Solution number two, he can become a narcissist. He can become a paranoid. He can become depressive.

These three solutions, what they have in common, is that object relations is maintained.

There is the inner schizoid core. There is the inner emptiness. There is the absence.

The person has been unborn. The person went back to the womb, is undead, is a zombie, but desperately tries to cling to the vestiges and remnants of a world. Desperately wants to be in touch with another human being, wants to feel loved, wants to experience intimacy. Somehow, even if it’s a mild, pale version of the original, a pale imitation, so be it. He wants it desperately.

So, he rejects the total schizoid solution.

Narcissism, paranoia and depression is when the narcissist creates a false self, allows people to interact with the false self, to love the false self, to be intimate with the false self, to adulate the false self, everything with the false self, not with the narcissist.

And then, internalizes these external objects, who are interacting with the false self, internalizes them so that he can maintain full control over them, so that they don’t betray him. They don’t persecute him. They don’t accuse him of anything. They don’t cheat on him.

By internalizing the external object, the narcissist makes sure that this object, who used to be external and now is internal, will never abandon him, never betray him, never stab him in the back, never persecute him, will never hurt him, will never cause him pain, pain that he cannot tolerate, mortification.

So, these are the two mechanisms and they are common in paranoia and they are common in depression as well.

Internal objects can be persecutory, for example, the inner critical, the sadistic superego, but the narcissist experiences these persecutory objects as external.

Remember, the narcissist confuses internal with external. He internalizes external objects. He internalizes you, for example, but he still experiences you as an external object. Though you had become an internal object, though he is interacting exclusively with the internal object, his experience of this internal object is wrong, erroneous. He believes this internal object to be external.

Now, if the object is persecutory, it creates paranoia, because even though it’s an internal object that is persecutory, it is projected, it’s experienced as external, and this creates paranoia, and paranoia creates aggression, defensive aggression, similar with love, with emotions. The narcissist internalizes you, supposing you are his intimate partner, supposing he’s attracted to you, saturated, wants you, wants you in his shared fantasy.

So, first of all, he redirects you to the false self, he redirects you to the false self. That’s a decoy, that’s a protection, that’s a firewall, that’s a shield, no pain, no hurt. One, two, he internalizes you, he takes a snapshot, internalizes you, and from that moment on, he continues to interact with the internal object, but he experiences you as external. He mistakes the internal object for an external object, and gradually you can become the persecutory object, in which case he will develop paranoia, and he will seek to destroy you. This will provoke aggression, which will be directed at you. Even though it was the internal object that had generated the persecution, he will punish you because he mistakes the internal object for you, and mistakes you for the internal object. He doesn’t realize he has an internal object, he thinks it’s you.

And when the internal object engages in any dynamic, he attributes this dynamic to you, he projects it onto you. If he’s persecuted by the internal object, he says you are persecuting me. If he’s accused by an internal object, if he feels guilty because he’s accused by an accusatory internal object, he says you’re accusing me, he attributes it to you. He says you’re criticizing me all the time, you’re accusing me all the time.

If he’s loved by an internal object, he similarly would attribute it to you. If he’s idealized by an internal object, he would also say you’re idealizing. Whatever the internal object does within the narcissist, because he mistakes it for you, he will attribute to you via a process of projection.

The schizoid chooses the safety of withdrawing, of avoiding reality, of denying external access to external objects.

But the schizoid also has no access to internal objects. For example, the internal object representing his mother. And his only solution is what Gantt and Fairbairn and others called identification.

The other solution is incorporation. In other words, schizoids, because they don’t have access to external objects, they cut all external object relations off, they are not in touch with people, they’re solitary, they’re lone wolves.

Okay, they also don’t have access to internal objects.

So what they try to do, they try to merge, they try to fuse, they try to assimilate, they try to disappear, they already disappeared, their absence, their emptiness.

So they try to integrate, to become one with an existing object. They are an absence in search of a presence, non-entity in search of an entity.

And this is going back to the womb. Going back to the womb, for example, is assimilating the external object that his mother and the internal object that his mother, which are inaccessible.

By going back to the womb, the schizoid becomes one with these objects again. And going back to the womb is, of course, an allegory, a metaphor, by withdrawing into confined spaces.

This is the core function of the pathological narcissistic space. All confined spaces where the narcissist and the schizoid feel safe, they are womb substitutes.

