 Question. What happens if you abandon the narcissist first, if you do the discard, if you dump the narcissist? Answer. Go to the description and click on the link. Question. What happens to the narcissist when his parents die, especially his mother? Answer. Go to the description and click on the link. And now for the trifecta. Question. What happens when the narcissist's intimate partner or best friend dies? How does the narcissist react to this? This is the topic of today's afterlife video. My name is Sam Baknin. I'm the author of Malignancy of Love, Narcissism Revisited. A former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of C.U.P.S. So what does happen when the narcissist becomes a widow or a widower? What happens with the intimate partner in his or her life just gets sick and dies or has an accident and passes away? How does the narcissist react to this? It is sometimes unexpected. Sometimes it's a protracted process allowing the narcissist to prepare himself mentally and yet surprisingly the narcissist reacts identically to the passing on and the demise of people in his life which he deems significant or intimate. He reacts the same way if he is given seven years to prepare or seven seconds to prepare and this reaction is comprised of three elements like everything else in narcissism. The first element is entitlement. The narcissist feels entitled to special treatment and not only special treatment by other people, special treatment by God himself, special treatment by the universe. The narcissist sets himself apart. He considers himself unique. He doesn't need to work hard. He doesn't need to study long. He doesn't need to go through all the motions and he doesn't need to conform to anyone's expectations. He doesn't need to have achievements or accomplishments commensurate with his standing in society and in life in general. He expects admiration, adulation, affirmation and notoriety if need be or being feared even though he has invested nothing and committed himself to nothing in the process. The narcissist believes that his mere existence is reason enough for him to receive special treatment, special endowments, special rewards, unique surprises and unexpected positive turns of events. The universe is constructed this way, he believes, to cater to the high and mighty, to the richly endowed, to the amazingly superior, to perfect beings like himself, to God-like creatures like he or she is, etc. The narcissist's grandiose self-perception as a divinity or a deity allows the narcissist to expect the impossible, literally. And so when you die on the narcissist, the narcissist perceives this as a humongously inconsiderate act an inconvenience inflicted on him by a disempathic person. I mean, dying is really bad taste. Dying on him is something you should have never contemplated. It's not a legitimate course of action. And this of course is very reminiscent of how an infant would react to his mother's demise, how an infant would react to his mother's absence. It is a temper tantrum. It is a low threshold of frustration, the inability to tolerate an incompletion of one's expectations and beliefs. Your death challenges the narcissist's worldview and even more importantly, the narcissist's view of himself within the world. His self-image, his inflated, fantastic self-perception, his very sense of self which does not exist. Narcissists don't have a self or they have a very disrupted and broken self. So your death is a reminder. It's like an alarm clock at a very inconvenient moment in the morning. It's a reminder that the narcissist is not all-powerful. He is not omnipotent. He is not God-like. She is not capable of avoiding the ineluctable, the inevitable, which is death. Narcissists react to your death as a kind of narcissistic injury, a challenge. And if your death is very public and as I said protracted, then it could amount to narcissistic modification. The narcissist's behavioural repertory in this situation is identical to the way an infant reacts to frustration, absence and challenge. And so this is the first element in the narcissist's reaction, but it goes much deeper as usual. The narcissist perceives you and himself as immortal. You have been rendered immortal by virtue of having entered or having been incorporated into the narcissist's narrative. The narcissist, of course, is God-like. He's never going to die. And this is not just a superstition or some idiotic belief in the afterlife. This is not a religious thing. There are many types of stupid delusions. Religion is only one of them. There's nothing to do with this. It is a firm conviction that death has no hold on the narcissist. The narcissist is convinced that he is exempt from dying, will never die. He is immortal in his own mind. It's not that he is denying death or avoiding death or repressing the very fact that we all have to die, which is something we all do. It's not that. It's that he believes that his apotheosis, his deity, his deification, the fact that he is a God would prevent him from dying. And having entered the narcissist's shared fantasy, the narcissist's fictional narrative, the narcissist's ambit and ambience and remit, having become incorporated into the narcissist's self-perception, having become a figment of the narcissist's imagination, having been rendered an internal object in the narcissist's mind, you too had become immortal. So now you're both immortal. That allows the narcissist, for example, to discard you with the absolute certainty that at some point in the future he would be able to hover you. That's even if you are 79 years old. The narcissist simply doesn't believe that you will ever die. So it's like he has an infinite horizon within which he can discard you and hover you, discard you and hover you to the end of time. And even the end of time probably does not apply to the narcissist as far as he is concerned. The narcissist therefore inhabits a timeless landscape, an eternal present. And within this eternal present, you are just a frozen artifact. You're a monument, a monolith. Just waiting there for him or her, for the narcissist to resuscitate you, to revive you and to resurrect you within a narrative, within a shared fantasy, who as, resurrect you as an internal object. So the narcissist's closure is timeless. The narcissist can always, at any point in time, as far as he is concerned, can always imbue you or re-imbue you with qualities and attributions that render you the