The child approaches the mother.

This is called reparation.

It’s very common in the Aposhmo phase.

The child approaches the mother, reparation, but keeps being rebuffed one way or another.

The mother is self-absorbed. She’s narcissistic. The mother is volatile and lebile. She’s a borderline. The mother is no longer with us. She’s floating somewhere in the upper stratosphere. She’s psychotic. Whatever the reason may be, the child keeps being rejected, frustrated, abandoned, neglected.

The reparation keeps failing and the child develops a profound sense of helplessness, impotence and threat.

And they become dominant.

At some point, they become dominant.

How can you survive like this?

You can’t.

You need to defend against this.

Because if this is your state of mind, you’d rather not have a mind.

So this creates complex defenses.

And these defenses associate a mirror representation of the disinvestment in the mother with an unconscious identification with the dead mother.

So on the one hand, the child withdraws from the mother, disinvets, disinvests in her, deep affects, takes back his emotions. Doesn’t attempt anymore to bond with her, to attach to her. Doesn’t regard her as a secure base.

On the one hand, on the other hand, he still needs her. He still loves her. He still depends on her. So he internalizes her.

And a compromise.

I will not attempt to connect with my mother in reality because that’s painful, that’s hurtful, that’s frustrating.

Instead I will attempt to connect with my mother internally.

As I control the internal space, I will not be hurt. Or at least I can minimize the pain.

This is of course the narcissistic solution. Isn’t it?

Snapshotting, introjection.

And the result of this process is the psychic murder of the mother.

There’s no hatred involved, it’s just necessity.

The child needs to kill the mother.

By internalizing her, he also objectifies her. She becomes an internal object. And he takes away her life.

Because his control over the internal object is so total, she is no longer alive in any meaningful sense except by his permission.

He becomes godlike. Grandiosity.

Now of course it’s mother, so the child cannot do any of this explicitly, aggressively.

The maternal affliction prohibits any aggressive expression.

If you reject mother, if you reject mother. If you tell mother I’m going to kill you, if you aggress against mother, she’s going to withdraw further.

This would guarantee maternal detachment.

And this is something the child doesn’t want.

So it’s all hush, hush. It’s all very secret.

The whole process of internalizing the mother, interjecting the mother, killing the mother inside the mind, all this is done secretly.

The child learns to keep secrets from mother. He learns to construct an alternative universe which is inhabited by mother and interject a maternal figure, but the real mother has no access to this alternative universe.

So the child becomes solipsistic.

You’re beginning to see the rudiments of pathological narcissism.

That’s why I consider the dead mother complex to be super critical in narcissism, way more than many of the suggestions of Freud.

That’s why I keep mentioning the dead mother in many of my videos.

The pattern of object relations is destroyed and instead there’s what we call peripheral cathexes, getting attached to people who are not threatening, who are not significant, who are not meaningful, sources of narcissistic supply.

There’s a hole in the middle, some black, all-consuming, sucking hole, and you surround its periphery with people who cannot hurt you because they are not meaningful. They can’t do anything to you. They don’t have the power. You don’t give them the power. You don’t experience emotions or empathy. You use them, their instruments, you objectify them the same way you have been objectified by your mother.

This silent destructiveness doesn’t allow the child to re-establish object relations with people.

He cannot overcome the conflict. He cannot, the internal conflict with his mother, he cannot open the way to connections that would strengthen his ability to overcome the conflict. He creates a shield that prevents access to the conflict.

So the child breaks in two.

In one part of the child there is an unresolved conflict with mother and in the other part of the child there’s a fake false version which interacts with people who would never be mother, who would never be given the powers that mother had.

The child is trying to heal the first part, the part involving the conflict by teaming up with maternal substitutes, with stand-in mothers, you, the intimate partners of the narcissist.

So the only thing that endures in the adult narcissist’s life is a dull psychic pain, some feeling of hollowness and emptiness, an incapacity to bond or attach or love any object, no effects. I can’t begin to tell you how it feels.

It feels like you have to hold yourself together all the time actively or you will disintegrate into molecules and be spread over the floor and never put yourself back together.

It’s a constant Humpty Dumpty situation.

Hatred, hatred is as impossible as love by the way.

Instead of hatred, there’s devaluation.