We’ll come in a minute to the codependent and the borderline, because they choose an identical solution, merger, fusion, assimilation, going back to the womb.

The narcissist chooses the pleasure, not the safety, but the pleasure of approach, because approach allows him to muster external objects via grandiosity, via exploitative entitlement, and via internalization.

So the schizoid chooses to, because he has no access to objects, internal or external, he chooses to become the object.

If you have not access to objects, the next best strategy is to become the object.

Because anyhow, you don’t exist. You have nothing to lose. You want to become the object.

So the schizoid wants to become his mother by going back to the womb.

The borderline and the codependent want to become the intimate partner.

Merger and fusion in codependency, borderline, schizoid states, assimilation, they are all second best solutions.

I can’t have access to external objects because I’m terrified of what may happen. I’m afraid of the pain, abandonment. I’m afraid of abandonment in borderline personality.

So I don’t want external objects. I don’t want external objects. No, thank you. I don’t have access to internal objects because everything there is disorganized, discombobulated, chaotic, fragmented. I don’t have proper access to internal objects.

So what I will do instead, I will merge with an object. I will fuse with an object. I will become another object. I will become my intimate partner. I will become my mother.

And that way I will get to live. I will get to survive. And I will get to experience reality and even object relations safely, simply by vanishing and reappearing, born again.

The narcissist is reborn, born again, as the grandiose false self.

The borderline, the schizoid, the codependent are reborn, born again via the agency of another person, usually an intimate partner, a partner, frequently an intimate partner that stands in for a parental figure, mother or father.

All these solutions are regressive, of course. They’re all infantile. They’re all a child’s solutions, but these people never grow up. All these people, narcissists, schizoids, borderlines, codependents, they never grow up. These are children coping with adult issues, with children’s tools and instruments, with a child’s capacity of comprehension, with a child’s insights, almost non-existent.

So when you see these solutions, they are, of course, infantile and regressive. They are a child’s solution.

Codependency and borderlines exactly like the narcissists. They are composites.

Remember, the narcissist’s solution is, I’m going to be schizoid, I’m going to disappear, I’m going to become an absence.

But before I do that, I’m going to create a false self, and via the false self, by proxy, vicariously, secondhand, I’m going to experience reality, the world, and I’m going to experience external-object relations.

Borderlines and codependents have a similar compromise, a similar composite solution.

Merger and Fusion are actually a compromise. They are a composite solution because they allow the borderline and the codependent to feel both safe and pleasurable. They provide pleasure, and they provide safety. And this is accomplished via pseudocycosis. That’s why Kernberg said that borderlines are borderline. They’re on the border with psychosis.

In codependency, as well as in borderline, there’s pseudocycosis, because they do exactly the opposite of the narcissist.

You see, all these three, actually all these five, the narcissist, the paranoid, the depressive, the borderline, the codependent, all five were faced with a grave life endangering threat, this schizoid state. All of them faced the possibility, the distinct possibility of self-inflicted extinction. Terrified, they all chose different solutions.

The narcissist solution was to internalize external objects and thereby control them. It’s a solution. What you control cannot hurt you.

The borderline codependent shows exactly the opposite solution. They externalize internal objects.

The mother’s womb, that the schizoid want to go back to, the codependent borderline externalize the mother and her womb. They externalize internal objects. And they mistake external objects for internal objects, exactly like the narcissist.

So it gives them a sense of safety and a sense of security and pleasure, because they are inflationary.

What the narcissist does, he takes the world and swallows it, like Cronus, you know, in great mythology. He swallows external objects and they become internal and he feels safe and he has the pleasure of interacting with external objects via the false self.

The borderline codependent expand themselves. Like the big bang, they go out. This is called hyper-reflexivity. It’s common in psychotic disorders as well. They externalize internal objects and then they get confused. They think that their internal objects are actually external, exactly like the narcissist.

So one of them swallows and assimilates the world. One of them is assimilated in the world. One of them renders everything external, internal. That’s the narcissist.

And the borderline and codependent render everything internal, external. They kind of disintegrate, evaporate and become one with the world. It’s not the world, it’s the intimate partner.

