Schizoid core is empty.

So the child misses being alive. The child wants to feel that he or she exists. And there is only one source of sustenance, one source of authority, one source of input and feedback that the child can turn to, and that’s mother.

So the infant turns to his mother or his caregiver. Most caregivers are mothers. So the child, the infant turns to his mother and elicits from her, provokes her to respond. So the baby smiles and the baby cries and the baby moves his hands and feet, chubby feet, you know, these are cues. They’re social cues actually. They’re intended to elicit, to generate in the mother responsiveness. And the mother’s responses are collected like so many treasures by the baby. The baby collects these responses.

Then gradually, out of these responses, he constructs an identity. He begins, core begins to emerge. A feeling of being, a feeling of existence. We become alive when we are seen. If we were to be invisible, and no one were to notice us, we would feel dead.

It is a fact that what we call ego and self are not individual enterprises. They are collaborative efforts. Everyone around us contributes to ourself even when we are adults. Everyone around us modifies ourselves. Ourselves are fluid. They are processes, not entities.

So the infant lets the mother create his self. And what is this self? It is the totality of the mother’s responses.

The first self, the primordial self, the nuclear self, which later is constellated and becomes much more complex.

But to start with, to start with, the baby has no other input, no other feedback, no other information except the mother’s responses, the mother’s way of looking at him, mother’s smiles, mother’s admonitions, mother’s absences and mother’s presences. And the baby collects all these and he puts them together in a framework and it glues, you know, it glues the parts and it becomes a basic Frankenstein-like self.

At some stage, the baby’s dependence on mother becomes a bit frightening. The baby depends on mother not only for his life, but for his being, for his existence, for his selfhood. So that’s frightening. Imagine, imagine this is the state of the narcissist throughout his life. Imagine how terrifying this is to be so dramatically, so all-pervasively dependent on other people.

So the baby, when he realizes this dependency, when he senses it, it terrifies him. And he reacts by trying to internalize mother, because if mother becomes an internal object, he can then control her. She will never abandon him. He can become, gradually, dependent on himself or at least on her internal object, the introject.

But the introject or the internal object or the inner representation of mother is a part of baby.

So the baby, in a way, regains, recoupes, takes back the locus of control.

At first, it was external. Mother was the locus of control. And now, by internalizing mother, the locus of control becomes internal.

But regardless of whether mother is an external object or later an internal object, the infant wants to be desired by mother. He wants to be his mother’s object of desire.

And yes, the infant tries to seduce mother. There’s even a hint of eroticism in this, which gave rise to the Oedipus complex, according to Freud.

But any mother would tell you that babies are somewhat erotic, that sometimes they are more reminiscent of demanding husbands than of babies. There is this interplay between entities, which is essentially somewhat sexual and somewhat erotic.

But at any rate, the baby wants to secure his mother’s presence and he wants to feel wanted and he wants to feel loved and desired. So he’s trying to seduce her by presenting himself to mother as irresistible, cutie pie, admirable, exciting.

The baby recasts himself as a baby. He discovers his power of a mother.

Teenagers go through an identical phase when they discover their sexuality, for example.

Girls, teenage girls, report repeatedly how they are astounded by the power of their sexuality over teenage boys. So the baby discovers his power of a mother whenever he smiles, whenever he moves his feet and hands, whenever he cries, mommy reacts instantly if she is a good enough mother.

And so the baby’s irresistibility is a core element of the baby’s interaction with mother.

But the baby doesn’t want mother to react as a robot automatically, unthinkingly. The baby wants mother to freely choose him. He wants to be chosen. He wants mother to bond with him and to choose him, not because she has no other choice, but because she loves him, because she does find him irresistible, admirable, exciting, amazing.

Love object. He wants mother to freely choose, but he wants her to freely choose to become what?

A love slave, in the language of Jeffrey Seinfeld, a love slave. Remember, let’s go back one step.

Mother used to be an external object. By the time the baby tries to seduce mother, by the time he tries to render himself irresistible, the mother is no longer an external object. It’s been internalized. It’s now an internal object.

So he wants mother to conform to the internal object. In other words, to become his slave.

Any mother will tell you that babies are tyrannical. And that’s the meaning of terrible tools.

