Okay, so the borderline’s fantasy is it’s okay, it’s okay, I can regulate myself, I don’t need anyone, but it doesn’t work. It’s all working.

She keeps getting dysregulated. She has mood lability falling apart. It’s bad.

And then there’s a nagging doubt. She starts to ask herself, if I’m so powerful, if I’m so much in self-control and so put together, well put together, so why am I feeling so bad? Why am I dysregulated? Am I lying to myself? Maybe I’m not so God-like. And this is a forbidden thought.

If the borderline were to accept that she is not God-like, this would have life-threatening implications. It’s death or God, nothing in between.

And remember again, that’s not the narcissist’s God. The narcissist’s God controls external objects. It’s an internal object that controls external objects.

The borderline’s God is an internal object that controls her emotions, moods and so on.

But at any rate, neither the borderline nor the narcissist can contemplate the possibility that they are wrong, that their grandiosity is a cognitive distortion. It doesn’t reflect what’s really happening. They can’t contemplate this.

If they do, they will fall apart. They will disintegrate. They will become psychotic or suicidal.

So the borderline finds someone, someone out there. And she says, “Listen, I’m at serious risk. My fantasy is not working. I don’t know what’s happening. I’m dysregulated. I’m leb on.“

Can you please regulate me? Can you stabilize me? Can you comfort and soothe me so that I’m able to continue to maintain my fantasy?

Because then I’ll be regulated. If you comfort me, I’ll be regulated. If you soothe me, I’ll be stable. I’ll be comforted. And then I will have no problem to maintain my fantasy.

So the intimate partner becomes an extension of the fantasy, a figment of the fantasy, a driver of a fantasy, a facilitator embedded in the fantasy. He enters the fantastic space.

And together, the borderline and her intimate partner, they create, of course, a shared fantasy.

And this is where the concept of shared fantasy comes from.

The intimate partner colludes with the borderline in her fantasy.

Of course, some people faced with these inexorable demands, which tend to become stockish or, you know, they walk away. They say, “What the hell? I don’t want this.” And they just walk away.

But some people get trapped because it’s very flattering to believe that you are the source of someone else’s regulation. You’re the one who makes them feel good. You have the power to make them feel bad. It caters to narcissistic elements, grandiose elements in intimate partners.

And by the way, covert narcissism is very close to borderline. The mechanisms are a bit different, but it’s very close to borderline.

So some partners are amenable to the borderline suggestion. They accept their role in the fantasy. They become integrated in the fantasy. They become a fantasy element. They become a figment of the fantasy.

And in order for the partner to become a figment of the fantasy, the borderline idealizes him. She idealizes her partners. She kind of photoshops the partner. She changes the partner so he fits into the fantasy.

And from that moment, the partner regulates the internal environment of the borderline, which allows her to keep the fantasy. And everyone is happy until no one is happy.

Of course, narcissists, borderlines, they’re never happy. Not for long at least.

Then she falls apart because there’s a risk to the fantasy.

Ironically, this ostensibly successful solution, I will find an intimate partner. I will idealize him. I will make him part of my fantasyand then he will regulate everything.

So ironically, it puts the fantasy at riskbecause the borderline realizes the intimate partner will ultimately fail, ineluctably, inevitably. There’s no way he will succeed because her demands are impossible, unrealistic.

The truth is that a few partners do succeed.

But then the borderline makes sure that they fail. And she makes sure that they fail because she has engulfment or enmeshment anxiety.

So the borderline has an abandonment anxiety because she needs the intimate partner to regulate. The intimate partner is the guarantor of the longevity and functioning of the fantasy.

But then the intimate partner gets too close for comfort. It gets to know her too well. He subsumes her. He consumes her.

And again, she experiences the trauma of disappearing. As a child, she disappeared into her parents. She was not allowed. She’s not been allowed to separate and to become.

And now that she has an intimate partnerand she has outsourced her mind to the intimate partner, she feels that she is disappearing into the intimate partner, dissolving, merging and fusing. It’s a reenactment of the early childhood trauma all over again. The child vanishes, disappears, not seen as a narcissist or cast as a bad object, counterfactually. Child is never allowed to become himself or herself.

