I quickly want to just touch on something else.

Before I do that, I just want to say because there is a war on vocabulary and pronouns these days that even though you’re using he and she, they’re all interchangeable.

I quickly want you to just if you can touch on what healthy primary narcissism is and when does it become pathological?

Because you have said it’s very essential in healthy development.

So if you can just quickly just touch on that.

I’ll be brief on this one.

Okay.

In the first 18 months of life, the child, as I said, cannot tell the difference between itself and the world.

So the child is the world.

It’s like the famous song, you know, we are the world. So highly narcissistic song. So we are the world.

And then because the child cannot tell the difference between itself and the world, the child invests its emotional energy in itself.

As far as far as it is aware, he’s investing it in the world because he is the world.

So he redirects his emotional energy at itself, sexual energy as well.

So there’s autoerotism.

The child is sexually attracted to itself and the child falls in love with itself. All the emotional energy goes into the self.

This is known as primary narcissism.

And it, for example, facilitates the formation of a coherent self, a process known as constellation or integration and so on and so forth.

Later on in life, the child takes the same mental energy, the same emotional energy known as cathexis.

So the child takes this mental energy and redirects it rather than invests it in itself.

The child redirects it to the outside.

And this is the primordial foundation of object relations.

So rather than fall in love with himself, he falls in love with another person.

Rather than being sexually attracted to itself, he becomes sexually attracted to another person.

So there’s a redirection of this energy.

Now, if the child gets stuck at the developmental phase, for example, if the child cannot complete separation and individuation, then the child remains enmeshed, remains engulfed and consumed by the maternal figure usually.

And so the child cannot, the child having become an adult, cannot really tell the difference between itself and the rest of the world.

And so he remains stuck in a narcissistic phase.

Healthy narcissism, in healthy people, is a remnant of the original self-directed emotional energy that allows you to maintain or stabilize or regulate a sense of self-worth and especially self-confidence and self-esteem.

The difference between primary narcissism, which is healthy, and secondary narcissism, which is pathological, is that primary narcissism operates on the reality principle.

It recognizes your limitations, for example, and your strengths, it adheres to boundaries.

Primary narcissism realizes where you stop and other people begin.

So primary narcissism is grounded in reality.

It has something called reality testing.

While secondary pathological narcissism is grounded in fantasy.

It’s an extended fantasy defense gone awry.

So secondary narcissists impairs the reality testing.

Narcissists cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. That’s why narcissists actually never gaslight. They never lie. That’s not true.

Psychopaths do this.

Narcissists believe their own nonsense. They believe their own confabulation, confabulations and stories and promises. They never, they, they promise, they believe the promise. They introduce you into their fantasy because they believe that fantasy is a reality.

So there is an enormous confusion to severely impaired reality testing with narcissism.

And there are no boundaries. The narcissist has no boundaries because he has no self.

So the narcissist internalizes you. He introjects you. He converts you into what I call a snapshot, an internal object.

And then he continues to interact with the internal object as if you have never existed.

So even if you’re married to a narcissist, he would take a snapshot of you. Then he would Photoshop it. He would idealize it. Then he would continue to interact with the snapshot and ignore you completely.

You will come to the narcissist’s attention if you deviate from the snapshot, if you diverge from the snapshot, if you challenge the snapshot, undermine the snapshot with your independence, with your agency, with your personal autonomy.

And that would enrage the narcissist because he would feel threatened and he would then devalue you and discard you. He would consider you an enemy.

The narcissist prefers the internal object to you always because you don’t exist. External objects don’t exist for the narcissist as far as the narcissist is concerned.

So secondary narcissism is fantasy.

Primary narcissism is reality.

And because you are grounded in reality with primary narcissism, you are self efficacious.

In other words, you’re capable of obtaining positive outcomes and securing favorable results in your environment, acting in your environment and on your environment.

Primary narcissism, reality-based self-efficacy, the ability to operate successfully and to make your life a success.