The narcissist, the child who grows up to become a narcissist under the dead mother, this child doesn’t deal with love or hate. He deals with functions, she can serve me, she can’t serve me. And if she can’t serve me, she’s persecutory, she’s frustrating me on purpose, she’s the enemy, but there’s no hatred involved. It’s just okay, she’s useless, let’s discard her.

And this is what many victims can’t wrap their minds around.

They are not sufficiently important to be hated. As they are not sufficiently significant to be loved, they are nothing.

They are buttons, they are instruments, they are tools, they are functions, they are obstructions, they are narratives.

And victims don’t understand, they’ve never been three dimensional to the narcissist.

The narcissist is incapable of deep emotions, hatred included, is capable of envy and anger.

But hatred is the opposite of love.

The principle of ambivalence, narcissist is incapable of the former as he is incapable of the latter.

He discards you coldly and calculatingly. Your piece of trash at the end of the process.

Who hates trash?

So the narcissist feels that it is impossible to receive without feeling obliged to give back.

Now I know that this flies in the face of everything you are being told by self-styled experts.

Notice the self-styled part.

Narcissists are transactional. I just said that you are nothing but instruments and functions and so on.

Narcissist makes a deal with you.

So in the love bombing phase, the narcissist will make a deal with you, I’ll be your mother, you’ll be my mother, the dual mother thing.

Later he will offer you money or freedom, unbridled freedom to look as you please with whoever you please.

It’s also a form of bribe. The narcissist bribes you into being in his life because he grew up in an environment where to obtain his mother’s attention, let alone love, he needed to perform.

He has the same expectations from you and from himself. It’s a deal. It’s a business.

That’s why narcissists are shocked when their former intimate partners are angry.

They don’t understand what have they done wrong. There was a deal, they kept their end of the bargain.

Why is the other party angry?

Because narcissists are incapable of introducing into the calculus of interpersonal relationships emotions, for example.

So they, narcissists don’t want to owe anything, not even masochistic pleasure, nothing.

And if there is a situation where they receive more than they give, they devalue you.

Yes, I know it flies in the face of everything you’ve heard.

So everything you’ve heard is wrong.

One of the main reasons that the narcissist devalues you is he begins to feel that you are superior to him, that in some way you have advantages over him.

Maybe you are more regulated, maybe you’re more self efficacious and maybe you give him more than he’s able to give you.

And so he is in your debt. He owes you, which is a position of inferiority.

The dead mother is omnipresent, but she is, she kind of seized the child. She seizes the child. She makes the child the captive of his warning for her.

The absent mother, the dead mother believes that if she makes the child, if she forces the child or coerces the child to grieve for her, to miss her, that’s the surest way of keeping him around.

It’s a form of emotional blackmail.

So she fosters in the child prolonged grief by withdrawing, by avoiding, by neglecting, by ignoring, by chastising, and castigating, and humiliating, shaming, and blackmailing, you owe me, if you don’t do this, I will die.

All these techniques are intended to produce in the child. The sense that mother is tantalizingly close, but unattainable and the resulting grief.

Grief is as strong as love and as strong as hate in binding people together and the only mechanism of attachment the dead mother trusts.

She’s been grieving all her life and she’s attached to herself. She’s narcissistic, remember?

And this clinical picture develops against the background of the child’s inability to grasp the reasons for it.

So the whole world looks totally crazy, senseless, arbitrary, and consequently menacious.

We mentioned, I mentioned at the beginning that there’s depression, infantile depression. There’s a loss of meaning, the feeling of inability to repair the mourned object, to awaken the lost desire and passion to connect with this object.

The mourning is not only for the lost mother, the mourning is for the lost potential to have bonded with mother and the lost potential to have become who you could have become.

It’s multiple layers of mourning which are replicated to the letter in relationships with narcissists.

And sometimes there are some significant realizations that displace the source of the conflict into the external world.

The mother’s desire becomes inaccessible compared to what the child believes that he has observed and he blames a failure of subjective omnipotence in relationships. He blames himself for having failed to bond with mother or to attach with mother.

And he tries to compensate for this because it’s an intolerable feeling.

When the child experiences guilt and shame for having failed to make mother love him, he reinforces his omnipotence in other areas.

He says, okay, maybe I failed with mother, but I’m a genius. Narcism is compensatory also in this sense.

Repression erases the memory traces of the mother’s touch, her smell, how good she feels, any contact with her.

And the child’s cathexia with her before the mourning, the sudden end to this forgotten relationship.

Repression sets in.

