 I'm completing the manuscript to my new book and I'm glad to inform you that I found the publisher and I thought it's a good time to give you a glimpse into one of the Innovations in in this forthcoming book mother's gaze and how the mother's gaze generates the child makes the child become Creates the child's unconscious and later on Shapes the child's self all this with the mother's gaze The same way a 3d printer would print out an object a mother Scanning her child time and again with her loving sometimes adulating caring compassionate holding containing gaze a mother Creates the child renders the child a being a person So this is today's topic and then when this process Goes all right. We have narcissism and How does this affect you as the narcissist intimate partner friend Family member, how does this failure in maternal gaze? Affect you. How does it impact you? How does it change your life? How does it shape the interaction between the narcissist and you? aka shared fantasy and what What does it render the narcissist? What does it make the narcissist into? the narcissist is As I keep saying not fully human Critical components and modules are missing How does this Manifest in a relationship in an interpersonal relationship Linking it backwards to the mother's gaze. This is the topic of today's video My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant self-love Narcissism revisited a former visiting professor of psychology and Currently on the faculty of see ups Commonwealth for international advanced professional studies Toronto, Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom Outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria So Before I proceed before we start with the topic of today's video. I owe you a correction. I Got something wrong in one of my last videos and I wish to thank the viewer who alerted me to this I Welcome any constructive criticism and any amendments to any mistake that I may be making so I made a claim in one of my recent videos that Psychopaths can deceive a lie detector. They can pass a lie detector test That is not true. I was relying on a study by Raskin and Hale And here I'm sorry Raskin and here here is the father of the modern conception of psychopathy And so I relied on the study dated 1978 Not realizing that the study has been criticized the very same year by Lycan and later on debunked multiple times over the ensuing decades psychopaths Exactly like non psychopaths Cannot deceive a lie detector. They cannot fake a lie detector test They cannot pass a lie detector test while lying Because a lie detector test measures Impacts in the body that are connected to the autonomous central nervous system however, another claim that I've made is absolutely true and well Substantiated over 70 years of studies and that is that people are not good at detecting liars and lying People cannot detect liars and lying This is beyond Debate and beyond doubt in the scholarly literature Okay Let's delve right in I received a fascinating comment from someone who calls himself the coach Sam if you came across Narcissus Laying there by the pool Would you try to pull him out or just leave him be? I'm not sure myself says the coach Interested to hear your take though That's a fascinating topic Because it goes Straight to the heart of Narcissus The inability to perceive the separateness or even the external Existence of other people Narcissus inhabits a world of one There's only the narcissist Others are passing penumbra shades. They're not real They're apparitions that are ghosts in the narcissist's mind. This is the demon in the narcissist's machine These are the ghosts in his mind other people The narcissist is incapable of perceiving Entities as external. So what he does he converts them Into internal objects and he continues to interact only with these internal objects But he did too in well over one thousand two hundred videos I didn't go deep into the question of how does this glitch happen? Why this bug in the narcissist's software? What happens today? I'm going to deal with it Before we proceed I'm gonna use the word gaze Gaze is not a physical fact. It's not like here's to looking at you It's not like a stair It doesn't involve the eyes necessarily a Gaze is any care-giving compassionate holding containing loving Idealizing and sometimes adulating attitude This is a gaze when the mother gazes upon her newborn child She gazes at the child not only with her eyes But with her mind's eye With her love for the child with her bonding with her attachment with her caring with her with her Dedication and this is the mother's gaze when the mother of course is a good enough mother Later on we will discuss what happens to the dead mother's gaze Okay, so gaze is actually the interpersonal interaction between two people We are all subjected to the gaze of others the newborn baby Helpless half half formed still forming as it is Critically depends on his mother's gaze but I Personally believe that many of the giants of the field including the likes of Winnicott Got it all wrong because They forgot That the infant has no conception of itself The infant doesn't realize that it exists the infant doesn't Acknowledge its own separateness So when the infant gazes Into the mother's eyes The infant can never see itself Never that's a mistake because the infant is incapable of Perceiving its own Existence He doesn't know that it exists There is a stage it used to be called symbiotic phase where the infant and mother and the world are all one so When the infant gazes at the mother's eyes He doesn't see itself Infant has no conception of self of others of the world it has no apprehension or comprehension of External and internal It doesn't make this difference this distinction. It