In the terrible tools, in the tyrannical phase, this is the phase of separation, individuation. At that point, the baby, when he separates from mommy, when he becomes an individual, wants to take mommy with him. He wants to separate from her without separating.

And how to accomplish this? He internalizes her. Even as he walks away, walks away, she is in his head. She is forever with him. So he has no anxiety.

But to accomplish this successfully, mother needs to conform. Mother needs to accept her internalization. Mother needs to behave in ways which do not conflict and do not contradict the internal object.

If mother were to contradict the internal object, to confront it, to subvert it, to undermine it, this would create intolerable anxiety in the separating, individuating child. And he would not be able to complete the separation, individuation phase. He is likely to become a co-dependent or a narcissist.

So a good mother actually complies with and colludes and collaborates in the process of converting him herself from an external, external, demanding, exciting object, an object of desire, into an internal, manageable, controllable object. A good mother doesn’t place, doesn’t require the child to continue to see her as an external object and never leave her, never leave her aside because she’s external. She allows the child to separate by internalizing.

And so the baby ends up internalizing the mother, converting her into a love slave in his mind, but this is accomplished by turning himself into an object. When the baby plays the role of the irresistible, exciting, amazing, cutie pie package of joy, when he plays this role, this socially allocated role in a way, a biologically allocated role, when he plays this role, he renders himself, he converts himself into the object of his mother’s love, the object of his mother’s desire.

Even as the child is internalizing the mother as an internal object, even when the child is engaged in the unbelievable undertaking of converting the mother from external object to internal object, he is converting himself into an external object. It’s a very crucial insight.

But simultaneously, there are two processes.

Process number one, the child tries to condition the mother, to get the mother to become addicted to it, to behave in ways which the mother would find irresistible, to render himself the object of love and desire of the mother. That’s process number one.

And in this process, the child converts himself into an object, an external object, of his mother’s love and desire. This is the first inkling of self, of existence, of being.

And at the same time, in order to separate and really become an individual, the child converts mother from an external object to an internal object.

But as the child objectifies itself, the child loses its own subjectivity. So there’s a problem here. It’s a conflicted process.

For the child to secure and garner his mother’s love and desire and attention and presence, the child needs to become an object, her object of love and desire.

But when the child becomes an object, where is the child?

The child needs to suspend itself to become, to disappear and reappear as an object. He disappears as a subjectivity, as a subject, as a mind, as a consciousness, as an ego, whatever. He disappears and reappears as an external object.

And he is then an external object of desire.

And the only solution, of course, is to rebuild his subjectivity as an object by adopting his mother’s view of him as an object. It’s very complex.

Let me reiterate this.

Follow me. The child converts himself into an object because he wants mother to love him and to be present and to never abandon him. So he converts himself into an irresistible, cute, amazingly adorable packet of joy.

But when he does this, he loses whatever self he may have had or may have started to develop. He loses his sense of subjectivity, of who he is.

And so to reacquire this sense of identity and subjectivity, to answer this question of who am I, he adopts his mother’s point of view. He becomes what his mother sees. His mother’s gaze, his mother’s look, his mother’s responses become him.

He becomes the totality of the feedback and input and information that the mother gives him.

When the mother observes the child, when she interacts with the child, when she responds to the child, she provides the child with information about how she sees the child, how she perceives the child.

And the child takes this information and molds it into his self.

The child’s initial self, the primordial self, the not so constellated self, is ego, perhaps congenital ego.

The first steps in selfhood involve suspending the self and adopting another person’s point of view of who you are.

The mother is telling the baby that’s who you are. That’s who you are because that’s how I see you. And I’m the only source of information out there. So you better trust me and believe me and rely on me and you better become what I see you as the way I see you.

If you become the way I see you, there will be no discrepancy. There will be no anxiety. There will be no conflict.

So better become what I see.

And of course, when the baby adopts this point, this mother’s point of view, when he becomes what his mother sees in him, when he transforms himself into the messages that his mother is sending him about himself, there’s alienation. The baby’s self is the totality of the look and the gaze of the other. It’s otherness. The baby’s self is founded on otherness. And it gives rise. This otherness, the otherness of mother, because mother is other, yeah. This otherness gives rise to the baby’s self, but from the outside.

