The concept of taking oneself as the love object is a perverted form of sexuality with its own psychic agency. If we consider the ego as the reservoir of libido, connected and oscillating between subject and object. The more one absorbs, the more the object loses. The withdrawal of libido from objects and self-preoccupation with the subject’s ego becomes inflated and narcissistic. Narc operates within a dual activation with contradictory tendencies.
- Seeks individuality at all costs
- Can’t live outside the state of fusion
Being in love
The person strip shimself of libido to the benefit of the love object, who is admired and overestimated, whilst the subject is diminished and devalued. Love is a feeling of elation, via narc projection onto each other, basking in the narc admiration. They share a state of fused exaltation that enhances the value of both, which excuses anything, even crimes of passion and emotional/physical abuse. The love object acts as a twofold mirror of oneself, whereby one may belittle oneself to accentuate the grandeur of one’s own reflection. Narcissism as an agency remains constant, infinite and limitless, while the libidinal charge (instinctual impulse ) oscillates, depending on the response of the object. narc has its own instinctual energy, which is in constant conflict with reality and sometimes opposes the ego rather than supports it. The reality principle is rejected and denied by the maintenance of an illusion that verges on delusion. The predominance of adolescent characteristics and narc dominance over the ego, which holds contempt for the central agency (Self), whose task is to activate and integrate the whole personality.
The ego repeats a behaviour, a repetition compulsion, where its achievement remains incomplete, thwarted at all times, trauma linked to an earlier ego stage, constituting an irreparable narcissistic wound. The ego lives with a continued fear of instinctual impulse and spontaneity, like a death instinct, always guarding and libidinally defiant. narc is an undifferentiated primary state of fusion, longing to be loved/admired, seeking narc gratification and clinging to narc equilibrium, unable to transition to a more mature stage. The child needs help and support from a caring mother for a crumbling narc world, when the child has suffered a narc injury and deflation. The child looks for the mother’s confirmation of their specialness, the excited and expectant gaze in her eyes, and recovers narc sustenance. The child is able to gradually adapt and conquer a new universe whilst preserving narcotic integrity, retaining a feeling of omnipotence.
The difficulties and challenges the child faces in their developmental tasks are frightening, unknown, and uncertain, and they have to take on new responsibilities with the enormous task of economic/libidinal restructuring. The child’s growing instinctual prowess and demands conflict with his sexual immaturity, and he is unable to gain narc gratification as before. The horror of an escalating and expanding world with greater responsibilities is contradictory to narc gratification, security, and control. The ego must receive a narcissistic stamp of approval and permission to resume and move into a new stage in a new, modified form/adaptation. The narc agency utilises the libido to gain narc satisfaction and instant gratification. The idea within analysis is to increase self-access and investment, relying less on superego demands and prohibitions for safety and security, thereby allowing more libido for the ego to grow stronger and more robust, enabling a transition into greater maturity. The ego has to integrate strivings with narcissistic approval of its contents and successful synthesis with instinctual forces. Increased anxiety is attributed to the more threatening instinctual tension, breakdown of flight defence, with a wish to remain asleep, inert and stuck in the previous stage ( nard withdrawal ). The ego becomes the persecutor and rejects impulses, stops the flow of all excitation, to rid itself at all costs. The child returns to a fantasy imago (pre-injury image) linked to the satisfying object, self-sacrificing impulses, and growth.
The child’s remedy is to curb instinctual impulses and preserve narc state.