doesn't differentiate it is therefore initially unable to identify itself in the mother's gaze And that is a crucial mistake in In the work of most of the giants in the field When the baby looks into the mother's eyes It sees nothing Because it sees everything It it sees a mass an undifferentiated mass and This mass doesn't include the child because the child doesn't perceive itself as separate from the mass It's not that the child is a component of the mass or an ingredient of the mass this undifferentiated mass is all there is When the child finally Recognizes itself in the mother's gaze the child experiences a trauma It is a schism a break in the world The emergence of the other and the initial other is The child itself The first other Person the child comes across is the child itself Initially when the child looks into the mother's eyes The first few months of life The child sees nothing there because it sees everything there Mother the child the world everything is one. This is just undifferentiated chaotic mass But later on Things begin to break down Suddenly the child recognizes someone else in his mother's eyes and That someone else is Actually the child himself By the way, when I say himself, it is herself, of course. Yes, it applies equally to female babies or female infants Now this is a Very big difference in my work compared to the work of winnichord object relations schools From Melanie Klein to Guntrip and Fairburn This is absolutely what I'm saying is is Not acknowledged or accepted in any of the schools of psychology mainstream psychology But I think These people didn't these scholars didn't think it through so There are three phases of gaze The first phase The child looks into the mother's eyes and sees an Undifferentiated mass. It does not see itself. This is not self perception and it has no self No constellation or integrated self to perceive The second phase the child suddenly realizes that there is someone there in the mother's gaze That someone in the mother's gaze is the other But who is it in the mother's gaze? It is the child himself So the child self-alienates The child is estranged from itself There is the child and there is the child's reflection in the mother's gaze the first primordial other and this creates an enormous trauma Because the initial undifferentiated mass Suddenly disintegrates Breaks down child begins to realize that there is internal and external himself and mother Someone out there Someone in here the whole world Collapses into clumps That are mutually exclusive and this is absolutely terrifying it's a Trauma What do we do when we are traumatized? We reject the trauma. We repress the trauma. We forget the trauma amnesia. We dissociate it That's exactly what the child does having perceived itself in the mother's gaze The child experiences the trauma of the Bicaberal world of the disintegration of the world This is a trauma that is too overwhelming even for an adult Let alone a helpless needy dependent newborn child So what the child just does it rejects the mother's traumatizing gaze It perceives the mother is a source of frustration It perceives the mother as the agent that brought about the breakdown in his erstwhile Unitary comforting safe stable universal world Mother is angry at the mother. There's aggression there. So the child Rejects the mother and her traumatizing gaze. He pushes her away but it is exactly this act of Pushing mommy away because she is traumatizing me exactly this act a Causes the child to realize the mother's existence as an external object The child pushes away the mother So clearly she is external to the child. He realizes the mother's Externality it is the child first experience at object Relations not a very positive experience, but still There's a dawning dawning realization That mother is not me There's me and this mother there's me this internal introspective experience and this mother the other Out there an external object more over it's a frustrating and traumatizing and hurtful object So it's an object of a witch. I have no control Sympiosis breaks down Dissolves disintegrates and ironically it is precisely this rejection that leads to Differentiation it is the first instance of proto separation like I'm called this our perception Our perception a form of self objectification ambivalent self-annihilation a Self-alienation. I'm sorry the Lacan said that when the child beholds itself in a mirror The child sees itself in a mirror It Realizes that there's someone there in the mirror, but he doesn't know that this someone in the mirror is the child itself But of course You're not in the physical mirror for that The mother is the initial the primitive the first the proto mirror When the child beholds itself in the mother's gaze the child breaks down there is me internal innate and there is someone out there in the mother's gaze and That's someone out there Is it me? Is it not me and this is Lacan's Perception the child objectifies itself. It says The the other child in the mother's eyes in the mother's gaze That other is an object The child self-alienates. It's as if the child divorces its own reflection This is very early on. It's around the age of six months to 12 months Lacan suggests that the unconscious The seat of repressed traumas is a compendium of other people's gazes. I'm going to repeat this Because this sentence is crucial to my work actually Lacan said that the unconscious is an anthology a collection of other people's gazes The information that we gather and glean from the way other people perceive other people as Individuals other people as collectives society itself So there's the gaze of society via Socialization and we internalize all this we interject it we identify with it. We incorporate it and it becomes