Good afternoon, Shoshanim. I’ve just been appointed to be Editor-in-Chief of yet another academic journal. I’m now Editor-in-Chief of eight academic journals and a member of the editorial board of another 90.

Ninety percent of these are peer-reviewed and about one-third of them are open access.

So who says narcissism doesn’t pay? I like to tease you.

Okay, Shvanfanim, Bonbonim, Chmadu Vadim, Shoshanim and every other Nim.

Today we’re going to discuss the narcissist’s inner child and how this alleged ostensible inner child captures you and renders you a hostage.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I’m also a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University and currently a professor of clinical psychology and business management in CIAPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies in Cambridge and Birmingham of all places in the United Kingdom, Ontario, Canada and with an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria, where else?

Okay, the narcissist’s inner child.

The narcissist uses his or her childlike features to attract you, to bait you, to lure you in, to induce you and induct you into the shared fantasy.

The narcissist dangles in front of you, his endearing, charming, somewhat immature and infantile features, characteristics and dimensions of personality.

It is as if the narcissist is communicating to you, “I’m a delectable child” and this proves irresistible, especially to women with their, so they say, maternal instincts, but also to men.

We are all protective of children. We all love children. We are all charmed by children. We, oh, well, the vast majority of us, let’s say.

And so when the narcissist gives you a glimpse, affords you access to his inner sanctum, where there is a child in pain, hurt, traumatized, crying for help, you find it, as I said, irresistible. You’re inexorably drawn and you can’t help yourself. You’re conditioned to react the way you do because of societal injunctions, norms and habits. Children provoking us, triggering us, reflexes, instincts, drives and preordained structured behaviors.

The narcissist knows this and so he becomes a child when he’s with you.

And it is a child who is endowed with magnetism and charisma and intelligence and captivating laughter or giggle.

And you just can’t help yourself. You want to hug the narcissist. You want to hold the narcissist. You want to contain the narcissist. You want to merge with the narcissist. You want to be the narcissist everlasting mother for providing him or her with unconditional love.

Narcissists actually use the child bait much more than they use the sex bait. Sex bait is a borderline thing. Child bait is a narcissist thing.

And you know, narcissists infantilize ostentatiously and visibly they talk in a childlike or baby voice. They use language that is more typical of infants than of adults. They cuddle. They display cues, baby cues, which elicit maternal behavior in men and women alike.

And so this is all part of a stratagem.

Narcissists, distinct from psychopaths, are not conditioned, are not premeditated, are not cunning and scheming. Narcissists act unconsciously. All this behavior is an unconscious behavior.

The way some other animal species display colors or behave in specific ways as if in order to attract mates.

The narcissist is invested emotionally, cathected, in a shared fantasy and he needs you to be a partner in this fantasy.

And the only way to draw you in and the only way to make sure that you remain within the shared fantasy, addicted to it, embedded in it, reified by it, integrated, assimilated by it, as if it were kind, some kind of matrix or primordial womb. The only way to ascertain this, only way to make sure this happens is by becoming your child.

The narcissist becomes your child and it’s very difficult to abandon a child. It’s very difficult to leave a child behind, especially a needy, damaged, broken, hurt, bleeding child.

The narcissist regresses not only himself, but he regresses you as well.

You are two orphans in the dark woods. You are Gretel to his Hansel. The witch is out to get you and eat you alive and you need to stick together. We embryos stick together. You need to stick together in order to confront the vagaries, exigencies, vicissitudes and especially dangers of hostile outside world.

It’s a cult like setting. We against them, we against the world.

And so the narcissist creates in you what is known as mass psychogenic illness, used to be known as mass psychosis or folie à deux. You become united, merged and fused against a perimeter of risk and danger and you fend off enemies real or stensible and utterly imaginary time and again.

By doing so, you become a single organism with two heads.

