 Similarly they are self-absorbed. Narcissism is an inability to maintain object relations. The only relationship a narcissist any narcissist truly have truly has is with himself and since he doesn't have a self he doesn't have a self. The narcissist has a relationship with his absence. I know this is mind-boggling. It's extremely difficult to comprehend. But you know what? Consider religious people. God is an abstract. God is an idea. It's a concept. And yet religious people convert God into a presence. It's a delusional presence. But it's a presence and they interact with God as though God were there. Similarly the narcissist deifies his false self. Narcissism is a religion. I keep explaining. So he deifies his false self and then he has a relationship with his false self that is akin to a religion. He misperceives his false self as a presence when actually the false self is defensive, 100% defensive. The false self is not about including anything or anyone. The false self is about keeping out, pushing away, excluding others and circumstances and competitors and objects of envy. The false self is busy firewalling the narcissist. The false self in other words guarantees an empty space and yet the narcissist perceives the false self as a presence. So he has a relationship. The only relationship and the only libidinal catexis, the only investment of emotions that the narcissist is capable of, if at all, is in this emptiness. He is married to absence. And of course because he has no true self to counter this absence, gradually he identifies with the absence. He becomes the absence. He merges with the absence and fuses. He has a codependent relationship with his false self. It's very intricate. And so the false self includes all the internal objects, including representations and introjects of the narcissist intimate partners who had been internalized, interiorized. That's the snapshotting mechanism that I'm describing. Okay, so covert narcissists are also self-centered, of course, although in the absence of self, one would say they are centered around the absence of self. In their case, they're also envious of overt narcissists and functional people. So in the case of covert narcissists, I would say that the relationship, the catexis, is in the envy. But envy is about emptiness because envy is destructive. The impulse of envy is to destroy the source of envy, to destroy the object you envy, to destroy the person you envy. So it's about destruction. It's about annihilation. It's about disappearing and vanishing. It's about emptiness and absence. So while the overt narcissist interacts with emptiness and absence via grandiosity, he interacts with the fantasy, which is not there. The covert narcissists interacts with absence and emptiness via envy.