us introjects our representations of this process of Formation of the unconscious And there and we perceive introjects as egocin tonic We perceive introjects as part of who we are. We don't perceive them as alien or estranged or external to us these voices become us and this is what Lacan said the unconscious is simply a Collection of all the people that have ever meant anything to you and became a part of you via the process of Introjection, but I want to add to this in my work. I add to this another layer and this one is borrowed from Freud the unconscious is Also a collection of repressed trauma traumas multiple In other words the unconscious is a collection of voices Gases Gases of other people the unconscious is the other or the others On the one hand and on the other hand the unconscious is also the seat and repository of all of lives repressed traumas and This is the linkage That I found which allowed me to develop my work the mother's gaze in my work is The cause of the formation of the unconscious. It is the mother's gaze That creates the initial unconscious The mother's gaze remember Traumatizes the child because the mother the mother's gaze Informs the child that there is something or someone out there The mother's gaze breaks the world for the child the mother gaze The mother's gaze Reflects the child so the child realizes there's something or someone out there and Rejects the mother and as the child rejects the mother This separation becomes even more acute The differentiation the distinction between the child and the rest of the world becomes incontestable Undebatable This is a major trauma The child represses this trauma. It is the process of repressing this primal trauma That creates the unconscious the mother's gaze and The trauma induced by it Are the two pillars That when put together Create the unconscious Now I've put all the pieces together The child beholds itself in the mother's gaze This traumatizes the child the child represses the trauma and the gaze These are the two components of the unconscious The trauma Repressed traumas and other people's gaze. So this creates the unconscious Within a few months of life six to ten to twelve months The child has made leaps and bounds That are Nothing less than astonishing but also cataclysmic The child symbiosis disintegrate he begins to perceive external external objects He begins to it initially to objectify himself and other people. He perceives the existence of the other He is traumatized. He rejects his mother He develops the unconscious What is this primal trauma That we are talking about I Keep mentioning that the mother's gaze Traumatizes the child. What is this trauma? It's the trauma of being seen The child is seen through the mother's gaze So why does the unconscious emerge to resolve the existential dissonance Between the need to be seen and the traumatic impact of being seen Initially the child The infant the newborn is critically dependent on the mother The child needs to be fed needs to be sheltered needs to be attended to Needs to have skin contact needs to be loved needs to be held The child in short needs to be noticed and needs to be seen a Child who is not seen is a dead child So there the need to be seen is a survival strategy But it has it Has a cost it carries a cost with it Whenever the child is seen The child is reminded of the existence of the external world The child is reminded that mother is an independent autonomous agentic entity Outside the child's control and sphere of influence The child develops extreme abandonment anxiety The child needs to develop object constancy the child has to cope with the fact That being seen is also being set apart Being separated The only way to be seen by mommy is to become a separate object The only way to be noticed by mommy Is to push her away The only way to be taking care of by mommy is To set oneself apart from mommy So the cost is enormous The oceanic feeling of being one with the world and one with mother the Very fact that the child is incapable of perceiving separateness externality This is very comforting This imbues the child with a sense of safety and stability and the ability to cope with The existential dread the angst of being 1,000 percent dependent on someone else and here There is a conflict there is a dissonance For the child to be seen The child needs to separate For the child to be attended to by mommy the child needs to push in itself away from mommy mommy's gaze being seen by mommy informs the child of its own separateness Let's the child know that mother is an external object which can have who can have an object that can abandon him any minute Terrify it's a mega trauma the likes of which one never experiences again So this creates a dissonance The child wants to be seen but but is terrified of the trauma attendant upon being seen to resolve These existential dissonance Between the need to be seen which is a survival strategy and the trauma of being seen the child invents the unconscious Conscious emerges to solve this dissonance the trauma of being seen is repressed in the interest of survival unconscious is formed as a container as As a repository as a space within which the child can deposit the trauma of being seen and Enjoy the benefits of being seen without being retraumatized time and again Refression is the mechanism that the child uses to continue to separate itself from the mother and not not experience existential dread anxiety terror and trauma This is the solution known as the unconscious and now the child He's ready to objectify and Instrumentalize the mother now that the child has perceived the mother's externality her existence as an external object Its own separateness from the mother The very fact that there's a world out there