The second mechanism is introjective, introjective identification. It’s identified with an introject.

You remember, some introjects are good, perceived as good, as real. The narcissist confuses internal and external objects.

So the internal object, your representation in the narcissist is mine is more real than you and it’s good in the idealization phase. In that phase, the narcissist identifies with you, identifies with the object.

When I say identify, it’s not that he has sympathy for you or he has empathy for you. He is you. It involves processes such as assimilation, incorporation, don’t ask. It’s simply confusing his non-existent self and ego with your very much existent self and ego. He identifies with the introject, with a fantastic representation of you inside himself and he imagines you as being inside himself, being a part of himself, being an extension of himself, an organ.

So these are the two mechanisms.

Either the narcissist teleports himself, exports himself into you and becomes one with you. That’s the codependent strand in narcissism.

Many narcissists do that or he brings you into himself. He assimilates you, digests you and identifies with your representation in his mind, with your introjects and imagines that he is one with the introject or the introject is part of him.

Here’s the crux. The narcissist could not split his mother. She was all bad. She had no good or positive aspects. She was not a good enough mother.

Helen Deutsch coined the phrase false self, which Donald Winnicott later popularized.

And so maternal splitting is a crucial phase in avoiding the need to develop a false self.

Why does a narcissist develop a false self?

Because he needs to split something. He can’t split mummy. So he splits himself. So there’s false self and true self.

And that’s a temporary measure that keeps him alive. It’s a positive adaptation.

And then he meets you, comes across you, you know, and you’re perfect. You’re his intimate partner. He wants to complete the process of maternal splitting with you. That’s why he has to convert you into a mother.

He needs to finish the unfinished business, the unresolved conflict of the inability to split his original mother. He needs to split you.

We call this repetition compulsion. He needs to split you.

Now he couldn’t split his mother. She had no good aspects. So what he does in your case, he idealizes you so that you have only good aspects. You’re all good.

That allows him to regress to very early childhood. You remember the baby, what the baby does? The baby splits mummy. Mummy is all good. The baby is all bad.

Narcissus goes back to that period, believe it or not. I don’t know, six months old, one year old. He goes back to that period and he forces you to become his mummy so that he can proceed with the unfinished business of splitting.

Render you all good, render himself all bad. At that stage, you become all good. He becomes all bad.

Now, that is not a tolerable state. Even the narcissist can tolerate it.

So he begins, he begins to test you. Co-idealization, the process where he idealizes you and through this process, idealizes himself.

In projection, the process where he internalizes you and incorporates you. These are the ways in which he annexes, appropriates your goodness.

So when the narcissist meets an intimate partner, immediately it triggers the early, unfinished, unconcluded maternal splitting. He then must convert you into a mother to complete the splitting.

Splitting has several phases.

Phase one, he makes you all good, he makes himself all bad, which he couldn’t do with his original mother. His original mother was all bad.

He could not idealize her, but he idealizes you. He makes you all good, which makes him all bad. That is intolerable.

He moves to phase two.

In phase two, he uses your goodness, your alleged, imputed goodness, your idealized, non-realistic goodness, your idealized, non-realistic goodness.

Because remember, he’s interacting not with you, he’s interacting with your idealized introject in his mind. So he then uses your goodness to idealize himself.

He says to himself, if I’m with such a good, perfect, brilliant, amazing, beautiful, talented, intelligent, super incredible woman, it must mean that I’m the same. I’m also amazing, super incredible, talented as that. She would have never been with me. She would have never loved me. She would have never stayed with me had I not been equally perfect, equally brilliant, equally handsome, equally everything. So he idealizes you and then the process of idealizing you is uncomfortable because the more he idealizes you, the more he devalues himself. This is completing the classic maternal splitting, which he couldn’t do when he was one year old.

But it’s a temporary state because it’s very uncomfortable.

So what he does, he co-idealizes, he says, she’s ideal, that means I’m ideal. And then he introjects you, internalizes you, incorporates you, he metaphorically swallows you, he digests you because in primitive people, they eat the liver in the heart of warriors. They had a war and then there are prisoners of war and they eat the heart and the liver of the prisoners of war because this way they believe they can digest or absorb the courage and the bravery of the enemy combatants.

And the enemy combatants, their traits and properties reside in body organs.

The narcissist is the same with you. He internalizes you, he incorporates you because this way he can absorb your goodness and become good.

Stage one, you are all good, he is all bad.

Stage two, co-idealization, if you are all good means he is all good.

To prove this to himself, stage three, he internalizes you, he incorporates you, he swallows you, he digests you, he makes you disappear, absorbs your goodness, thereby becoming an entirely good object. He now becomes all good.