Anal Sadistic
There are no separate objects, only substances, where the child reacts to any separation as a serious threat and traumatic. Always complaining, unable to satisfy, and cannot bring reality into their object relations. They demand and want instant gratification, with a black and white all or nothing attitude/thinking, caught in prenatal narcissistic perception. A mode/adaptation they refuse to surrender, with no compromise or submission to reality, marked by lack of pragmatism and ability to act ( Dysproxia). unable to cathect developmental stages and complete object mastery. unrealistic, insatiable and excessive character, unable to make the most of situations, with obsessive craving and exhaustive quest for narc supply, with no obstacles to their inordinate desires. They create a fantasy bridge between longing and fulfilment, erratic, uncontrolled behaviour and lack of willpower. Their love life is superficial, immature, intensely experienced, and driven to seek satisfaction with a series of unrelated, undefined objects. invariably disappointed, unconsciously driven with hope of fulfilment, projecting ego ideal onto objects, seen as the obliging mirror (narcissistic). Freedom becomes the right to distance and dissociate from others, and protection from outside interference, regardless of past history or involvement. Grave difficulty in forming demands, even if perfectly justified, prefers spontaneous gratification. Incapable of refusing, setting boundaries, sating one’s needs, with insatiable giving and intolerance of receiving (selfish). Giving and receiving are the same, and take place within unconscious fusion, unable to comprehend the principle of exchange due to lack of values and separation. Can be greedy and clamorous, fiercely demanding satisfaction and yet unable to accept it due to their immaturity.
The spoiled child missed the optimal quality of oral frustration, as well as the trauma that would have enabled him to acquire a response to his frustration. The anal component has not developed, is not freed from guilt, and is unable to integrate strength and firmness. Received narc gratification, not oral gratification, stuck with impotent rage, stamps his feet, demands an easy cure and then refuses it. The anal component, leading to mastery of the object, restores his narc integrity. The anal character uses power, fear or oral dependency, and strives to make the object dependent on them. Satisfaction is given by him and depends on him, a master and slave dynamic. Defiance by saying “no”, he breaks, rebels, and tears all that passes in their way. A radical distortion of reality, where insecurity is compensated for by the support they obtain via social compliance and admiration ( narc supply), does not try to love or be loved, only to dominate/be dominated, as he can’t validate a missing intrinsic self. augmented and empowered by belonging, being an important member of a group of similar others, with the same beliefs, values and virtues. They need and crave an absolute enemy, suitable for visceral and hated projections. An insane hive, captured individuals, who revel in their collective power and need to destroy their imagined enemy.
With analysis, one can strip away the surface and penetrate into increasingly archaic layers, in inverse order of regression. Analysis mobilises two different dimensions of the psyche’s awareness of contents of analysis and the emergence/abreaction of such contents. For instance, content may be in an oedipal state, but the mode that emerges is a narcissistic emotional climate, a pre-ambivalent phase. As treatment unfolds, the emotive atmosphere can become intense and distressing. Narc needs an instinctual vehicle to express itself, which is difficult to distinguish and evaluate. The narc harbours a nostalgic memory of elation, preambivalent and non-instinctual. Depending on the mode in which content emerges from the unconscious, the same material takes on two different, contradictory meanings. We know that the Oedipus complex has two faces, positive and negative, dual in nature, in which a dominant stance toward one’s parents may coexist with an underlying opposite stance. As development becomes conflcited, narc manifestation and instinctual impulses can follow two parallel courses, one noisy and turbulent and the other limpid and calm. The child isolates these two elements of his object cathexis and creates a double image, one all good and one all bad. projecting onto the same parent both his guilt-laden oedipal impulse and his preambivalent narcissism, which enable him to indulge in pregenital pleasures while expressing his oedipal desires. The child must overcome great obstacles before he can synthesise his instinctual satisfactions and narc longings, as his uninstinctual strivings are fraught with conflict and fear. His mother, who serves as his narc vehicle and surface of projection, confronts the child with almost insurmountable problems as he has no well-defined imagoes at his disposal.
Ego development follows a dual track, narcissistic and instinctual and as each phase of development unfolds, it will be marked by the synthesis of both parallel strivings. Each impulse will be narc cathected, and each narcissistic striving will be augmented by the instinctual drive, acting as biological support. Upon the dual process of maturation, the child will be able to feel worthy in and of themself. During this long process, he will have a continued need to be valued, with a margin of difference that persists between his ego and powers, diminished and blocked by instinctual conflict. The child, therefore, needs his parents’ love and availability, which are revalidated and supported by such love with each step working towards a new personal narc integrity. Eventually, he will be able to recover on his own without needing external validation or approval from his parents. The mirror in which the child recognises his narcissism is first and foremost his mother, who confirms his specialness ( narcissism) through love.