The child is ready to proceed to stage two which is Objectification an instrumentalization of the mother as a mirror Mother now truly becomes a mirror the child beholds itself in the mother's eyes Child is able to form a well-informed View of itself concept of itself delineation and demarcation an illustration of itself using the mother's eyes as incontrovertible mirrors But why use the mother's eyes? What in the mother qualifies her to become the first the proto mirror Her love for the child her gaze The function of caregiving So the child feels safe They the mother is a secure base child feels safe To use her gaze To use her as a mirror the child knows That if he were to look into the abyss The mother's eyes the abyss is not going to look back at him the child is not afraid to Venture forward into the mother's eyes, and it is the first time the child takes on the world Attempts to explore the universe discover things Beyond the child and this of course gives rise to personal boundaries the mother's mirroring function via her loving gaze Allows the child to safely explore explore the exterior The world out there and realize the boundaries between itself and that world And again mother gaze is a secure base. It's a safe environment where the child To behold itself in another person's gaze not the mother there would have been the risk of psychosis because exactly as Nietzsche said when you gaze into the abyss sometimes the abyss gazes back at you Hyper reflexivity the mechanism at the heart of psychosis is an attempt to deny the mirror And the mirror is threatening and terrifying you deny the mirror you say The world I the world is me There's no external Everything that's happening in my head my voice is like they're all external and because my mind is externalized Then there's not me in the world. There's no distinction. I'm one with the world Psychosis is the perfect merger infusion with the world. It's a regression to the premirror stage To the stage where the child still perceived everything is a single mass and differentiated when the child did not separate and did not have a Self-perception because he didn't have a self that is psychosis but when the child Studies itself Studies mommy explores the world discovers external objects via the mother's gaze There is a sense of safety There's a secure base. This gives rise to primary narcissism The healthy kind the kind of narcissism that persists into adulthood as the foundation for a sense of self-worth Self-esteem self-confidence self-regulation most importantly a self-concept that is young. That's not what This introversion is intimately connected with narcissism in Jung's work. Anyhow the mother actively reflects the child to itself and What does she reflect to the child does she reflect? True fact-based picture of the child not because she loves the child So she reflects to the child and the child an idealized aggrandized image of the child This is very very crucial Healthy narcissism ironically is founded on the wrong information It involves grandiosity because at age 18 months Or two years You have to be seriously grandiose to take on the world To separate from mommy To explore the next door neighbor To climb up a tree or to try to climb up a tree To let go of mommy And move into the world adventurously You need to have an impaired reality testing A misperception of a proportion between you and the world You need to perceive yourself as much bigger much larger than you are much more powerful than you are in short You need to be idealized Healthy narcissism primary narcissism relies on the mother's idealizing fantastic aggrandizing gaze The mother broadcasts to the child through her gaze You are godlike You're perfect You're amazing I love you no end You are ideal And this empowers the child energizes the child and charges well I have become a god through my mother's gaze. It's an apotheosis. I I've become a god And now and it's an epiphany It's religious. It's a religious experience. I've become a god and now I'm ready to let go of mommy for a short period of time of course and explore the not mommy Explore everything that is not mommy And this is what I call the whole of mirrors whole of mirrors effect The mother reflects through the child through her gaze an image of the child which is not real Which is grandiose which is idealized Thereby misleading the child to believe that it has the capacity to take on the world safely This is what renders it her a secure base to borrow a term from attachment theory This affords the child the grandiose energy to take on the world and to affect the world to emotionally invest in the world The mother's proactive benevolent gaze idealizing gaze Is synonymous with her secure base status And it gives rise to healthy attachment healthy narcissism mental health in general We need to transition as children through this phase of narcissism laughable grandiosity Being idealized and loved essentially unconditionally adulated and admired albeit passively We need this Then reality pushes back and the friction with reality informs us About boundaries and limitations. That's a later stage in life mother's gaze and genders in the child this capacity to venture forth separate from her and become an individual process known as separation individuation individuation But the mother gaze is another very important function known as mentalizing The mother's gaze Informs the child of the fact that the mother is external to the child is not the child So the child has to develop a theory about who is mommy If mommy is not me who is mommy? and this initial proto theory Is the first phase of a process known as mentalizing Mentalizing is perceiving other people as separate to you external from you and with their own mind and