Repression is so massive in such children that they become dissociative. They learn to repress not only this, but generally they repress memories. They repress life itself because life is painful. Memory is threatening. Emotions are deadly, lethal.

So repression and dissociation becomes dominant mechanisms in such people.

It is repression. It is a way to bury the mother alive.

Even when repression and dissociation demolish everything, even when they demolish her own memory, her tomb in Andrei Grin’s words, even when repression and dissociation eradicate her past existence and anything the child has had with her, it’s a price worth paying.

Because what Winnicott called “Holding” has collapsed. The object is encased, encased within a firewall.

And then the whole thing is cast into outer oblivion and darkness, aka unconscious, not traces left of it.

The identification then is not with the mother because the mother is gone in every possible way. She’s been killed and buried and her tomb was desecrated and everything was burned to the ground, scorched earth policy. It’s the only way the child could cope with his pain and hurt and impotence.

So what’s left?

A hole, a hole, a vacuum in the shape of the mother.

The disinvestment, the de-café, the withdrawal, the avoidance, the disconnection, the detachment, they leave a trace behind which is not a trace of the mother but a placeholder where the mother should have been.

It’s a hole in the shape of the mother.

And the absence of all meaningful reference points is very important.

The modification of the maternal attitudes is inexplicable. The child can’t explain to himself why am I being rejected, suddenly ignored, hated even, and chattering. Can’t wrap his mind around this.

And this inexplicability, this mystery leads to all sorts of questions which arouse feelings of guilt aggravated by secondary defenses displaced into elements and other people.

I mean, the child is flailing about trying desperately to solve this conundrum, which is unsolvable, of course, because it’s not the child’s fault.

To feel guilty and at fault and responsible for the mother’s behavior is a grandiose defense, even I would say a bit psychotic.

So any attempt to block problems not governed by repression of this untenable situation, this provokes significant pathological reactions. It’s major etiopology.

The purpose of these defenses is to keep the ego alive or somehow coherent and functioning, although this often fails.

Narcissistic children, for example, don’t have a functioning ego. To some extent, borderlines are the compromised ego.

But there is a desperate attempt to keep the ego alive through a secondary hatred of the mother.

But of course, as I just said, narcissists are incapable of hatred, which is precisely why this defense fails.

There’s a frenetic, unquenchable search for maternal love substitutes, for example, pleasures, attempts to find meaning in displacements, in other things. There’s an attempt to this kind of crazy race to reanimate the dead mother, to get her interested, to distract her, to seduce her sex, remember, to give her back the taste for life, to undo her mourning and grieving, to say, you know, “Mommy, don’t grieve. Don’t mourn. I’m here. Am I not a reason to be happy and to feel pleasure? To breathe into her by any means possible, artificial if necessary, the joy of living. And then to compete with the object of mourning in a kind of precautious triangulation. Ignore the reason you’re mourning. Look at me.

The dead mother complex is a powerful and intense element, and it affects all the systems of the psyche. And that includes fantasy defenses, attempts to make life, the world, intelligible, competitive relations with other objects, sudden mourning periods, reawakening of the chains, and so on and so forth.

There is a kind of apocalyptic sense, this kind of impending catastrophe, because the child feels that he has to retaliate against the maternal object.

And the child undulates, oscillates between indifference, because the mother is gone somehow, and the terror of knowing that he’s about to conflict with mother.

The fantasy takes him away from this conflict, but the fantasy itself involves maternal elements, so reminders.

The Oedipus complex is an example, by the way. I don’t want to go into this. There’s important rage in such a child. There’s paralysis. He’s helpless against the violence inside him, against his own aggression. It’s an intensified feeling of emptiness. The most deleterious effects on everything that makes a human human.

And Ray Green hypothesized the destiny of the primary object as a framing structure for the ego, hiding the negative hallucination of the mother. He said that the dead mother complex demonstrates the failure of this process, forcing its representations into a painful vacuity, obstructing the capacity to bind together in any preconscious thought pattern. The dead mother complex opposes hot castration anxiety, links to the vicissitudes of object relations, which can be threatened with corporal mutilation.

And this is all converted into a cold anxiety, which is linked with losses suffered on a narcissistic level, negative hallucination, flat psychosis, dull morning, resulting in the clinical treatment of negativity.

End quote. It is a dead mother that creates dead children who become dead inside adults. Death is intergenerational, transmitted intergenerational.

Not so life. Life requires effort. Life is a project. Death is a default.