The baby in a way outsources his self. He imports his self from his mother and it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good because never mind how good the mother is, how loving and how present she would still, she would still impose on the baby her own point of view, her own prejudices, her own biases, her own insecurities, her own mental health problems, issues. So it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel good.

And the baby wants to disappear. He wants to become invisible in order to avoid this objectification.

When he’s faced with the option to have a self which is dictated by his mother’s look, by his mother’s judgment, by his mother’s preferences, by his mother’s responses, this is one option.

And the other option is to not be. Sometimes he chooses to not be, to disappear, to become invisible, to avoid this objectification. And he reverts, he regresses to the empty schizoid space, the schizoid core. And he rejects the exciting object of desire, his mother in this case, aggressively.

And of course, this is what we call approach avoidance. The baby approaches mother. Mother provides him with, with his self. The baby doesn’t feel comfortable with this new self that he had acquired from mommy.

So he retreats, he withdraws. He may withdraw all the way back into the womb, become unborn. That’s the schizoid core.

But he withdraws in any case.

So he approaches mommy and then he withdraws for mommy. And of course, anyone who’s been married to a narcissist would confirm. Anyone who has had a relationship with a narcissist is very, very acquainted with his approach avoidance cycles because a narcissist is two years old, forever.

I want to finish by reading to you a segment from a book.

When you dissolve the snapshot, and when you amplify the narcissist’s abandonment anxiety, the narcissist is disoriented. He feels totally confused. Things are happening and he cannot explain them.

In his mind, your only existence is an idealized, snapshotted internal object.

And suddenly this internal object is autonomous, defiant, independent. His agency and self-efficacy defies him, disagrees with him, acts in ways which undermine and challenge the internal object.

And this is extremely disorienting. In extreme cases, it can lead to mortification and psychosis.

There’s a confusion between internal and external, can wreak havoc on the narcissist’s mind.

And I want to read to you an excerpt from a book.

The book is called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

I want to read you this excerpt because it describes how we cope with experience that is unexpected and unpredictable. How do we cope in case of disorientation?

Explanations says Daniel Gilbert, explanations allow us to make full use of our experiences, but they also change the nature of these experiences.

As we have seen when experiences are unpleasant, we quickly move to explain these experiences in ways that make us feel better.

And indeed, studies show that the mere act of explaining an unpleasant event can help defend it.

But just as explanations ameliorate the impact of unpleasant events, so too do they ameliorate the impact of pleasant events.

For example, college students volunteered for a study in which they believed they were interacting in an online chat room with students from other universities. In fact, these students were actually interacting with a sophisticated computer program that simulated the presence of other students. After the simulated students had provided the real students with information about themselves, the researcher pretended to ask the simulated students to decide which of the people in the chat room they liked most.

In just a few minutes, something remarkable happened. Each real student received an email message from every one of the simulated students indicating they liked that student best.

Now here’s the catch. Some real students, the informed group, received emails that allowed them to know which simulated student wrote each of the messages. And other real students, the uninformed group, received email messages that had been stripped of that identifying information. Hence, real students in the informed group were able to generate explanations for their good fortune having been selected.

So they said, for example, Eva, a simulated student, Eva appreciates my values because we are both involved in Habitat for Humanity.

The real students in the uninformed group were unable to generate explanations. Someone appreciates my values, but I wonder who and why.

Although real students in both groups were initially delighted to have been chosen as everyone’s best friend, only the real students in the uninformed group remained delighted 15 minutes longer.

If you have ever had a secret admirer, you understand why. The reason why unexplained events have a disproportionate emotional impact is that we are especially likely to keep thinking about them.

People spontaneously try to explain events and studies show that when people do not complete the things that they set out to do, they’re especially likely to think about and remember their unfinished business.

Once we explain an event, we can fold it up like fresh laundry, put it away in memory’s drawer and move on to the next one.

But if an event defies explanation, it becomes a mystery and refuses to stay in the back of our minds. Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them.

I may add, in other words, to reduce anxiety.

Okay, get to work. Negate, vitiate and dissolve your idealized snapshot and amplify the narcissist abandonment anxiety. Good luck with it.