states of mind And the mother's gaze triggers mentalizing in the child And once it's triggered it persists The child uses mentalizing to form theories of mind About other people especially significant others And later on A theory of the world known as the internal working model The mother's gaze Is also as I said The initial primordial form of object relations Object relations are the relationships that people have with other people Other people have perceived as objects, yes? In psychology She tells you a lot about psychology Okay, but this is object relations It is founded on The separateness of other people On other people being external to you and On secure attachment Object relations Are founded on attachment to other people if the attachment is insecure the object relations are disrupted If the attachment is secure Object relations are healthy The mother's gaze, the loving mother's gaze, the good enough mother's gaze to use Winnicott's phrase The mother's gaze teaches the child To relate to other people as if they were secure bases As if they were copies of mummy So the child learns Other people are separate to me Other people are external objects, they are not me And other people are safe They're secure bases, they're not going to hurt me They're not going to hurt me, they're not going to traumatize me And this all comes through the mother's gaze Although The trauma attendant upon the mother's gaze initially Is repressed And forms the foundation Of the unconscious This is when the mother is loving When the mother is what Winnicott called good enough What about a dead mother? Andrei Greene coined this phrase in 1978 to describe mothers who are absent, who are depressive Who are selfish Who are instrument who instrumentalize the child or parentify the child Pedestalize the child idolize the child Use the child to realize their own fantasies and dreams, etc. These are dead mothers The dead mothers because they don't care about the child They objectify and instrumentalize the child, they don't see the child, they see what the child can do for them Or they see the child as a nuisance to be rid of So there's no process of gaze With the dead mother a dead mother has dead eyes She has no gaze The child when he looks into the eyes Of such a mother Uh Physically or metaphorically when he looks into her gaze when he tried when the child tries to Latch onto her gaze to decipher her gaze In other words when the child tries to attempt to use the dead mother Is a mirror He cannot see himself Because the dead mother doesn't see him He cannot even see the world because the dead mother doesn't see the world He cannot also see the mother because these kind of mothers Are empty inside their black holes their voids. They don't exist There's nothing there What the child sees in the dead mother's gaze Is the infinity of deep space The devouring of the black hole The predatory nature of the world The symbiosis that is undisputed Undisturbed and undisrupted The merger and fusion and enmeshment that never give rise to separation and individuation It's very sick and this kind of child fails to develop a concept of the external Fails to embark on operative object relations And never constellates and integrates a self or even an ego Such a child is also incapable of mentalizing Because he doesn't develop his own states of mind He doesn't perceive himself because there's no self This kind of child cannot attribute states of minds to other people This is known as non-mentalizing. I'm going to deal with it in a separate video soon So There is a disruption in the process of mentalizing the child remains stuck in primary narcissism Which as time passes becomes pathologized Becomes malignant It's a kind of narcissism that is known as secondary narcissism adulthood narcissism And it's bad because it doesn't allow the narcissist To separate from other people It doesn't let the narcissists Individuate So What the narcissist the grown-up narcissist Offers his partners including his intimate partners Is the whole of mirrors effect Because that's where he's stuck. He's stuck at the whole of mirrors effect The mother's gaze should have provided him With a whole of mirrors But he didn't because the mother was dead So the narcissist tries to recreate this With his partners, especially his intimate partners And he offers them the whole of mirrors effect. He says to them You can conceptualize yourself Through my gaze you can see yourself idealized and loved Unconditionally and accepted through my eyes Look at my eyes says says the narcissist And I will mirror you But I will mirror you the way you've always wanted to be I'll mirror you the way a loving Functional mother good enough mother mirrors So the narcissist force advertisers He says I can be a good enough mother to you. I can idealize you I can energize you to explore the world safely. I can be a secure base I can offer you the whole of mirrors effect Yes, but that is not true Because the narcissist has never experienced the whole of mirrors effect The narcissist has never separated Never individuated never saw itself Through the mother's gaze Or her mirror was never seen The narcissist cannot offer this to his partner or intimate partner. He cannot Mentalize her he cannot have an object relations with her He cannot perceive the partner as separate external with our own mind and states of mind And emotions and cognitions and hopes and dreams and wishes He cannot perceive this as far as the narcissist is concerned She is a figment a figment of his imagination an internal object in his mind It's a manipulative game Within his mind It's all self-contained. So when he offers the partner to be a mother To become a maternal figure to her He is unable to conceive of her She doesn't exist