The child’s desire is aimed at the same object that is also the target of his aggression
The child’s total personality is strengthened and enriched when he assimilates his narcissistic, perfected self-image, reflected by the object and confirmed and enhanced by it. If this collaboration breaks down and the entire process becomes conflicted, the narc frutsration and disappointment the child suffers can give rise to guilt in object relations, but also revives conflict between the ego and the ego ideal, creating a gulf between the two which may never be bridged. The consequence of this deficiency of narc confirmation is that the child is no longer able to accept narc gratification or solicit it in an effective manner; the repeated and ceaseless attempts he nonetheless makes in that direction are doomed to failure. which inevitably blocks his psychological development. He remains immature, and projects blame onto external objects, present, pas or future. The intensity of the narc injury can lead to narc hypertrophy. The greater the narcissistic subject, the greater will be the discrepancy between narc demands and his feeling of impotence, and the more he will need narc confirmation and enhancement from them around him. The client needs to have a total rejection of a traumatic event /fixation, ceasing to relive it in the moment and to progress to a more mature autonomous narc gratification. process can be considered complete when the client attains one’s own integrity, the parent of oneself, with one’s own agency operating to choose one’s needs and desires.
Among the criteria of successful analysis is the client’s capacity to enjoy leisure, socially adapted activity and narc self-gratification. One who can indulge in mental and physical relaxation during vacation has better adjusted relationships with oneself and others. A compromise between the ego and narcissistic gratification, giving over to an elative narc freedom, not one via promoting and pleasing others. The goal of analysis is the restoration of the ego through normalisation of narcissistic cathexis, where the client must undergo a relentless and objective investigation, if their ego is to become healthy, with narcissism remaining intact. Analysis unfolds under the sign of frustration, interpretation of instinctual impulses, where one’s agency should be exempt from such frustration. Narcissism cannot be integrated without being revalued; in the unconscious, a lack of value is experienced as a castration. The individual suffers from loss of sexual autonomy, lacking narcissism, wholeness and unity, leading to feeling impotent and inadequate.
A client starts out from a deep regression and arrives at the synthesis of his narcissistic and instinctual drives, which in the unconscious is acquired with acquiring the “Phallus”. In the course of analysis, attended by fierce resistance and difficulty, the phallus is hard to acquire. A strong sense of guilt is attached to the recovery of the phallus (narc integroty ), as it usually encompasses some transgression and betrayal of parental dictates and beliefs. Narc striving turns towards the absolute, the limitless. No reality can stand in its way when narc achievement is accompanied by a feeling of elation, preambivalent, unconsciousness, and free from guilt. The child manages to preserve their narcissistic omnipotence by projecting it onto their deified parents, represented by the phallus ( in the unconscious). The phallus does not mean being a man or woman; sexual distinction disappears. It represents existing fully and wholly in a narc sense, being what one is.
Dialectical Process
Narcissism is originally non-instinctual and preambivalent, and only becomes confluent with instinctual development. This psychosexual development unfolds in relation to parallel guilt, attached to the anal component, ego ideal and superego. libidinal energy will always be attached to the least conflicted of the two ( narcissism and object relations). A client may accept castartion at the instinctual level in order to obtain narc gratification or may forgo narc gratification to obtain instinctual gratification. At the oral stage, a child enveloped by the breast achieves such unity, at the anal stage, one obtains it via mastery of the object, and at the genital stage, via coitus and union of two complementary partners. A sign of narcissistic confirmation is the continued need to project it onto others in order to love oneself as an object; they will have to do so via the intermediary of an idealised figure, through the vehicle of an ego ideal. Each time a child is confronted by an instinctual impulse that has not been enhanced and integrated, the need for narc confirmation is renewed, as well as the pain of narc injury/wound. Reminded of paradise lost in contrast to their early narc omnipotence, left with a searing sense of inadequacy and insignificance. It’s the opposite of elative happiness, the child feels when the parents’ love enhances their instinctual gratification. The depressive relives his narc injury with severe intensity, a primal trauma experienced when the thrust of positive narc charge was intense or frustrated with a crushing. annihilating blow. Its lack of validation leads to a negative cathexis of life, felt as a continuous malaise. When not properly integrated into the instinctual system, narcissism remains infantile, unadapted and anachronistic. The ego is full of shameful weakness, mental defection, despondency, disgrace and disgust. The more successful the narc confirmation, the smaller the discrepancy between ego and ego ideal.