Primary narcissism, fantasy, impaired reality testing, therefore an inability to operate in reality and on reality in a way which secures good outcomes, favorable outcomes.

So narcissists are failures by definition.

Even when they are temporarily successful, they’re going to destroy everything. They’re very self destructive because not because not necessarily because they’re malicious or malevolent, but because they can’t read the reality properly. They can’t read social cues, sexual cues, other people. They have no empathy. They’re devotional reality. It’s a delusional disorder.

But there are also psychopathic narcissists, right?

Yes, about 3% of narcissists are what we call malignant narcissists. They are psychopathic narcissists and these are narcissists who obtain narcissistic supply by deploying psychopathic methods, psychopathic techniques, psychopathic strategies.

So they are likely to be, for example, reckless and defiant and contumacious opposed to authority and impulsive when in the pursuit of narcissistic supply, then they’re going to trample over people. They’re going to abuse people, exploit people, ruin people, hurt people, you name it.

Just in order to obtain supply.

The psychopath is going to do exactly the same thing, but in order to obtain sex or money or power or access or luxury life.

So psychopathic goal oriented.

The narcissist is also goal oriented, but he has only one goal and that is narcissistic supply.

So it would be good actually at this point.

I was going to get into the phase, have you go into the phases, but since you ended there, can you tell us what is narcissistic supply?

The narcissist inhabits a fantasy, as I said, and his fantasy is founded on a cognitive distortion.

The cognitive distortion is known as grandiosity. It is an inflated, fantastic self image and self perception that is counterfactual, defies reality and is extremely difficult to uphold because reality keeps challenging the grandiose self image, obviously.

So the narcissist needs you to tell him that his self image is accurate, that his false self is not false, that if he considers himself to be a genius, he is a genius or handsome, he is handsome.

He needs external, he needs input from the outside to regulate and to stabilize his belief in the fiction that underlies his life, the fiction known as grandiosity.

In clinical terms, we say that the narcissist regulates his sense of self worth via input from the outside.

And this input is known as narcissistic supply.

If you could just describe what you call the three S’s and also the difference between narcissistic supply and sadistic supply.

Actually there are four S’s.

The narcissist, first of all, there’s this myth that the narcissist is attracted to specific kinds of partners. That is not true. The narcissist couldn’t care less if you’re empathic because he doesn’t do empathy. He couldn’t care less if you’re kind because he’s not kind. And he couldn’t care less if you’re offering intimacy because he wouldn’t know what to do with it.

So all this self aggrandizing mythology that if you have fallen victim to a narcissist, it means that you’re empathic and kind and amazing and angelic. That’s utter sheer unmitigated nonsense.

Narcissists are promiscuous when it comes to the selection of partners. They are partner promiscuous.

In other words, they go with anyone.

If you give the narcissist, if you provide the narcissist with two out of four S’s, the narcissist would willingly come up with you and become your intimate partner. And the four S’s are sex, services, personal assistant, chauffeur, cook, cleaning lady, so sex services, supply, sadistic and narcissistic and safety to allay, to reduce, to mitigate the abandonment anxiety.

If you provide your narcissist with two out of these four, you could be a psychopath. The narcissist would be with you. You could be another narcissist and the narcissist would end up having a couple with you.

It’s a myth. It’s a myth that there is tight constancy.

Sadistic supply is the narcissist’s realization that he is about to experience pain and punishment by inflicting hurt and abusing another person.

So it’s not what people think. People think that sadistic supply means that the narcissist enjoys inflicting pain on other people. That is sadism.

The sadist, the classical sadist, derives gratification from humiliating other people, from inflicting pain on other people, from torturing other people. That’s the classical sadist, not the narcissist. The narcissist derives anticipatory gratification, the joy of anticipation. He knows that if he hurts you, you’re going to hurt him back. If he misbehaves, you’re going to punish him. And it is the anticipation of this masochistic pleasure that I call sadistic supply.

