 So what are you there for? What's your role as the narcissist's intimate partner? You are there to facilitate this solution, the narcissistic solution. You are there to serve as the narcissist's womb, as his mother's womb. You are the womb. I want you to understand how critical, supremely critical your role is. Now, the narcissist would deny this. Because he is a schizoid, remember. At core, the core of the narcissist, the non-existent core, is absence, schizoid absence. So if you interrogate the narcissist, they would tell you, she's interchangeable, she's dispensable, she's disposable, she's like a bus, they come and go every 10 minutes. But really, your function, your role in the narcissist's life is regulatory and life-sustaining. Let me put it this way. If you modify the narcissist, this is the closest that he comes to suicide. Because he becomes effectively a borderline, dysregulated emotions. All these defenses crumble. And we know that when these defenses crumble, narcissists develop borderline traits, as do victims of complex trauma, by the way. So you are there in the narcissist's life within his shared fantasy, shared fantasy is a controlled space. Because the narcissist can't take chances with you. He can't have you improvising. He can't rely on your goodwill, judgment, moods, effects, cognition, no, no way. He's not going to trust you with anything, ever. He's going to take you by the hand, he's going to convert you into an internal object and he's going to embed you firmly in the ground of the shared fantasy. That way, he feels safe. But within the shared fantasy, your main function is to be the womb of his mother, the place where he can go to when he is in the schizoid state. You are the womb, you are the found and source of the oceanic feeling of safety that he experiences when he is with you. Never mind how much he abuses you. Never mind how much he fights with you. Never mind how much he says he hates you and he does. Still, you are the womb. You are the safest, most holding, unconditionally accepting place where he can shed some of his narcissistic defenses and indulge in or experience fearlessly the schizoid state. You have another function, of course, secondary narcissistic supply. Your function is to affirm the reality and the veracity of the false self. You tell the narcissist the false self is not false, it's true, it's real. So you have two functions. The most important one, you are the safe zone. You're beyond the comfort zone, you're a safe zone. It's to you that he goes when he needs to let go and become a schizoid. You are his schizoid sanctuary. And the second thing is you uphold and buttress and support his grandiose false self because it's the only way that he can have any relationship with you. You're an external object. He has relationships with external objects only via the false self. It's not safe to have a relationship directly with you. It needs to be mediated, filtered, firewalled, evaluated, assessed, accessed, reframed, whatever, via the false self and its grandiose fantasies. Remember that the narcissist misperceives you as an external object when actually he had internalized you already. In order to guarantee your functioning, in order to control you, manipulate you, prevent abandonment, the first thing the narcissist did was snapshot you, took a snapshot of you and internalized you. But he mistakes you for an external object. There's a confusion in his mind. He thinks you're external when actually he's interacting exclusively with your representation in his mind that because you're external in his mind, because you're external in his mind, wrongly, you have the power to tell him, you have the power to report to him about reality. You are, in other words, the narcissist's reality testing. You're the gauge. He refers to you for reality testing. And the most critical question in his mind, am I nuts? Am I insane? Is the false self real? And you are there to say, yes, dear, it is real. You are a genius. You are amazing. You sort of accumulate. You record past narcissistic glories and recount them to him. Sick transit. Narcissus mundi. Sick transit gloria. Narcissi put it this way. So you are, look how many critical functions you have. You are his safe refuge and sanctuary where he can be himself, where he can be, where he can be a non entity, where he can be an absence. Himself means not self because he has no ego. Where he can vanish, knowing full well that he will rematerialize. It's like teleportation. You're the teleportation chamber. You are the one who confirms to him and assures him that the false self is not false but real. You're his reality testing. Nothing is more important. You're the mother. You're the mother in this sense. You're the womb. The narcissist internalizes all external objects. They said so. So if we take this principle, you begin to understand that your existence in the narcissist's mind is very, very bizarre and peculiar. Take, for example, the famous Madonna-Horre complex. The Madonna-Horre complex is not a splitting defense directed at external