Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. How Narcissist Perceives Your/Their Death

1. 00:01 Once in a while I get a great question in the comment section of YouTube. It is such an aberration that I celebrate with wine, champagne, caviar, and a trip to Bali. And a few days ago, someone wrote to me the following. The narcissist has no
2. 00:26 object constancy. I’m I’m paraphrasing. The Narcissist has no object constancy and introjects people, snapshots them, creates internal objects that represent external people and then continues to interact only with the internal objects. So the question, how do narcissists
3. 00:45 perceive other people’s death when other people die? How do does a narcissist cope with this? Not only for themselves but for others. What is death in the narcissist’s mind? We know that there is no emotional empathy. But cognitively, how do they see death? Well,
4. 01:08 I will um mostly discuss the way narcissists perceive other people’s death. A narcissist of course cannot perceive his or her own death in real time. Would be a bit difficult. But the narcissist does contemplate death. the sess c sessation of existence the legacy
5. 01:28 what would be left behind the narcissist refuses to believe in the existence of death denies death as far as a narcissist is concerned he or she is going to live forever and the reason I think is that the narcissist is already dead narcissism pathological narcissism is an
6. 01:50 internalized death cult there’s a void there’s an empty skit core. There’s a black hole to use Tustin’s phrase. I mean, you choose. And so when
7. 02:05 the absence that is the narcissist masquerades as a presence, when the non- entity, non-being that is the narcissist pretends to be a creature, a being, that creates enormous cognitive dissonance and gaps, not only in other people’s minds, but in the narcissist’s mind as well.
8. 02:31 And so the need to constantly pretend to be alive when you have actually been assassinated as a young child, you’re dead. The narcissist is dead. It’s a corpse. It’s an animated corpse. It’s a zombie. And um but this zombie is engaged in pretending to be normal. There’s a
9. 02:56 pretention to normaly and normality. And so the narcissist integrates death in a way which is dissimilar to healthy and normal people. Healthy and normal people never experience death. They experience life. And as far as healthy and normal people go, death is the
10. 03:19 negation of life. It’s the exact opposite of life. Everything that characterizes and typifies life is absent in death. And on the very contrary, death has characteristics and traits and and aspects and dimensions which are the visiation of life, the
11. 03:37 contradiction of life. That’s how healthy normal people perceive death because they constantly experience only life and they have no experience of death. Whereas a narcissist constantly experiences death and has no experience of life. So as far as a narcissist is concerned,
12. 03:57 biological physical death is just an affirmation or confirmation of an existing state, a merger and fusion of body and mind. Finally, the narcissist’s body catches up to the narcissist mind. The narcissist mind has been dead for ages. Now the body catches up with it
13. 04:20 and dies as well. In a way, the narcissist would perceive death as an apotheiois, an epiphany, a form of elation, what Freud called the oceanic feeling, going back to the womb, becoming one with everything and everyone that matters. In other words, sources of supply and so on. The
14. 04:44 ultimate shared fantasy from which there’s no escape and no reversion and fantasy which is unambiguous, unequivocal, irreversible, always there and all is all consuming and all pervasive. Death to the narcissist is the ultimate shared fantasy. That’s a
15. 05:05 biological death of the narcissist himself. Now, of course, that is not to say that narcissists are not afraid of dying. Of course, they’re afraid on an animalistic, primordial, atistic level. They are as afraid of dying as anyone else. They’re as afraid of dying as
16. 05:23 cockroaches and rabbits and elephants and other people. Everyone is afraid of dying. Every organism is geared to fight death, to fend it off for as long as possible, to transmute it somehow. So in this sense narcissists are no different. They’re organisms but that is
17. 05:41 not the way they perceive death psychologically. The psychological complement of the biological repulsion or the biological rejection of death is not there. Whereas in healthy people body and mind reject death are terrified of death are trying are deni deny death
18. 06:00 trying to ignore death. There are various strategies of coping with death which involve both body and mind. In the narcissist, there’s a divorce between body and mind. The body inexurably is on the path to dying, decomposition, decay and disintegration. Whereas the mind
19. 06:20 never is never is ever is immutable is always there, never changes. There’s no accommodation of change in transformation in the narcissist mind. And the ultimate change and transformation is of course death itself because a narcissist is incapable of transformation and change. The
20. 06:39 narcissist in his own mind is incapable of dying. One of the ways narcissists convince themselves that they will never die in the in any meaningful sense is that they believe they they were they’re engaged in some kind of cosmic mission. They’re
21. 06:56 imprinting the world. their legacy will survive somehow. And when they’re confronted with facts to the contrary, they collapse. They get mortified. They get injured. But then they immediately recreate the grandio narrative and somehow revive and resuscitate this disengagement from