and it never progresses beyond grandiose cathexis Emotional investment in the grandiose Fantastic Idealized image which has nothing to do with partner is not real This courses courses in both partners in the narcissist and in his partner causes them to regress To become infants again because it triggers The original trauma that has been repressed and had become the unconscious. The narcissist taps into his partner's unconscious By regressing her to the phase That she had has been that the phase where she has been seen for the first time The narcissist takes the partner by the hair pulls her by the hair and regresses her to age I don't know six months 12 months 18 months It's a time when the partner when the narcissist partner Has first been seen by her own mother or caregiver And so she goes through this phase again, but this time There's no protection against the trauma of being seen In a way the partner exports outsources her unconscious to the narcissist and he becomes her unconscious That's why the narcissist is able to activate introjects in the partner To form Relations with other introjects to team up with other introjects because he is granted Unmitigated access to the partner's Unconscious where the first trauma of having been seen by a mother figure Has been repressed Of course being seen by the narcissist Triggers this trauma But while the original mother Was helpful Loving compassionate And so the trauma was easily repressed With the narcissist there's no such thing. So the trauma erupts full force. This is the core of trauma bonding At the same time The partner herself Is converted into a dead Frustrating withholding betraying mother A mother who mirrors herself Who mirrors the world But never the narcissist At least initially And then later A mother who is incapable of mirroring the world or herself Because she has been demolished by the narcissist so the narcissist Is also traumatized or retraumatized by his partner because he renders her converts her Into his original Biological real mother the only mother he is ever known This is why the narcissist's hope Attempt to separate and individuate From this new mother the intimate partner These attempts are reasonable The stupid Because he doesn't convert her the intimate partner into a good enough mother He converts her into a dead mother exactly as his mother has been And so the deadness of the intimate partner induced by the narcissist and Her constant trauma because she is seen by the narcissist But not loved by the narcissist These undermine the shared fantasy And the narcissist converts his intimate partner Into a persecutory object This is the core of my work And my work differs From the work of others such as Fonaji and Lacan and Winnicourt and many many others It differs And I hope I succeeded to explain how it differs Now I'm going to make a much Um, I think I believe a longer video on on these topics which would be a bit academic Um But I want to give you some glimpses and some Access and some insights Into the topics I'm going to discuss In this next video um I'm going to start with empathy Empathy has been linked to mirror-gazing Remember the concept of the mother as the mirror And later on the mirror in Lacan's work And the mirror in my work so Empathy has been linked to mirror-gazing I refer you to work by Article by Giovanni Caputo And I want to read to you the abstract the the article is titled empathy and mirror-gazing The abstract says A relationship between empathy and self-directed behavior During mirror-gazing has been hypothesized by some authors Nevertheless, how these concepts may how these concepts may be connected is still an argument Or a debate Previous research on mirror self-recognition May not completely account for the fascination produced by mirror-gazing In fact Gazing at one's own face in the mirror for a few minutes at a low illumination level Can produce the perception of bodily Dysmorphic visual illusions of strange faces Strange face illusions may be the the projection of the subject's unconscious contents Into mirror image of the basis of somatic motor mimicry in contagion This is by the way the primal trauma that I've been discussing Motor mimicry and emotional contagion Can operate through the feedback produced by the mirror within the observing observed object The projection of unconscious content That's my primal trauma the primal trauma that I mentioned is the projection of unconscious content Can characterize empathy according to early ideas of einfühler the german term for empathy Empirical research shows correlations between susceptibility to strange face illusions And both the fantasy and empathy empathic concern sub-scales of interpersonal reactivity index I arrived and this was published in psychology and neurobiology of empathy edited by dogla swat And punk punk set it was published by nova science publishers in 2016 So caputo says actually what What I've been what I've been what I'm saying what I've been saying for well over over 10 years Being seen by the mother Is a trauma? I call it the primal trauma because it breaks the world It teaches the child that the mother is external to it And so the world breaks at least in two pieces and then in many more pieces becomes a kaleidoscope. It's very traumatic And what caputo says is that this trauma can be projected onto the mirror and result in Self-perception as ominous strange terrifying a horror figure And so so that's why I mentioned Hagel had a concept known as negation of the negation and I'm using it in my work The identity of the self and the determination of an object outside the self Both require Hagel's negation of negation So in my work There is the child is an undifferentiated mass. Let's call it child mommy world World mommy