objects because narcissists don't interact with external objects. They internalize them. They interact only with internal objects. So it is meaningless to say that the narcissist regards some women as Madonna's and some women as whores. It's meaningless because it does not regard women end of story. It regards representations of women. It interacts with internal objects that stands for women. But these internal objects have very little to do with you. They go through a process of idealization and it's a mess. It's not you. So what is the Madonna-Horre complex? It's an internal splitting, not external splitting, because there's no external object relations with the narcissist. There's no contact with external objects. So it must be an internal splitting as Gatry had observed the self is split, the non-existent self. I mean, it's difficult to wrap your head around this. The processes, the psychodynamic processes, they're split. The narcissist splits himself to all body and all mind, all mental. Reminiscent of somatic and cerebral, yes? So all body and all mental. The all body part interacts with orish women. It doesn't have anything to do with judging these women. It's not that the narcissist is like, well, I'm going to look for orish women. It's that his body part interacts with women who are classified as a woman. Are classified as orish internal objects. And his mind part interacts with women who are classified as Madonna internal objects. They're both internal objects. The narcissist is auto-erotic. He has sex. He loves, he's libidinally invested, is emotionally affected. All the processes are auto-directed, self-directed. So he cannot have anything to do with women even during sex. But he splits himself, internal splitting. That's an example of how bizarre the narcissist world is. Now you, I said that earlier, I said that you're a fetish. To remind you of the sexual fetish is originally, the fetish is when the savage saw something as the embodiment of his God. So it could be an object. And the savage said, well, God is in this object. And that's a fetish. Freud discusses this in three contributions to the theory of sex, 1905. So when you have a propensity to regard or treat other people, caregivers, parents, intimate partners, as objects to objectify them, that's fetishism. When the narcissist converts you, objectifies you into an internal object, he's fetishizing you. He is treating you as a fetish. Now fetishism is an inevitable phase of personal development and growth during the formative years, six, six months to three years. Psychoanalysis and object relations theories teach us that we outgrow the fetishistic immature way of relating to external objects to the human environment. Instead, what is what replaces fetishism is empathy. When we perceive others as human beings, full fledged human beings, not objects. And yet some people, narcissists, for example. But not only narcissists. I mentioned paranoics. I mentioned borderlines. I mentioned co-dependence. They're all the same. These people remain fixated in the fetishistic phase. They do not progress into full fledged adulthood. And arguably the most ostentatious manifestation of this retardation is sexual. There's a parapheria called fetishes. But there is mental or psychological fetishism. And it is equally rampant and equally egregious. In sexual fetishism, there are three types of fetishes. Inanimate object, body part, or reified trait. So classic fetishes, sexual fetishes react to a specific object or specific body part or specific trait or quality of a person. The narcissist is exactly the same. He transforms you into an object and then he reacts to your traits, to your body parts. Anyone who has ever had sex with the narcissist will note the narcissist's inordinate focus on specific body parts. You know, feet, breasts. The narcissist reduces his intimate partner, his female intimate partner, or his intimate partner, into an assemblage of organs, assemblage of body parts. And then he chooses some of these body parts as erotic, erogenous zones. And he is aroused by these body parts actually, not by the totality. This sense is a fetishist. That is of course sexual fetishism. We have objective fetishes. These are people who fetishize objects. We have somatic fetishes who fetishize body parts. And we have abstract fetishes who fetishize a personality trait or a body trait. The same with psychological fetishes. The narcissist fetishizes your body parts, fetishizes you as an object and fetishizes certain traits. This process of fetishizing the traits is what is called idealization. It's when you convert, when you invest emotionally. And according to Freud and many others, right? There's no difference between emotional energy and sexual energy. When you invest emotionally in a specific set of traits, this is idealization. When you elevate them emotionally to a privileged position, that's idealization. So people who prefer autoerotic, partialist, anonymous sex, they are also fetishes. With the fetish being their own bodies or the organs of their sex