The narcissist is capable to obtain this, capable to implement this strategy because you both share the same background of abuse and trauma in early childhood or a dysfunctional family with adverse childhood experiences, ACEs.

So the narcissist regresses to childhood, becomes a child, infantilizes, even his tone of voice changes, even his body posture, his body language, everything. He becomes like a big baby and as he babyfies himself, he also regresses you into infancy and beyond.

And so you become a baby as well. And then your two babes, two babes in the wood, two orphans holding hands as they traverse the dark forest at night.

And so this makes it very difficult for you to break up with the narcissist because you feel as if you were a mother abandoning her child and you fight for the relationship. You fight for the relationship the same way some parents don’t divorce because of the kids.

You know, when you talk to people and say, you are evidently unhappy with each other. Don’t you, why don’t you divorce? And they say, well, we don’t want to divorce because of the kids.

It’s the same with you. You don’t want to abandon the narcissist because of the narcissist in a child because of the kids, the two kids that are the narcissist and yourself. You’ve both become kids in a shared childhood fantasy.

How would it be? How is it possible to break out of this without detesting yourself, loathing yourself, hating yourself, feeling ashamed and guilty for having inflicted yet another round of pain and hurt on this child, this bleeding, wounded, damaged child?

This infantilization or co-infantilization, regression to early infancy, the symbiotic phase in early infancy, is a strategy used by narcissists to make you feel guilty and ashamed to abandon the narcissist because you are not abandoning an adult. You’re abandoning a kid in need.

But this is all a facade. Everything with narcissist is mere appearances. There’s no substance there. It’s nobody there. It’s a vast emptiness all consuming the equivalent of a black hole.

So there’s nobody there. It’s an absence masquerading as a presence. And everything you think you know about the narcissist is wrong. Absolutely everything.

And this is no exception. You think you’re in touch with a childlike element or a childlike being or a childlike entity within the narcissist. You’re not.

The narcissist’s true self is long dead and gone, deactivated and dysfunctional to the point of having vanished. It never emerges, not even in therapy. It is a myth, nonsensical myth that the narcissist’s true self somehow erupts under certain circumstances. It’s complete nonsense. There’s no true self there. There’s nothing left behind except a huge crater in the volcanic eruption that is a narcissist’s childhood.

And the true self never emerges. What you’re witnessing is an elaborate choreography, a simulation, a bait and a lure intended to drag you, unwittingly, into a shared fantasy. And then entomb you there, magnify you like an ancient Egyptian mummy and keep you there in animated, the external equivalent of the internal object that represents you in the narcissist’s mind.

So the narcissist actually does not have an inner child. The narcissist does possess dynamics which are typically identified with an inner child.

But in the strictest clinical sense of the word, the narcissist does not have an inner child. There’s nobody there, not a child, not an adult. I mean, please get it through your thick defenses. There’s nobody there.

Now, behaviorally and emotionally the narcissist is a child. So it’s not as if the narcissist is an adult with an inner child.

Narcissist doesn’t have an inner child. He doesn’t have an inner nothing, anything, it’s all empty.

But he is behaviorally and emotionally a child, especially behaviorally because narcissists do not possess, do not have access to their positive emotions, only to negative affectivity, hatred, envy, rage, anger, and so on.

Narcissists are incapable of positive emotions, not even joy, not even love. So the narcissist is a child behaviorally.

Now we used to call this in psychology arrested development. We no longer use this term. Today we call it developmental delay, a kind of developmental disorder.

But the fact is that the narcissist’s developmental age does not conform to his chronological age. Developmental age is a measure of development, which is expressed in an age unit or age equivalent.

For example, someone who is a four year old child may have a developmental age of six in terms of verbal skills, for example, emotionalquotient, emotionally intelligentEQ also enters the formula of the equation that yields the developmental age.

The narcissist’s developmental age is not expressed in integers. It is a fraction. Whereas the narcissist is, for example, 40 years old. He is behaviorally and to some extent emotionally two years old.