child. It's it's one thing. It's not even symbiosis. It's it's Like the child dissolves into the world and the world dissolves into mommy and mommy is the world It's one thing. It's all one thing oceanic. I mean many eastern traditions Would appreciate this this state of I mean it's nirvana in a way and so This is the this is the the first stage then there's negation the child Negates itself when it sees itself in the mirror or in the mother's mirror in the mother gay in the mother's gaze It is traumatized And the child rejects the mother rejects the gaze rejects itself It's it's a recoil. It's subtle reaction. It's like btsd about child. It's terrified And this would be the negation in hagels model And then the child negates the negation because it has to survive It needs to be seen by mommy It realizes that if it were to reject mommy and reject the gaze and reject the world and everything Then it would die. So it negates the negation. It negates the previous phase And this negation of the negation is what Is colloquially called the unconscious And later on object relations. So i'm using hegel's negation of negation. I'm not going to it in this video Although I will go into it in my next video I also claim that empathy is a form of healthy narcissism Empathy is a self contained internal set of processes Triggered by the presence And by the self reporting of another person Empathy involves two confabulated self deceptions self deception number one That the internal experience of empathy is actually external Has to do with that other person that that other person triggers the empathy. It's not totally internal It's externally triggered. It's not true. It's a deception and number two that Uh, by the way this confusion Uh between internal and external objects is formal psychosis actually And the second self deception involved in in the classical perception of empathy or colloquial Perception is that the experience of empathy is altruistic that it is focused on the other person But in reality empathy is solipsistic It revolves exclusively around self centered emotional regulation and cognitive processing Empathy is all the hallmarks of healthy narcissism. Now I have two videos dedicated to this and I'll I'll put the I'll place the the links in the description. Those of you who want to delve deeper into the issue of empathy now I'm mentioning empathy. I mentioned Hegel's negation of negation and all this because these emerge as the inevitable outcome The interaction between the child's nascent ego or self or whatever and the mother's gaze Now, you know that I don't believe in in a unitary self, but it doesn't matter the assemblage of self states is the same The mother's gaze is an external boundary condition. It's a determinant It gives rise to the unconscious. It shapes the self. It creates the child Does not child without the mother's gaze so This is why phenomena such as empathy are crucial If you perceive of empathy as an externalizing emotion like aggression, you know aggression is externalized Empathy is externalized if you perceive empathy as externalized This undermines almost everything we know about developmental psychology So I need to tackle the issue of empathy and I will do so in this more academic video in the future I received a fascinating email from William de Graf. William de Graf Created an application an app With all this with the transcripts of all my videos up until the end of april So there's this app. You can download it on google play And there's this website vaknin-talks.com and William de Graf wrote to me having watched My video on behaviorism. He wrote to me. I read some interesting literature on behaviorism earlier in the week He referred me to some twitter link I also wonder if this behaviorism approach is connected to phonogies phonogies teleological form of non mentalizing in his model Which also has interesting links to cloning us phylogenetic research on human personality So i'm going to deal with all these issues in the next video I'm going to explore automaticity mentalization phonogies non mentalization And and so on and so forth, but I want to make a few initial comments Automaticity is probably the wrong model for human behavior But equally rationality is the wrong model for human behavior Even bounded rationality is an optimistic approach and probably counterfactual I'm going to deal with all that In in my video phonogies teleological non mentalizing Feeds not only humans, but for example animals So in many ways, it is tautological It's the outcome of observations So it's like we observe behavior And when we then we make deductions based on our observations Of these behaviors when these behaviors actually are in themselves observations So it is second order observations definitely leads to infinite regression It's tautological in the best case And I'm going to analyze No, the non mentalizing concepts phonogies non mentalizing concept try to demonstrate How erroneous it is the existence of a goal Because for one of phonogies Non mentalization concepts has to do with teleology So there's an assumption of a goal goal orientation, but the existence of a goal Existence of a goal implies per force The existence of intentionality That's Franz Guentano and vice versa So you cannot divorce You cannot divorce behavior From a state of mind You cannot say well does mentalizing and then there's non mentalizing Non mentalizing is simply the inability to conceive of the existence existence of states of minds in other people and goal orientation So you can't divorce it too and I'm gonna I'm gonna go much deeper into this criticism In the next video What we cannot be sure of I admit Is the existence of goals and this is why teleology is a bogeyman in science But We equally cannot