perfect participant in his shared fantasy. In other words, the narcissist believes that he can always re-idealize you. He can always reintroduce you into a shared fantasy, into the disrupted narrative of your previous relationship. And he can do this with no regard for the passage of time because the passage of time has no impact on the narcissist and anyone the narcissist has chosen to anoint. And here you go and prove him wrong by dying. Your death makes such closure, renders idealization impossible. The timeless closure that the narcissist is absolutely convinced of, is forestalled by your demise. The narcissist remains stuck with the persecutory object that represents you in his mind, unable to re-idealize it in a new shared fantasy. You frustrate the narcissist not only by inconveniently passing away, inconsiderably vanishing from his life, challenging his omnipotence and godlike powers, his self-perception as a deity. So not only that, but you also prevent the narcissist from hovering you, from re-idealizing, from re-establishing a new fantasy, shared fantasy within which you would fit, from getting rid of the dissonance and anxiety that are generated internally in his mind by the persecutory object that represents you and used to be an idealized object. You remember the process? When the narcissist picks you up as an intimate partner, a source of supply, a best friend, whatever, the narcissist creates a snapshot of you. It's an introject. It's an internal object that represents you in his mind. It's like an avatar. Then the narcissist idealizes it, and because the narcissist needs to separate from you, he then devalues this internal object. He renders it an enemy, a persecutory object. Then when you die on the narcissist, the narcissist remains stuck with this enemy within. Trojan horse, fifth column, you in his mind hate him. There's a hateful object, a vengeful object, a critical object, an object that dislikes him and hates him, wants him dead, I don't know what. So he remains stuck with the enemy object, the persecutory, the hostile object in his mind that used to represent you, because now you're dead, and he is unable to transform this object into a benign, idealized, loving, compassionate, caring and affectionate and empathic object. So he's stuck with an enemy within, and this creates a lot of dissonance and anxiety, and he's unable to get rid of this because you're not there anymore. Now you could ask, why does the narcissist need you? I keep saying that the narcissist are unable to relate or refer to external objects. Yes, that's very true, but external objects are triggers. The narcissist needs an external object to allow him to create an internal object because the narcissist wishes to maintain an appearance of normalcy. He wishes to convince himself that his fantasy is not a fantasy, it's a reality, that his false self is not false, it's true, it's real. And he cannot do this by totally divorcing reality, that would be psychosis. So what the narcissist does, he uses external objects in reality to trigger the formation and arrangement of internal objects in his mind. That way, the narcissist can claim, I'm in touch with reality, I'm normal, I'm okay, I'm not psychotic, I'm not crazy, I'm in touch with reality. When you die, you remove the external object that allows the narcissist to trigger the formation or the transformation or the rearrangement or the re-idealization of an internal object. In other words, by dying, by passing on, you deny the narcissist the ability to manipulate your internal object in his mind, the internal object that used to represent you in his mind. He can no longer act upon this internal object, he can no longer interact with this internal object. This internal object suddenly remains frozen as it is untouchable, non-manipulable, non-manageable, uncontrollable. And the narcissist is faced with the horror of an enemy within, a hostile, critical, hating, demeaning, humiliating, devaluing internal object within his mind that has no external correlate, has no external correspondent, there's no external object out there that corresponds to the internal object because you have died and the narcissist is stuck. And this is the equivalent of not obtaining closure in narcissism. The narcissist's way of obtaining closure is, as usual, forcifying. He falsifies the persecutory object and re-idealizes it, but he cannot do that when you are 10 feet under the ground, he just cannot. He takes away the narcissist's ability to reduce or mitigate his anxiety by eliminating the dissonance between the persecutory object and other objects, like the false self. The third element, the third reason for the narcissist's reactivity or reactance, the narcissist has chosen you, especially if you're an intimate partner, but even if you're a good friend or the narcissist has chosen you to be his new mother, you're a maternal figure, the narcissist converts you into a mother. Now, the narcissist's original mother, the narcissist's biological mother, was a dead mother, metaphorically speaking, was an absent mother, a selfish mother, instrumentalizing mother, hurtful mother, abusive mother, etc. Wrong type of mother, not good enough mother. Andre Green called it, in 1978, the dead mother. So the narcissist starts off as a child, was an infant, with a dead mother, and he keeps going through life looking for a live mother, not a dead one, but a live one. He keeps looking for a good enough mother. Then he finds you. Then he convinces himself that you could be his new mother. Then he tells himself that you could be this good enough mother that he's always been looking for, hence the idealization, he needs to idealize you to believe in that. Then he keeps testing you to see whether you are truly a good mother. When you die on him, you prove to the narcissist that you've always been a bad mother. As he you are, frustrating him, abandoning him, separating from him, unavailable to him, absent from his life, having died. Having died without the narcissist's consent, having died not as a part of the shirt fantasy, having died challenging the narcissist's inflated, fantastic self-deception, is a divinity. Bad mother, you're a bad mother. This is shocking to the narcissist. It's shattering because the narcissist convinces himself that the new maternal figures in his life, you included, are not like his original mother. They are not dead mothers. These new maternal figures in his life, you