22. 07:18 reality. This detachment, this inhibition of a paracosmic other dimension far away in some galaxy of their own making. The narcissist relationship with with death is complicated. You know like Facebook compl it’s complicated is complicated because he
23. 07:41 accepts the narcissist accepts death only on the biological level but not on the psychological level. There’s no intimacy with death on the psychological level. There’s no accommodation of death, acceptance of death. There’s no making peace with death on the
24. 07:57 psychological level because the narcissist in his own mind or her own mind is immortal but not immortal in the childish perhaps mythical mythical way not immortal in a primitive way. I’m going to live forever. Even narcissist don’t believe that. But the narcissist
25. 08:14 in his own mind is immortal precisely because of his or her non-existence. When you never experience your existence, when you have rejected life, when you have constricted yourself to the to the point of becoming a pinpointed laser beam, then of course
26. 08:34 you would not dread death, nor nor would you anticipate it, nor would you believe in it actually. So it’s very complicated. It appears to be an infantile reaction, but it’s actually not. Now a narcissist would tell you I’m afraid of death. I hope I leave something behind. I I
27. 08:58 looking back at my life, you know, I wish maybe it were different. Or the narcissist would become model and and tearful when when they discussed their own impending death and so on. And these would appear to be normal behaviors, but there is no real internal correlate in
28. 09:15 the narcissist’s mind. These are more like rehearsed behaviors, imitative. There’s a mimicry. There’s an imitation here. The narcissist doesn’t really feel this way, if you understand what I mean. The narcissist could become nostalgic, sentimental, and especially self-pitting.
29. 09:37 But it would not impinge on or undermine the narcissist’s inflated fantastic grandio self-concept which is all-encompassing, all pervading, immutable and everlasting. So this is the way the narcissist relates to his own death or her own death. Half of all narcissists are women
30. 09:59 and it makes it very difficult for the narcissist to relate to other people’s death. The person who posted the comment noted correctly that the first problem is that the narcissist doesn’t have object constancy. When people are out of sight, they’re
31. 10:16 out of mind. When people are no longer useful, they’re out of mind. When people have been um rendered um persecuto objects, when they become became enemies or perceived as enemies, they are out of mind. The narcissist mind is populated only with sources of
32. 10:37 narcissist representations of sources of narcissistic supply, representations of participants in the shared fantasy, representations of potentials for both. That’s it. There’s no object constancy. Not for the same reason as in borderline personality disorder where the problem
33. 10:55 is introjection, flawed introjection. So there is introjecting constancy. But because the narcissist is utilitarian, he places emphasis emphasis on use usage and utility. And if you’re no long you’re no longer useful, you you no longer exist. So there’s no investment.
34. 11:18 There’s no cexis. There’s no investment of emotional energy, psychic energy in maintaining representations, inner representations, introj people who are no longer active in the narcissist’s real life and therefore they are rendered not dynamic in the narcissist’s
35. 11:39 internal life. So it’s a bit like enabling and disabling. There’s like an there’s like an onoff switch in the narcissist’s mind. He can turn you off and then he can turn you on. There’s one exception and that is intimate partners, but we will not go into it right now. I
36. 11:58 dealt I’ve dealt with it in the shared fantasy um on the shared fantasy playlist. But generally speaking, narcissists don’t have object constancy. So you are dead to the narcissist anyhow. If you’re not meaningful, if you’re not contributing, if you’re not
37. 12:14 participating, if you’re not providing, if you’re not supplying, you’re dead. As far as a narcissist is concerned, humanity is divided into two major groups. A tiny group which are suppliers, providers, um service providers, um participants in
38. 12:32 the shared fantasy. small group and this small group is alive in the narcissist mind does does possess object constancy and the vast majority of humanity who are dead in the narcissist’s mind they’re perceived as dead the walking dead that’s why narcissists are are able
39. 12:53 to exercise empathy or because everyone is dead narcissism is a death cult it’s the internalization of death the assimilation of death. Narcissism is about death mainly. The narcissist is dead inside we say and correctly so. So everyone is dead. So when people die in
40. 13:15 reality it comes as no great shock to the narcissist or surprise. Nor does it provoke or trigger any dynamics psychonamics in the narcissist. There’s no psychological reaction to the death of other people. Even people the narcissists have known for decades, even
41. 13:33 parental figures, there’s no psychological reaction because these people have been dead to the narcissist for very long. Another issue mentioned in the question is introjection. The narcissist snapshots or introjects people. He is unable to recognize and accept the
42. 13:52 externality and separateness of other people. He does not regard them as as external subjects or external objects. He regards them as internal objects. He interacts with the avatars of the representations uh that stand in for these people in his
43. 14:12 in his mind. So there is a vast space inside the narcissist’s mind populated with internal objects. Each one of of these internal objects bears the bears some semblance to an external object. But the externality of the object is not recognized. Is not is not assimilated.