So in this process, which is an intricate dance, two steps forward, one step back and so on, he needs to test you. He needs to make sure that you are all good.

This is post-traumatic hyper vigilance. Maybe you are like his mother, maybe you are all bad, maybe you are just pretending to love him. So he needs to test you all the time. He tests you by abusing you.

This is narcissistic abuse type one. He abuses you to test you. He pushes you to the limit. He creates elaborate situations to trip you up, sets you up for failure. I want you to understand that very often this masquerades as benevolence, as love.

So someone who gives 100% of himself to you is setting you up for failure because you cannot give back 100%. Someone who is too good to be true is setting you up for failure. You cannot be that good, ever.

He sets the bar so high that you will never make it, your fail. It’s an example of testing. He puts you in situations where you will end up drunk and with another man. That’s testing.

He constantly criticizes you and challenges you. That’s testing. He wants to see, are you truly a good object?

Because his mommy deceived him. He thought his mommy loved him. He thought his mommy accepted him. He thought her love was unconditional. He was wrong.

And consequently, for the rest of his life, decades, he could not complete the splitting process and could not grow up.

Now you are his last chance, his second chance, his last chance. It is through you that he will experience parenting and mothering, proper, good enough mothering.

And to accomplish this, he needs to split you and then needs to interject you, to absorb you, to incorporate you. You need to become one. He needs to become one with a good object, but it’s very terrifying because becoming one with an object is disappearing. He needs to sacrifice himself. He’s used only to sacrificing himself. He sacrificed himself to the false self.

So he wants to sacrifice himself to you, but he wants to make sure that you’re worthy of the sacrifice, that you’re truly good. So he has to test you. When you fail his test, the whole thing reverses. He splits you again, but now you’re all bad. You’re all bad. And he avoids code evaluation because look, if you’re all bad and you’re still together, means he’s an idiot, means his judgment is poor, means he is not omniscient. If you’re all bad, it challenges the grandiosity of his false self.

So he needs to discard you. The minute you fail his tests, and they are very, very surreptitious, stealth, subtle, occult tests. You don’t even know that you’re being tested. You don’t understand what are his expectations. What does he want?

So very likely you’re going to fail. The likelihood of failure is enormous. You fail. He devalues you. He devalues you. He has to discard you because if he devalues you and you stick around, you’re challenging his grandiosity and his false self. And that is absolutely intolerable.

Okay. I hope you got the picture. I want to make, I want to finish by, as usual, mentioning literature, and this time a classic.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you know, we are so brainwashed by messages propagated, promulgated via the education system, mass media, experts, authorities, that we don’t, it’s extremely rare that we stop to think, actually, critically think. For example, we all believe that Dr. Jekyll was the victim of Mr. Hyde.

To remind you, Dr. Jekyll was a very vulnerable, well-respected, renowned doctor in the story by Stevenson. And he invented a potion, a concoction, a kind of medicine that he would swallow. And when he swallowed this medicine, he became Mr. Hyde. Not Dr. Jekyll anymore, but Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde was a psychopath, sadistic, killer, horrible man, rapist. I mean, you name it. You name it, he did it. Horrible person.

Dr. Jekyll, lover of humanity, medical doctor, savior of bodies and souls, swallows the medicine or the potion, becomes Mr. Hyde.

Exact opposite. A psychopath, if ever there was one.

So everyone says, poor Dr. Jekyll. He clearly is Mr. Hyde’s victim because he had to pay the price, of course. Once the potion wore off, he reverted to being Dr. Jekyll and he had to pay the price for the misdeeds and misconduct in criminal activities.

Mr. Hyde. So everyone says, Jekyll is Hyde’s victim. I’m saying exactly the opposite. Mr. Hyde is Dr. Jekyll’s victim because the control was with Dr. Jekyll.

Dr. Jekyll could have decided to not drink the potion. Hyde had no control over it. It was Dr. Jekyll who always invariably made the decision to manifest, actualize and realize the poor Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Hyde couldn’t help it. He was a psychopath. There’s nothing he could do about it. Dr. Jekyll could help it and he made choices and he victimized.

Hyde, Dr. Jekyll says in the book, I knew before I left the hospital that I was not straight. That despite all that was available there, nobody was sharp enough to pick up my secret and I didn’t want anyone to learn my secret.

That sounds pretty psychopathic to me.

Lamb in 1996 analyzed this argument and the complexity of the argument and he asked the question, could it be that the individual perpetrator is not blameworthy? Could it be that Mr. Hyde is actually not to be blamed?