So that’s two divided by 40. If he’s lucky, he’s six years old.

Narcissists are severely behind their chronological age, which makes it easier for them to emulate, imitate and mimic children. They don’t have to go far. They’re anyhow children in the bodies of adults. They’re anyhow behaviorally retarded, so to speak.

No, there’s no problem for them to present to you a facade of a childlike, delightful, endearing person.

Part of the charm of the narcissist, the boyish charm, in case it’s a man or the girlish charm. If it’s a woman.

Narcissists suffer from developmental amnesia. Environmental amnesia is an impaired ability to form memories of past events. This is known as episodic memory.

Narcissists have severe difficulties with autobiographical episodic memory. Usually this is the outcome of brain injury or brain trauma sustained early in life.

And my claim is, I insist that the brains of narcissists have been damaged in early child have been physically, physiologically, electrochemically damaged in early childhood by the abuse and trauma that they have suffered.

There is an enormous body of evidence, studies and so on and so forth, that links abuse and trauma to changes in the brain, some of which are irreversible, most of which are reversible with neuroplasticity, but some of which are irreversible.

And this damage to the brain caused by abuse and trauma preconditions the narcissist to dissociate, the narcissist’s solution to memories which are painful and intolerable is simply to forget them amnesia, developmental amnesia.

This is especially true if the injuries, if there is a physical injury to the hippocampus, but not to the surrounding medial temporal lobe structures.

But I suggest that early childhood or adverse childhood experiences, especially early childhood trauma and abuse of the kind suffered by the narcissist are liable to inflict enormous damage on memory pathways, the dopaminergicthe hippocampal pathway and the HPA axis.

So narcissist very likely suffer from developmental amnesia. Memory for factual information known as semantic memory appears to remain largely intact. So narcissist would recall encyclopedic information, the names of people, dates and so on and so forth, but would fail to recall crucial events in his own life or her own life.

So this is developmental amnesia.

And because the developmental age is so regressed and there is developmental amnesia, there is a maturational crisis.

Maturational crisis is caused by life changing events. And it is encountered usually during the typical course of development and it stops the development dead in its tracks.

This is why narcissists do not possess a constellated integrated self or ego, use whatever term makes you feel better. They don’t possess this core identity, this executive locus that manages the various self states, reactions to environment and so on and so forth. They don’t have this core. They’re very fluid, they’re very kaleidoscopic.

And this is also typical of borderline. This is because of the maturational crisis and the resulting developmental amnesia.

And so this requires a significant psychological behavior and other adjustments. This developmental crisis, also known as normative crisis, usually is a huge problem.

And because the narcissist has enormous resistance to learning, to therapy, to any outside authority, to morality and so on and so forth, the maturational crisis is likely to persist well into the narcissist’s very late life and to death.

Only death do us part, says the narcissist, to his mental health disorder.

So don’t be impressed with the narcissist’s childlike features. They’re a theater production. They’re a movie stage for your benefit. They’re not real. There’s nobody there. There’s no adult there and there’s no child there. There’s nothing there.

Behaviorally, the narcissist is a Peter Pan. Peter Pan, definitely. He never grows up behaviorally.

But internally, it’s a hollow grave. It’s a walking, talking cemetery. The narcissist is dead inside because he has died as a child, having been subjected to the most excruciating and extreme mistreatment in a variety of ways.

And so do not get attracted to the narcissist’s alleged inner child, which is non-existent. Do not feel as if you’re the narcissist’s mother or father. And by abandoning the narcissist, you’re a bad person. You’re evil because the narcissist is this hurting, crying, bleeding child who needs you, who clings to you. You’re the narcissist’s rescuer. You’re his savior. You’re her fixer and healer.

Don’t think this way because it’s simply not true. It’s counterfactual.

Had you been able to gaze into the outer darkness, which is the inner world of the narcissist, you would have fled screaming to the hills and never ever looked back.