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1. 00:00 I think people find it very difficult to accept even when they do understand but they find it difficult to accept. So there’s a cognitive realization but there’s no emotional reaction. They find difficult to accept that the inner experience of the narcissist is an
2. 00:17 experience of death. Yes. The narcissist experiences her existence as non-existence as absence as non-being. That is true for narcissism. That is also true for borderline. Actually, it’s one of the diagnostic criteria of borderline personality disorder, the emptiness.
3. 00:38 So, the experience is an experience of death. In this sense, narcissism is a death cult. And it’s predicated on what Freud used to call than or the death drive or the death force. For the narcissist to appropriate another person, for the narcissist to
4. 00:56 convert another person to snapshot, convert another person into an internal object, the narcissist must imbue the other person with death. The narcissist must kill you metaphorically before and as a condition for converting you into an internal object.
5. 01:19 An internal object that is full of life cannot exist in a mind that is full of death. As the environment is a graveyard, you need to be dead if you want a tombstone in that graveyard in that cemetery. So the first thing the narcissist does, the narcissist kills you metaphorically.
6. 01:42 The narcissistic mother kills her daughter in her mind and then takes the corpse, converts it into an internal object and continues to interact with the internal object in something that is very reminiscent of a of a seance more or less talking to ghosts.
7. 02:03 These internal objects in the narcissist’s mind are ghosts. People think that the internal objects are alive, full of energy, you know, elvital, they have a force of life and that’s not true at all. The internal objects in NAS’s mind are ghosts. They
8. 02:16 are ephemeral. They are ectoplasm. They are spiritual apparitions. They’re not they’re not real. They don’t have contours. They don’t have depth, dimensions, density, not they don’t. And to reach this death stage to allow the narcissist to convert you into internal object the
9. 02:36 narcissist needs to take away from you all the attributes of life. So first and foremost the narcissist needs to take away from you your joy. The joy is a sign of life. your sexuality and later on your independence, your agency, your social circle, social network,
10. 02:58 your autonomy, personal autonomy, including financial independence. The Nazis need to take all these away from you so that ultimately you’re not alive. You may be alive physically, but you’re a zombie. Only then the narcissist can convert you. And because a mother has access to
11. 03:18 you when you are defenseless, when you are when you have no life experience, mother has access to you from the very early stages. The mother kills you when you are 18 months old. When you are 36 months old, the mother kills you early on. That was my point.
12. 03:39 And it’s very difficult after that to come alive, to resurrect. It’s a bit a bit of a religious process, a religious metaphor if you wish. There is a crucifixion early in life and the resurrection requires a miracle. So it’s difficult to resurrect from
13. 03:58 this. If the gaze that defines you is a lethal lethal gaze, a gaze that kills you, then you define yourself via this gaze, the most crucial gaze, mother’s gaze. You define yourself via these gaze as dead and all your so-called life is a celebration of death.
14. 04:22 You actually feel very good the more dead you are, the less independent you are, the less autonomous you are, the less the fewer friends you have, the fewer things you do, the more dead you are, the better you feel. You’re egoonic only when you’re dead.
15. 04:45 Because you have learned early on in life to associate being existence with death, not with life. This is your comfort zone. Death is your comfort zone. That’s why you feel when you’re about to abandon your mother, you feel very bad. Yes. That’s a sign of life. You feel when
16. 05:07 you’re doing something totally independent, you feel very bad. You feel guilty because that’s a sign of life. Ironically, the more lively you become, the more alive you become, the more your internal mother, your mother introject, maternal introject will sabotage you,
17. 05:26 will drag you back to the polarity of death because only then you could be at peace with your mother. Any relationship with another person, for example, is a betrayal of your mother. automatic betrayal of your mother because that other person person can
18. 05:43 give you life, can give you another gaze, can trigger your independent uh choice making and decision making can so it’s a competition to your mother. It’s it’s a very important thing, very important point because in my mother’s case for