44. 14:33 Narcissist doesn’t experience other people as if they are outside his mind. They’re all inside his mind. Which of course makes it very difficult for the narcissist to relate to any external phenomena such as death. When people die, this happens outside the
45. 14:53 narcissist’s mind, not inside the narcissist’s mind. So, he has to work very hard. The Nazaris has to work very hard cognitively to assimilate the fact of death and then it becomes just a historical fact, a piece of news, an episodic memory. Nothing with emotional balance, nothing
46. 15:16 with an emotional correlate. There’s no emotional response to the death of another person, just registering the fact somehow. It’s as if the narcissist maintains a population register registry and updates it from time to time with the demise or the disease or the passing
47. 15:36 on of other people. Um, narcissists of course don’t have effective empathy and so they have to relate to uh facts such as death
48. 15:53 only in a cognitive way. So they have to process everything cognitively and we usually healthy normal people usually relate to the death of another person not cognitively but emotionally. The narcissist lacks this apparatus lacks this machinery. The narcissist is
49. 16:14 unable to fully digest and embrace and accept and and integrate the all the dimensions of the death of another person. it becomes a paper thin fact, an event, an occurrence to be forgotten because there are millions of of events and occurrences a day. So, it’s noted
50. 16:33 and forgotten, buried somewhere, filed away or whatever. I want to um in this context use an idea uh which is now forgotten regrettably like a lot of the psychonalytic literature. It was a term coined by Eduardo Vice in 1957 and it’s ego passage. Weiss, Edwald Weise claimed that
51. 17:05 uh an object that has been introjected, an external object that’s been introjected can somehow infect the self. When we introject objects, external objects, other people, when we create snapshots of other people, representations, avatars of other people
52. 17:26 in our minds in our mind, these come replete with the qualities of these other people. So the representation in your mind of another person in your life also contains also carries the characteristics and traits and behaviors and memories and experiences affiliated
53. 17:50 with or related to this person. And why why suggested that these can somehow dissipate or disseminate or somehow infect or become contagious and affect the qualities of the ego or the self. The process of integration according to Weiss does not necessarily mean that the
54. 18:16 internal object becomes an inseparable part of the ego. But it could mean that the internalized object has affected the ego somehow has changed altered modified some of the traits of the ego by osmosis by proximity vicariously by proxy if you wish. So it’s an interesting idea
55. 18:40 because why suggests that the internal objects maintain their integrity maintain their rigidity and boundaries. They do not get dissolved into the the ego ocean, the ego sphere. They they remain there separate and unique and distinct but they have an effect they
56. 19:01 interact with the ego. They have an effect on the ego and the ego does change. Now, we could apply it easily to narcissism. Narcissists do not have an ego or at least don’t have a constellated integrated self because they don’t have an ego or a self. Um,
57. 19:18 when the narcissist internalizes other people, when he creates representations, snapshots, avatars of other people in his mind, these are the only internal objects. There’s no internal object labeled self. There’s no internal object labeled ego. It’s a playground of
58. 19:39 internal objects. All of them emanating from the outside, triggered by the outside, modeled on the outside. So the narcissist’s mind is a hive mind and in and rather than influence the self, which does not exist in the narcissist’s mind, rather than paint the
59. 19:59 ego with a white brush, the ego doesn’t exist in the narcissist mind. What happens in the narcissist mind is that the internal objects interact with each other. They form coalitions and clusters. They modify each other. They affect and influence each other. It’s a
60. 20:19 collaborative project. And so that’s why I call it the hive mind. And according to Weiss, in a healthy person, uh there is an there there is a pop a plethora of objectoriived traits. Um but these object derived traits of the ego can be traced to other people. They
61. 20:47 belong to someone else. So it’s like the ego is this multicultural diverse entity that is open to influences and contributions by other internal objects which represent people in the outside external objects. And so the ego traits, the object derived traits appear to
62. 21:14 belong to someone else. Actually they are experienced as one’s own but they actually can be easily traced to to other people and uh they’re introjected they become internalized. Weiss says that these traits can be externalized again. That while the ego acquires traits from
63. 21:40 internal objects that represent people in the outside, the ego can also get rid of these acquired traits. The ego can reexternalize these acquired traits, purge itself, cleanse itself of these external influences. And this is what wise called the ego passage.