So the borderline and codependent solution is I’m going to disappear and reappear in my intimate partner’s mind and body. I’m going to merge with my intimate partner. I’m going to fuse with my intimate partner. It’s all very religious because there’s a process of dying in resurrection. And this is probably the power of the biblical narrative, is dying in resurrection are the core principles of mental illness, at least in close to be personality disorders.

But I think in manydepression.

So attempting to cope with an impossible threatening environment, people, children come up with solutions that involve dying in one way to gratify the parent because the parent is rejecting the parent’s messages. I want you dead. I want you to die. You’re a nuisance. You’re I don’t know what you’re disappointing. You’re frustrating. I don’t want you. I don’t love you. I want you to die.

So the child says, okay, Mommy, I will die. I become schizoid. But I don’t want to die. I want to be in touch with the world. I want to be in touch with.

So they come up with these composite solutions with these compromises. And they become the world or the world becomes them.

They confuse external and internal, all in desperate attempts to maintain hold on reality and interact with other people.

And in this sense, being abandoned, abandonment is the equivalent of birth.

Auto-rank suggested the concept of traumatic birth. And in the minds of these personalities, narcissistic, borderline codependent, being abandoned is the equivalent of being born.

But they don’t want to be born. They want to be dead. They want to be the undead. They want to be dead, but in touch.

So the borderline is dead inside. The codependent is dead inside.

But their solution is I will accept that I’m dead inside, but I will leave. I will leave outside.

And how will I do that? I will disappear and reappear, resurrect, be reborn as my intimate partner.

The narcissist solution is I’m dead inside. I accept it. It’s painful, but I accept it. I’m going to reappear. I’m going to resurrect as the false self. That way I’ll be in touch with reality.

But being abandoned, when these people are abandoned, the solution falls apart.

And it’s like they went back to the womb. They did. They went back to the womb. And now they have to exit again. They have to be born. They have to be, they’re forced into the world and into external object relations, not mediated via the solutions or compromises that they had come up with as children.

This is the process of mortification.

Abandonment causes mortification by eliminating the false self, by eliminating the persecutory object in paranoia, by eliminating the accusatory object in depression, by eliminating functional internal objects and replacing them with the same thing from recognizable external objects.

So in the case of the depressive, the accusations come from a real life person, not from his inner object. In the case of a paranoid, he’s really persecuted by a real person conspired against, malice. In the case of the narcissist, he suffers narcissistic injury and humiliation at the end of a real life person.

So abandonment is when these defenses are shattered in a process called this decompensation. All the defenses shut down. And all the internal objects are demolished because they critically depend on the operation of these defenses. They are either demolished or inactivated.

At that moment, the narcissist, for example, cannot operate any grandiose defense. His false self is shut off, you know. So he has no grandiose defenses. He’s not godlike anymore. He’s a mere mortal, vulnerable, fragile.

So the narcissist has no grandiose defenses and can no longer control, manipulate his internal objects because they are equally shut off or even destroyed. So he’s absolutely back to the first months of life or the first two years of life when he had been terrified by a rejecting, hateful, dead mother.

Because at that time, before he had come up with a narcissistic schizoid solution during these years before he had invented the false self, it was raw terror, raw horror.

An abandonment or any other crisis like being cheated on or bankruptcy or divorce or what they do, they disable the defenses and they deactivate or destroy the internal objects.

At that second, the narcissist feels that his world is spinning out of control. External objects are no longer internal. They cause him pain and he cannot master them, tell them what to do, control them. And he falls apart.

This is extreme anxietydecompensation, acting out.

And in many cases, there is a self state, the protector self state, usually a secondary or primary psychopath, psychopathic self state.

And this self state comes forward, comes forward, for example, the borderline, when the borderline is subjected to rejection, abandonment, humiliation, real, imagined or anticipated, the borderline brings forward a self state, a psychopathic self state. It’s a secondary psychopath. It’s a psychopath with access to empathy and emotions, but it’s still a psychopath. It’s impulsive, reckless, etc. De-sympathy.

So empathy is suspended. So the protector self state takes over in such a case in order to avoid mortification, but it usually doesn’t work, actually. Mortification is only minimally delayed. A major object relations crisis, major crisis with an external object, such as abandonment, cheating and so on, is bound to bring mortification.

So what are you there for? What’s your role as the narcissist’s intimate partner?

You are there to facilitate this solution, the narcissistic solution. You are there to serve as the narcissist womb, as his mother’s womb.