partners. So the narcissist behaves this way in sex. He's focused on his gratification, his body. He uses your body parts. He masturbates with your body in effect. But also outside the bedroom. He uses you for gratification. He reduces you. He reduces you to a set of traits. One, two, three traits, four traits. And you have these traits. And he can do this because he is not interacting with you. He's interacting with an internal object. And he can design and redesign this internal object as he sees fit. He's in total control. So this is a pathological attachment to a fetish, but this is an internalized fetish. Because the narcissist is autoerotic, even his fetishism is directed inwards, not outwards. Normal fetishes direct their arousal, their sex drive outwards. Narcissistic fetishes direct everything inwards. So they're going to fetishize an internal object and the idealized traits of this internal object. And it's going to carry over to the sex as well. And so in the absence of the fetish, most fetishes are sexually dysfunctional. Same with the narcissists. In the absence of the fetishized, idealized internal object, he becomes dysfunctional. And the circumstances surrounding the fetishistic sexual encounter are not very material. And similarly, anyone can serve as an intimate partner or a source of supply. It's a kind of tunnel vision. It's very similar to the autism spectrum disorder, schizophranical, somatic. Somatophon disorders. It indicates an underlying mental health problem or trauma or process. Okay, the narcissist fetishizes you. He internalizes you. He reduces you to set of traits and so on. And then he uses you. He uses you to uphold his false self, to establish reality testing. And to become the safe zone where he can be himself, him non-self, schizont. And this is actually your role. When you abandon the narcissist or threaten to abandon him, and when you cheat on him, when you betray him, as he sees it, and so on, everything falls apart and he is modified. Same process in borderline, same process in codependency. We can ask, okay, if it's the same process in all three, aren't these three one and the same? No, of course not. Massive differences. I suggest that you watch relevant videos. But this particular process, these defenses against the schizoid state exist in all three disorders. But remember, the narcissist solution is an exact opposite, the diametrical opposite to the borderline codependent solution. All three fetishize the intimate partner. All three idealize the intimate partner. But the narcissist chooses to assimilate her, to swallow her, to convert her into an internal object. And the borderline and codependent want the intimate partner to do it to them. They want to become an internal object in the intimate, inside the intimate partner. They want to go back to the womb, but to a specific womb, a functional womb, a womb which will provide external object relations. The narcissist wants to go back to the womb, but again, a specific womb, a womb that will uphold his view of himself, the false self, grandiosity. So they all want to go back to the womb because they are driven by the schizoid engine. They're driven by the schizoid core, but they resist this drive. They strike a compromise with the schizoid state. They say, please, we will become absent. We will disappear. We promise. We will not exist anymore. But please, let us experience objects, relationships with objects, with other people. Please, and we will do it in a way that will satisfy you because we will disappear in the process of having a relationship with an external object. We will disappear by becoming the false self. We will disappear by merging and fusing with an intimate partner. We will disappear by developing extreme dependence on an intimate partner. The disappearing act is the schizoid part. It's the sacrifice, the human sacrifice to the schizoid God, schizoid idol. The what's left are the dysfunctional solutions that these children had found in desperate attempts to not disappear, to somehow remain rooted or planted in reality, to keep one foot in reality, to somehow, somewhere with someone, have a fleeting, ephemeral touch of contact like a butterfly, simulated external relationships. These people crave, crave intimacy and love, crave other people. They just can't. They feel threatened, and they had become schizoids early on. And the borderline veneer, the codependency veneer, the narcissism veneer, these are all camouflages, they're all compromises struck with the schizoid core, allowing the person, the non-person, the non-entity, to pretend in a make-belief world that she or he is in touch with other people, is loved, is held, knowing deep inside that it's a doomed effort. A doomed effort, because ultimately, the schizoid wins. All narcissists end life, all narcissists end life, alone, decomposing, decaying, ruminating and brooding on past glories, pathetically trying to recapture them and recreate them. All narcissists, all borderlines, all codependence, end up losing the battle and becoming full-fledged schizoids.