64. 22:02 In the process of such introjection and then projection the original qualities of the object certainly undergo alterations and some of these alterations are basic uh long long lived and maybe even irreversible. But there is a continuous trade between
65. 22:25 internal objects that represent external objects and the internal object which is the ego of the self. There is a an exchange a barter counter trade system. There’s an exchange of goods and services exchange of traits. The ego borrows traits from other internal
66. 22:45 objects which represent people outside. And these internal objects uh reacquire the traits that they have lent. They lend these traits to the ego. Then they take them back. The ego can reexport these traits, externalize them back back to the internal objects, back
67. 23:07 symbolically to people out there. So it’s a two-way street, not a one one-way street. The reexternalized representations are not replicas of the original object but still they can be reattributed to the original object. So the wisest wisest conception of the ego
68. 23:30 is much more malleable much more open-ended much more permeable. It’s like a me more like a membrane and things pass through this membrane back and forth. and Weiss called this phenomenon passing of an object through the ego or simply object passage.
69. 23:48 Regrettably, this fascinating idea has been neglected and abandoned, completely forgotten even in literature. But it would explain perfectly the way the narcissist relates to other people. The narcissist first snapshots other people, internalizes them, creates internal
70. 24:07 objects that represent other people and then he these internal objects interact with each other and they form impromptu ad hoc coalitions on the fly if you wish and these coalitions and cluster clusters function in lie of self states in lie of a self in lie of an ego. So
71. 24:30 the narcissist substitute for an ego, substitute for a self would be the hive mind. And the hive mind is not static, is not rigid, is not lifelong. The hive mind is an open dynamic entity which experiences these passages. The hive mind appropriates traits from other
72. 24:57 internal objects and then gives them back and then appropriates other traits and gives them back. And the narcissist experiences the hive mind the way a healthy normal person would experience his or herself as a as a continuum as a continuity. But
73. 25:14 in the case of the narcissist because there is no organizing principle there is no central structure. The formation of the self has been disrupted in early childhood. Because of this, there are many memory gaps and this dissociation forces the narcissist to confabulate and
74. 25:32 the whole structure is very shaky. And so while the narcissist would claim to be continuous or to experience himself or herself continuously, there is no continuity. There is dissociation, there’s dissociative confabulation. And coming back full circle to the issue of death.
75. 25:54 If what you have instead of a mind is a population of internal objects interacting with each other, influencing each other, reshaping and remolding each other, forming coalitions and clusters on the fly and then disintegrating or dissolving these coalitions and
76. 26:10 clusters. If your experience therefore is not continuous, not static but more dynamic and open-ended and illdefined, if you’re fuzzy, which is the narcissist, uh if your boundaries are not there, you don’t know where the world ends and you begin.
77. 26:29 Given all that, it would be impossible for you to truly assimilate the fact of death of another person. These other people are not perceived as real. They’re not perceived as external. They’re not perceived as separate. They’re perceived as triggers in the
78. 26:45 best case. And internal objects never die. They’re deactivated. Yeah, they are sometimes they sometimes dissolve into each other. They merge and fuse. There are many dynamics which involve internal objects. But like bacteria, they never die. Bacteria never die. They multiply and
79. 27:04 multiply and multiply. Essentially, it’s the same bacterium over and over and over again unless they’re interrupted with antibiotics or whatever antibiotics. So, uh the narcissist bacterial viral population which passes for a mind never dies. So, there’s no
80. 27:26 conception of death, true conception. There’s not true assimilation of the idea of death. As far as a narcissist is concerned, no one dies. Everyone lives forever because they all inhabit his mind. He can turn some of some people off. He can turn some representations off. He
81. 27:48 can turn some internal objects on time and again at will, but they never vanish in the true sense of the word. They’re always there as potentials available in time of need. So the narcissist can revive people, resuscitate them, resurrect them. He has this god-like
82. 28:07 power of giving life again, reanimating the internal objects that represent people out there. And when the external object disappears because they’ve died, the narcissist doesn’t notice the difference because a narcissist never interacts with external objects. He
83. 28:27 interacts with internal objects. And so he would note cognitively the fact that so and so has died. It would be a historical fact like saying Napoleon has died, Hitler has died, you know. So he would note my neighbor has died, my ex-wife has died, you know. He
84. 28:47 would he would note the fact but it would have no effective no emotional resonance within the narcissist and it would definitely not change the economy structure function dynamics boundaries and delineation of the internal object that has represented and is representing
85. 29:10 and will forever represent the person the real external object who has passed