissist, the child, the child on his way to becoming a narcissist reacts by coming up with a private religion.

When he grows up, when he becomes an adult, you have a role in this religion. You are the mother, the archetypal mother. You are the partner of the false self, the counterparty, the intimate partner of the false self. That’s why you have to be idealized. That’s why the narcissist needs a snapshot of you because he needs to internalize you. He needs to convert you into an internal object.

Having converted you into an internal object, you can interact with the other important internal object, the false self.

So there’s a family, a defined family like the Olympian gods. There’s you in the role of Hera. There is the false self in the role of Zeus and there’s the narcissist in the role of Hercules.

Intimate partner as a mother provides the narcissist with access to the feminine. It allows the narcissist to safely explore femininity in general and his femininity in particular.

Now his femininity could be normative. So he’s male with feminine aspects. All men have feminine aspects, of course, or it can be very pronounced. He could be a latent homosexual. Whatever the case may be, he needs access to his suppressed, repressed femininity, to his forbidden femininity and you are providing this safely.

He can explore his femininity through you because he had rendered you a sexless, genderless object, internal object in his mind so he can explore his femininity without the threat of sex or sexuality.

You see, you fulfill many crucial roles. You represent the feminine dimension or the feminine aspect of reality. You represent your integral part of a holy trinity, a religious experience.

But ultimately, the shared fantasy is always antisocial. It’s antisocial because it rejects real life. The narcissist rejects adulthood and the narcissist is paranoid. He involves you in a shared psychosis. It’s we against the world.

If you put all these things together, the religious aspect or pseudo or quasi-religious aspect of narcissism in the shared fantasy, this we against the world, paranoia, and the exploration of forbidden sexual realms, psychosexual realms, like homosexuality.

If you put all these together, what you get is a cult. It’s simply a cult setting.

Shared psychosis is a paracosmic cult, which brings us back to paracos. Remember that paracosm is an imaginary kingdom, imaginary world, imaginary space, imaginary galaxy, invented by a child.

The concept was first described on, believe it or not, the BBC. There was a researcher who was interviewed on BBC, Robert Silvey, and then there was another guy called Stephen Mackiewicz, and finally the psychologist who gave paracosm its weight in scholarly literature was David Cohan, a British psychologist.

Paracosm, the word itself, was coined by Ben Vincent and he was just one of the participants in Silvey’s study. Silvey conducted a study in 1976 of children who inhabit imaginary spaces with imaginary friends.

The psychiatrist Delmont Morrison and Shirley Morrison, they enlarged the concept of paracosm. They came up with something called paracosmic fantasy, which, if you read their work, is actually a shared fantasy.

They published a book called Memories of Loss and Dreams of Perfection, and they described people who went through trauma, people who went through the loss of a loved one, or some tragedy in childhood, or maybe had been abused in childhood, people who had experienced childhood trauma.

And they said that one of the major compensatory mechanisms that these people come up with, they invent an imaginary world, a paracosmic fantasy, and they retreat to this fantasy whenever they’re stressed, whenever they’re anxious, or whenever they seek love, care, and intimacy.

For such people, paracosm are ways of processing and understanding loss, pain, hurt, trauma, and possibly abuse.

In literature, we find this, it’s very common.

If you read Peter Pan by James Barry, Peter Pan openly says, I don’t want to grow up. Wendy, let’s run away to an imaginary kingdom.

Ultimately, we discover it’s not so imaginary, but it sounds like an imaginary place. Let’s run away there and live there ever after, genderless and sexless.

Peter Pan is the originator, originator of the first narcissistic shirt fantasy, at least in public, dinosaur.

Emily Bronte, all of them wrote about paracosms. And all these paracosms followed some major calamity or catastrophe.

Denison and Bronte describe paracosms which followed the death of a loved one.

James Barry described a paracosm which followed the refusal to grow up.

And I will elaborate on this issue a bit later.

It’s important to understand that for the narcissist, the need to grow up is traumatic, it’s painful, it’s threatening. And he retreats to his paracosm, which is the shirt fantasy with you.

There’s a false self to protect him, you to love him.

The child developmental psychologist Marjorie Taylor studied imaginary friends. And then later on she discovered the concept of a paracosm and she was very happy because imaginary friends usually inhabit paracosms.

The false self, think about the concept of the false self, the false self would have been inefficacious, would have been useless, had it not been integrated with elements, vestiges and figments of reality.

These figments of reality are among others you.

The false self needs to interact with people, needs to interact with people in order to extract from them narcissistic supply, support, love, caring, imaginary or real. The false self is an interface between reality and the narcissist fantasy, later shared with you.

So the false self is an imaginary friend and it is the role of imaginary friends in paracosms to isolate the child, to protect the child, to prevent the child from suffering.

They are the shock absorbers, they are the lightning rods, they don’t allow harm to come to the child.

These imaginary friends, their grandiosity is invested in their capacity and capability to isolate the child and to fend off enemies, hostile entities, threats, abuse, trauma and hurt.

They are like firewalls.

Adam Gopnik wrote an essay called Bumping into Mr. Ravioli and in this essay he describes a conversation he had with his sister. His sister is a child psychologist. He was very worried because his daughter was three years old and she had an imaginary friend and he went to his sister who was a child psychologist and he said, is it bad? Is it good? What’s happening? I’m very worried because my daughter who is three years old is much more invested in her imaginary friend and in reality or in us.

And she introduced him to Taylor’s ideas about imaginary friends within paracosms and she told him, his sister told him, don’t worry, paracosms are a way of actually transitioning to reality.

The child, I’m about to drink. The child uses the paracosm as a bridge to reality.

Similarly, the narcissist uses the false self in the shared fantasy as a bridge to reality, the reality of you.

Michelle Ruth Bernstein, she studied creativity and she also, I don’t know why all of them do this, but she also discussed her worries about her daughter. Her daughter invented an imaginary world and her daughter inhabited this world, resided in this world mentally for well over a decade, shining, giving up on reality.

And Ruth Bernstein was very worried.

In 2014, she wrote a book called Inventing Imaginary Worlds from Childhood Play to Adult Creativity. And she suggested that fantasy and paracosms are critical in the process of creativity, the ability to imagine another world and then to retreat to that world and to create from within it, from within the imagination, from within the shared fantasy.

Many narcissists will tell you that they are very afraid to lose their narcissism. They’re very afraid to be cured and healed whenever that would become possible because they feel strongly that their narcissism is intimately connected with their ability to create.

Narcissism is the diagnostic and statistical manual, clearly makes very clear. Narcissism is a fantasy defense writ large.

It’s simply fantasy out of control. It’s fantasy on steroids.