The narcissist acts sadistically, tortures you, hurts you, causes you pain, humiliates you, shames you, debases and degrades you. All this is true. All this is true.

But he does this in order to make sure to experience masochistic punishment.

So this is sadistic supply.

Nastistic supply we discussed. It’s the attention granted by other people that allows the narcissist to regulate his internal advantage.

So this is a good time to get into, I mean, I really, when I first heard your, one of your lectures on the stages, the, is it five or six stages? I can never remember. It feels like more, but it’s so phantasmic, the whole experience when you have a relationship with a narcissist that you don’t realize how, how surreal it is until you try to explain it to someone else. And then you realize there’s no language to really explain what it is, but you have created that language.

So if you could just kindly take us through the different stages.

You mean the shared fantasy to the discard.

No, the whole thing is a shared fantasy. The whole thing is normal. It’s a shared fantasy. It has seven, it has seven stages.

I will not go right now to each and every one of the stages. I’ll describe in broad brushstrokes, what’s happened.

When the narcissist decides that you could be an intimate partner, the narcissist love bones you. He love bones you.

And the aim is to create something which I call the Hall of Mirrors.

What the narcissist does, he idealizes you and then he exposes you to your own idealization.

So you begin to see yourself through the narcissist gaze and it’s very intoxicating and it’s very addictive because you see yourself through the narcissist as an ideal figure, super intelligent, drop dead gorgeous, amazing, amazing, unprecedented. And it’s, you know, no one can resist this. It’s irresistible.

So the narcissist gets you addicted to his gaze and he maintains a monopoly on this gaze.

So if you were to break up with the narcissist, you would no longer be able to see yourself as this idealized God like figure and you become addicted.

At that point, the narcissist draws you in. He uses, he leverages the love for me and the Hall of Mirror effect and he draws you in.

The Hall of Mirror works because the narcissist sees you the way a mother sees her child. A mother idealizes her newborn baby. When the mother has a new baby, she idealizes the baby. That way she wouldn’t survive motherhood. It’s a very onerous, onerous task. So she idealizes the baby and she loves the baby unconditionally.

The narcissist does the same. He idealizes you and then he offers you unconditional love.

In other words, the narcissist becomes your mother.

But for this to work, you need to become a child.

If the narcissist is your mother, you need to become a child to benefit from this.

So the narcissist regresses you, infantilizes you, forces you to become an infant so that then you can regard the narcissist as your mother and get attached to the narcissist and bond with the narcissist as if the narcissist were your mother.

At that moment, it’s too late for you. You have been infected. You are corralled and there’s no way for you to live now because you have a second childhood with a mother figure and you’re being idealized and you fell in love with your own idealized image. You’re experiencing intoxicating self-love.

Now the narcissist leverages these newfound assets and compels you to become his own mother. He converts you to a mother figure.

So now there is dual mothership. He is your mother and you are his mother and you have entered together the shared fantasy.

This is the essence of the shared fantasy.

Within the shared fantasy, the narcissist creates a snapshot of you, creates an internal object that represents you in his mind and introduces you. This internal object, because you are his mother, this internal object is totally idealized. Mother is all good. Mother is always all good.

So your representation in the narcissist’s mind is all good because you are mother.

But life compels you, forces you to deviate from the snapshot, to divert from the snapshot. You have your own friends, you have your own family, you make your own decisions, you go on a trip, you have your own job. I mean, you deviate from the snapshot. This frustrates the narcissist the way he used to be frustrated as a baby with mother. So it frustrates the narcissist.

And so he begins to get angry. He begins to be aggressive. And then he converts you in his mind to a frustrating bad object. He transitions you from all good mother to all bad mother, a frustrating mother, a hateful mother, and in other words, an enemy, a persecutory object.

So then he needs to separate from you. The whole exercise, the shared fantasy, is about reenacting the narcissist’s childhood and allowing him to separate successfully. So he has converted you into a persecretary object, an enemy, and now he can safely separate from you because you’re bad, you’re a bad object. So he devalues you.