A deep feeling of shame, the harsh, inadequate ego feels before its ego ideal.
the feeling of deep distress, total discouragement, experienced as a break in life’s momentum; time has congealed, stopped dead, and is at an impasse. Unexpected happiness is in harmony with the demands of the ego ideal, but instinctual conflicts prevent them from complying with the demands. The gulf that exists between the ego ideal and instinctual maturity, a gulf the ego is blamed for, is what causes depression. The depressive craves love but will derive a substitute narc pleasure from alcohol, drugs, gambling, mystic beliefs, and sometimes perversion. Caught in a continuous state of need, yet regularly turning to the same fulfilling means for relief, they will create a special bond, a closeness with the substitute object, in a transcendental quality of enormous magnitude beyond its true functional value. Depression is a disorder of the ego, where the ego is a passive victim of the painful effect of lost narc integrtiy. The tension between the ego and the ego ideal leads to a virtual decathexis, or disintegration, of the ego, which is deprived of the necessary energy to perform bodily ego functions. The narc agency becomes the enslaver, prison guard of the ego, exerting continuous pressure on it to the point of crushing it; the ego’s sole concern then will be to recover the lost narc ideal, trying to prove itself worthy before the agency, but it will never be affirmed.
The primary object (mother ) should help the child, via narc confrimation, to continue forth into the object world without serious damage to their self-esteem. If they fail in this task, the child projects his absolute primary narcissism wholly onto the ego ideal and returns to prenatal narcissism. At one level, the depressive compulsive seeks an object, a never-ending quest, but at a deeper, more archetypal level, he rejects objects, is fearful and threatened by them, their lack of instinctual maturity makes them incapable of tolerating difference in narc values between themselves and others, and can only attach to looking glass objects. similarity in values, personality, and maturity. The depressive is under dual domination of the ego ideal and maternal conflict, two positions at different topographical levels ( narc and instinctual). leading to psudo maascochism.The aggression of the depressive sometimes breaks forth in explosive, volatile outbursts in an attempt at instinctual abreaction, doomed to ceaseless repetition without ever being able to extricate oneself from the impasse. The depressive does not directly accuse the object of committing a specific act, but is, in some respect, open to criticism, of being inadequate from an arbitrary point of view.
The ego appears in all its nakedness, where ego impotence is blamed for the wound.
The ego is overruled by the ego ideal and exposed to the original narcissistic injury /wound, which reappears once the projection is cancelled out. The object choice is narcissistic, and the loss of such an object always corresponds with narc wounding. The subject loves the object narcissistically, as a mirror, and projects their narcissistic cathexis onto the object. Owing to the gratification derived from the narcissistic object, they are able to achieve a satisfactory narcissistic equilibrium; hence, the object becomes irreplaceable. The subject complains of feeling impoverished, inadequate, narcissistic, where object relations take on an anal-sadistic form (possession, loss, quantitative factors). The symptoms of gloom and revolt against narc decathexis affect the subject in an atmosphere of overwhelming annihilation. They can only stand by as they are stripped naked, as the ego crumbles and stops functioning. The ego is alone, frightened and trembling, without any narc reserves, awaiting revenge and attack from the narc agency.