And with the partner, the borderline has the same, the very same experience. The closer she gets to the partner, the more she develops engulfment, anxiety. The more the partner is adept at regulating the fantasy, managing the fantasy, the more she is at his mercy, the more they become one, the more she vanishes into him.

So this is known as approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion, push and pull. I hate you. Don’t leave me.

These dynamics are preordained, predestined, immutable, incurable. These are lifelong dynamics.

Even when the borderline loses her diagnosis, about 81% of borderlines lose their diagnosis after age 45. She doesn’t lose this.

She approaches the partner because she wants him to eliminate the processes in herwhich challenge the fantasy.

And then he does his job. He regulates her. He stabilizes her. He soothes her. He comforts her. He’s constantly there.

And then she feels suffocated, trapped, disappearing, imprisoned, shackled, smotheredonce to run away.

In other words, the price that she feels that she’s paying for the maintenance of the fantasy is too high. The price is not worth the price.

What’s the price? Her existence.

She has to disappear.

Maybe the fantasy is left behind, like the smile of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

So she says, what the heck?

I mean, okay, fantasy is nice, but I also want to be.

So she runs away.

The minute she runs away, the fantasy is threatened because her dysregulation kicks in.

And so she runs back and away and back.

The partner becomes an external regulator.

This is the borderline solution to the onslaught of life and its demands, which threaten the fantasy.

The main preoccupation of borderline narcissists is the maintenance of the fantasy.

Fantasy matters to these people more than anything, more than anyone, more than husbands, more than wives, more than children, more than money. Fantasy is it.

This is it. This is who they are. And this is what they do.

And this is what they want to be.

This is the borderline and the narcissist solutionsin this sense, in this sense, the narcissist and the borderline are no more. They’re ephemeral. They became fantasies. They are rare, fight fantasies.

The borderline is simpler than the narcissist because she develops an approach avoidance with a partner and the partner regulates the borderline’s internal world.

Essentially, that’s where it stops.

She gets stuck in these loops for life.

The narcissist as usual, complicates things.

So the irony is this, the narcissist internal machinations are much simpler than the borderlines, but the borderlines external regulation in fantasy management are much simpler than the narcissist.

The last is complicatations.

When the narcissist goes out to life, his fantasy is challenged as well. And he needs to find a solution exactly the same way the borderline does.

This solution is actually fascinating.

The narcissist says, life challenges me. My fantasy is falling apart because I am not the core of my fantasy.

In some ways, the narcissist saysthe fourth self is not sufficiently differentiated. It’s not really out there.

Let me try to explain this.

It’s very difficult to understand.

But it this way, life is challenging. The narcissist sayslife is challenging. Life is attacking me. Life is contradicting me. Disagreeing. Life is exigencies, vicissitudes, difficulties, tribulations. Life sucks.

Why is this happening to me?

Because the fourth self is too close to mebecause we are one.

Remember that the narcissist merged with the fourth self, became one with the fourth self, and was accused with the fourth self.

Now all that’s left is the fourth self. The true self has been sacrificed to the fourth self and nothing is left except the fourth self.

But the narcissist, as a child, is a bad object. He is an internalized bad object.

So what the narcissist is saying is this.

When I merged with the fourth self, when I became one with the fourth self, I brought with me my bad object.

I contaminated the fourth self. I dragged it down to my level before we became one, before we embarked on a unitary entity.

When the fourth self was out there, not me, he was God, it was God.

But when we merged, I dragged the fourth self down because I’m a bad object.

I’m unworthy, I’m inadequate, I am not disciplined.

So now the fourth self is compromised, infected by me.

What I need to do, I need us to break apart.

I need to unleash the fourth self, release it.

I need to render the fourth self not dependent on me.

How to do that?

Evidently, if the fourth self is dependent on the narcissist in some way, needs to be unleashed and released, then the fourth self is not God.

It’s the narcissist’s hostage.

So the narcissist has two reasons to let the fourth self go.

One, to remove the bad object from the fourth self, thereby purifying the fourth self and rendering it God-like again, immaculate.

And the second reason isby releasing the fourth self, the narcissist acknowledges the fourth self’s deity, divinity.

Because as long as the fourth self is at the mercy of the narcissist, it’s not a God and it cannot do its job.