included, are going to give him a chance for closure. With his original mother, by separating from you, by individuating the narcissist completes the disrupted cycle of separation, individuation, with his original mother. And here you go and sabotage this. You undermine this. You do not allow the narcissist to separate from you and to individuate. You behave exactly as the narcissist's original mother has done. She was absent. You're absent. She was absent because she was depressive or selfish or hateful or whatever. You're absent because you died. Your death is a defiant act. It's an act of hatred. You died on purpose. You died in order to frustrate the narcissist, in order to destroy him, in order to not afford him closure, in order to not allow him to separate and individuate. In short, you're just a replica, a clone of his original mother and his hate knows no boundaries. He hates you for dying. He hates you for dying. And yet, at the same time, he misses you. He misses you not in the regular sense because narcissists are incapable of positive emotions or emotions in general. He misses you in the sense that he misses your functions. He misses what you used to give him, what you have been giving him. He misses your functionality within the shared fantasy. He misses your ability to allow him to re-idealize the internal object and then maybe separate again. He misses you were a catalyst, you're a facilitator of internal processes in the narcissist. We call it external regulation. He misses you as an external regulator and, of course, a service provider. The four Ss, sex, supply, sadistic and narcissistic, services and safety. You took away the safety. You took away the safety by dying. And, of course, by dying, you took away all the rest, the services, the supply and the sex. So now you've denied the narcissist, everything you owe him. You have owed him. You deny, by dying, you're denying the narcissist his ability to function socially and otherwise. Again, if it's done, if the process is public, for example, if you're dying of cancer over four years, if the process is public, this is widely perceived as modification by the narcissist. Your death, your gradual decline, your inability to function bodily as well as mentally and ultimately your demise, they're perceived as a form of criticism. It's as if you were saying to the narcissist, you are not good enough to save me. You're not good enough to rescue me. You're just a human being, a limited human being. You can do nothing in the face of cancer, in the face of, I don't know why. So your death and disability and disease are perceived as constant criticism, constant injury and finally modification by the narcissist. And if you die instantaneously and surprisingly in an accident by drinking too much coffee, for example, this is doubly so. Because this is perceived as a collusion between you and the universe. Accidents are perceived as the universe's way, reality's way of snubbing the narcissist, you know, of humiliating the narcissist, of reducing the narcissist to size. You have conspired with the universe against him and he hates you for it because you've betrayed him. Your death is a betrayal. You switch sides. You have joined his persecutors. You've joined his enemies. The enemy could be something totally abstract, like, I don't know, the way reality is structured, or God, or whatever. But whichever the case may be, the narcissist is always a paranoia. Paranoia is a form of narcissism. Narcissist places himself at the center of attention and then everyone around the narcissist is involved in a maligned conspiracy against him because he's that important, he's that relevant. And you, by dying, you've joined his detractors. You've joined everyone who's ever wanted to harm him and to destroy him and to attack him and so on. You've become an enemy which sits well with the persecutory object and enhances it and makes the situation even worse. Narcissist anxiety. Narcissist dissonance. How to get rid of this persecutory object of you? Now that you have died, you have confirmed 100% that you've always been the narcissist, hostile, conspiring, conniving, cunning, scheming enemy. So your death throws the narcissist into a turbulence, typical in the wake of modifications and so on. And it's very difficult to emerge from this turbulence and very often the narcissist never does. He rehashes, he ruminates, he becomes obsessive and compulsive. He may move on, he may find another substitute mother, he may create another shared fantasy. Actually that's very likely, but there would be an unsettled account with you. There'll be an open wound, a lacuna, a void which is very threatening because it could suck the narcissist in and never let him out again. Your death, especially sudden death but also gradual death, your death pushes the narcissist, forces the narcissist to confront reality and brings him in contact with the reservoir or repository of life-threatening shame inside him because if he's not a God, that's shameful. That brings out the shame. The narcissist's original parents, parental figures, shamed him for not being perfect, for not performing, for wishing to have boundaries. It was all shame and guilt-based. These were the motivating forces in action within the dysfunctional family. And when the narcissist fails to save you or to rescue you, when you have joined the narcissist's universal enemies by dying on him, when you frustrate the narcissist, when you don't allow him closure, when you become a bad mother by abandoning him, just like that, all to himself, this regresses the narcissist to early, very early infancy where he felt oceanic, unmitigated, drowning, overwhelming shame and could even lead to borderline-like behaviors and ultimately, if not tackled appropriately, to psychosis. So, perhaps the only way to really impact the narcissist, let alone punish him, to finally get a rise out of him is not to cheat on him, is not to betray him in some other way, is not to dump him, is not to discard him. If you really want to exact tribute from the narcissist and punishment on him, maybe you should consider dying on him by surprise or in a lengthy process. But if you ask me, he doesn't deserve this. Just move on, no contact and forget this simulation of a human being, this death cult of one masquerading as a person. There's nothing there and nobody there except the howling winds of what could have been, what would never be and what is not there.