Because you know his actions, he was Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego. His actions were not his own. They were fully controlled by Dr. Jekyll.

Dr. Jekyll took a drug that required premeditation, planning, preparation of the potion. It took a long time. It was a conscious act and he took the drug and he transformed him into Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Hyde was an addict in a way and he was created by Dr. Jekyll’s need to continue his experiment. He was an experimental creature. Hyde was a villain. He committed heinous, horrible acts. There’s no dispute in this, but who is the moral responsibility?

Dr. Jekyll recognized, knew about Hyde. He knew about Mr. Hyde. He knew that Mr. Hyde is hiding inside himself. He could not refer to Hyde as I because Hyde was, yes, an ego-alien, egosyntonic, egotistonic introject. So he disowned Hyde. He rejected Hyde. He hated Hyde. He was referring to him in third, you know, he used to call him Hyde, as though it’s not himself, but it was a part of himself.

And to have continued the experiment, inflicting untold damages over hundreds of people, strikes me how to put it gently, is extremely psychopathic.

Perhaps after all, there was not much difference between the unscrupulous, relentless, ruthless, callous, disempathic Dr. Jekyll and his mirror image Hyde.

Perhaps Hyde was Dr. Jekyll’s dark side, but definitely a part of him, an integral part of him, a perfect reflection of him.

Dr. Jekyll was Mr. Hyde in hiding. That’s all.

As Dr. Jekyll himself states in the book, I know I’m he, but he is Hyde.

Yeah, very convincing.

There was a guy called Dr. Hans Renschorn. He wrote interesting works in art history and psychiatry. He sort of conflated art history and psychiatry. And he wrote a book. He studied the art of the mentally ill, art created by the mentally ill. Bill Niedegeistes Grönken, it’s called, was published in 1923. He studied the psychology of expression. He came up with a fascinating list of six fundamental impulses regarding self-expression.

He believed that people create art in order to make contact with other people, that art is an interface, a communication interface between people like the ancient moderns.

The fifth impulse of six, he attributed to psychopaths. He said, the fifth impulse is the tendency to imitate or copy. And he said, this undeniable pleasure involved in this achievement, McGregor analyzes it in 1989. And it’s very interesting that he believes that psychopathy consists of imitation or copying.

Because when we act out, what is to imitate, to copy, is to not be ourselves. When you imitate, you are not yourself. When someone makes an impersonation of me with meaning, he is not being himself in that moment.

So imitation, copying, is denying yourself. That’s really the crux of psychopathy.

Remember what I said earlier?

Externalizing, introjects.

He, Menninger wrote in 1963, the aggressive instincts lack discrimination, lack judgment, lack perspective, lack everything but power and a destructive goal.

Ted Bundy, the serial killer, you know, he was interviewed by Stephen Michaud and Hugh Ainsworth in 1999. At least they published the interviews in 1999.

And they tried to talk to him about the murders, but he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to talk about the murders. He talked about everything under the sun, politics, history, art, you know, he was, he was, by the way, a genius. He had, as far as I remember, 160 IQ. But he wouldn’t talk about the murders.

And so the interviewers were at an impasse. They were like a dead end and didn’t know what to do.

And suddenly it occurred to them. They said to him, Ted, would you like to talk about the murders in the third person? Like it’s not you, it’s someone else.

Use he, don’t say I killed her, say he killed her.

And Bundy agreed immediately to this arrangement and opened up and discussed the murders in full detail using he, third gender pronoun.

Everything he said was clearly about himself, but it was presented in the third person, depersonalization.

Narcissists, anyone, everyone who has come across a narcissist or many psychopaths and many border lines, they talk about themselves in the third person.

They don’t say I did it. They say Wagner did it. Or Wagner is the victim of coaches in substance violence or Trump is hated. Trump would say about himself, Trump is hated. Third person.

Okay. I will take this opportunity to answer a question of yours in a single sentence and I’ll dedicate a whole video to this.

Contempt. Contempt is a driving emotion sentiment in narcissism, in psychopathy. Contempt.

It’s a crucial element of grandiosity and there’s contempt for weakness, perceived inferiority, inadequacy, emotions, vulnerabilities, neediness, clinging, attachment and bonding, empathy and altruism.

How many? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, six, seven, eight, nine, nine or 10 types of contempt?

And I will analyze this in my next video.

You have my full contempt and I wish you full recovery from this video if you made it to the end.

YouTube provides me with an amazing statistic. Half of all viewers sign off after the rant and the jokes. They are utterly uninterested in the topic.

So how can I give you my respect? Contempt. Contempt it is.

Stay tuned for the next episode.