doubt the existence of state of mind and I'll try to explain why in that video I want to finish by quoting Extensively from the work of the biggest of them all Winnicott I disagree with him I just explain to whole video to explain Where I differ and diverge from winnicott, but he is still the foundation upon which we all work So i'm gonna read to you what he what he had to say In individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother's face? I'm suggesting that ordinarily what the baby sees is himself or herself And this is of course where I differ I beg to differ with winnicott Because I don't think the baby has a conception of himself or herself And therefore the baby cannot see himself or herself in the mother's eyes or mirror That's completely wrong in my This is an anachronism. This is projecting backwards Adults themselves Babies don't Okay, but i'm going to continue reading In other words says winnicott the mother Is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there All this is too easily taken for granted I'm asking that this which is naturally done well by mothers who are caring for their babies Shall not be taken for granted I can make my point by going straight over to the case of the baby whose mother reflects her own mood Or worse still the rigidity of her own defenses in such a case. What does the baby see? If the mother's face cannot reflect him The infant does not look into the mirror anymore Instead he binds up looking at the mirror Of course Nothing can be said continuous winnicott nothing can be said about the single occasions on which a mother could not respond Many babies however do have to have a long experience of not getting back what they are giving What he says is that a single event is not going to damage the baby Just to be a long exposure to a dead mother. Okay winnicott continues The babies look and they do not see themselves With the dead mother There are consequences The baby gets settled into the idea that when he or she looks what is seen is the mother's face The mother's face is not then a mirror So perception takes the place of our perception Perception takes the place of that which might have been the beginning Of a significant exchange with the world Our two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the world of seen things This is the magnificent magisterial book mirror role of mother and family in child development article in the in one of his books, so this is winnicott and I will Expand on winnicott and phonagy and others in in a future video At this stage, I wanted to explore my work and demonstrate to you how it differs from the older perceptions Babies are born They're not blank slaves We know that by the way, uh winnicott Winnicott was a pediatrician When he has written most of his work. He only much later acquired a degree in In psychoanalysis. He's never had a degree in psychology actually So those of you who are very much into credentials and academic degrees forget it Most of the contributions to psychology were made by people with no degree in psychology As simple as that fact check it out Okay, let's continue um The baby is born. It's not a blank slate To differentiate itself to form boundaries To constellate and integrate at first an ego Which guides him with regards to reality and then later as self The baby needs feedback And only the mother is there To reflect the baby At itself to let the baby see itself in her gaze, which is like a mirror And this traumatizes the baby because baby realizes. Oh my god I'm separate from mommy. She can leave me at any minute. I am not the world It's terrifying It is this trauma that causes the child to form the unconscious and to bury the trauma there That's where the trauma is buried In the trauma is attached to The mother's gaze because the mother's gaze created the trauma So both the gaze and the trauma are buried in the unconscious And then the baby continues to do The same with other people gradually the unconscious becomes very rich It includes hundreds of introjects and voices and and so this is what Lacan Said that the unconscious is the other others In the mind they form the unconscious And so this is how I see things the baby then Learns to bury the trauma But benefit from the gaze The mother's gaze is idealizing aggrandizing fantastic and fosters in the baby primary narcissism grandiose and godlike as it is It has become the child then takes on the world as it takes on the world reality pushes back And he learns his limitations His boundaries and the existence of external objects are the people with whom he later on goes to develop a relationship Relationships that's object relations It's all predicated and dependent crucially on the mother A good enough mother would accomplish all this for her child And he would grow up to become a relatively functional and balanced adult She would serve as a secure base He would have this kind of child would have a secure attachment style But a dead mother Would not provide the mirroring necessary So the child would never separate would never become And so this kind of child cannot mentalize other people He cannot perceive other people is external with their own states of mind And Cannot develop object relations So this kind of child comes a narcissist In attempts In repetition compulsion To reenact this failed stage of mirroring separation and individuation With intimate partners as he goes along Of course all these fails It fails because The child turned adult has never had experience With a whole of mirrors With mirroring separation and individuation Is unable to reenact something that he has never experienced before And this is the shared fantasy and its dismal outcomes Both for the narcissist and for his partners or intimate partners