Remember the role of the fourth self, the job of the fourth selfis to isolate the narcissist from realityand to do this, the fourth self must remain God-like.

How to accomplish this?

Separation.

Separation.

We’re talking about separation.

The narcissist feels the need to go through separation individuation.

The fourth self in this sense is a kind of mother.

It’s a parental introject.

Remember that in the previous phase, the child said, okay, the only solution to all the informationunpleasant information that the environment is providing me with, the information that challenges me, the only solution for me is to become one with the fourth self, to become God-like.

So I will sacrifice myself to this new God and I will become the new God.

But reality and life are unimpressed.

They continue.

The challenge, the breach, the invade, the humiliate, the answer to the child says, I must have done something wrong. That wasn’t the right solution.

What have I done wrong?

Oh my God, he says, I’m a bad object.

I merged the fourth self with the bad object.

I brought it down.

I made it less than God, unable to protect me.

I need to restore the fourth self’s divinity and the only way to do so is to separate myself from the fourth self, separate myself from God, allow God to be God, unadulterated by me.

And be known to the narcissist or the narcissistic child is trying to reenact the separation individuation, which remains uncompleted, incomplete with his mother.

Narcissist is trying to replay the separation individuation from the maternal figure.

The fourth self is a standin internalized maternal figure or parental figure.

So this time, instead of separating from an external object, which is mother, there’s a separation from an internal object, which is the fourth self, but the fourth self has parental attributes.

The same way a child sees his parents when he’s very young, you know, they’re God-like, they’re infallible, they are.

The narcissist sees the fourth self the same way.

So it’s a parent.

Similarly, the protonarcissistic child merges with the imaginary friend, which had become the fourth self and renders the fourth self God-like.

And then he sacrifices himself like a human sacrifice and disappears into the fourth self, merges, becomes one with the fourth self.

And then life continues to challenge the narcissist.

Because now having done this, the child had become a narcissist.

Now he’s a fullfledged narcissist.

But life continues to challenge the narcissist, continues to heme the narcissist lemons.

Narcissists are not very good at making lemonade.

Insteadthey just cut down the tree, mind you.

So the child needs to modify the fantasy yet again.

Poor child, poor narcissist.

The borderline has modified a fantasy, you remember?

The borderline modified a fantasy by introducing a reallife partner to regulate the environment.

Narcissist needs to modify his fantasy for the second and last time as well.

There are two modifications for the borderline and two modifications for the narcissist.

So second and last time for the narcissist.

To understand what’s going on behind the scenes and why the narcissist makes the choice that he does when it comes to modifying the fantasythis time, we need to realize that idealization means divorcing reality.

When you idealize someone, it means you don’t want the external object. You don’t want the, you’re rejecting the real object. You want an idealized version of the real object, which by definition is unreal.

It’s a fantasy.

So when the child is a protonarcissist and idealize the false self, the child removed the false self from reality. The child divorced the false self from reality by imbuing it with ideal counterfactual, unreal attributes.

And then in this second phase, the child merged with a false self. They became one, but when the child had merged with the false self, the child brought the false self back into reality.

The child infused the false self with the child’s own bad object.

The protonarcissistic child is a bad object.

So when he merged with the false self, the false self now is a bad object.

The child believes himself to be inadequate, broken, vulnerable, fragile, insufficient, stupid, ugly, etc., believes himself to be like that. He believes it’s real.

In other words, the child believes that the bad object is real.

The child had idealized the false self and removed the false self from reality.

And then the child merged with the false self and brought reality into the false self in the form of the bad object.

He contaminated the false self with reality because the bad object is an element of reality.

And now the false self is no longer divorced from reality because it includes a bad object which is real and which used to be the child.

So the false self cannot provide a defense against reality because it had become a part of reality. It’s compromised.

It is now in reality.

False self loses its power, loses its magical potency because it used to be divorced from reality the way God is divorced from the world.

And now the child brought himself, his very real bad object into the false self and rendered the false self real.

And now the false self is impotent, not omnipotent.

This is an urgent need to again idealize the false self, re-idealize it, to render it fantastic, not real.

Now you see why narcissists re-idealize people like you, objects in the hovering phase.

You see that all the internal processes in the narcissists are projected onto you and reflected in the relationship dynamics.

But this is not the topic of today’s lecture.