 The narcissist hates you because he needs you, and so what he does? He takes a snapshot of you, he internalizes it, and then he works on it and converts you into a bed, sometimes persecretary object. I've said it before in previous videos, but today, for the first time, breaking news, I'm going to go into the process of snapshotting, psychological background, how it's done, what are the outcomes? Once you understand the process of snapshotting, a lot of what seemed to you enigmatic and baffling in your relationship with the narcissist would suddenly become crystal clear. So let us start with a quote from one of the greatest minds in psychology, Fairburn, fairburn, F-A-I-R-B-A-I-R-N, Fairburn was an object relations theorist. He preceded Guntrip, but the work is usually combined. So we discussed the Fairburn-Guntrip theory, and Guntrip writes about Fairburn. Fairburn regards a destructive element in infantile love, or need of the object, as a direct reaction to rejection. Winnicourt regards a destructive element in infantile need as normal and natural. Here again says Guntrip, it seems to me equivocal to use the same term, love, for such different things. Winnicourt in 1964 wrote, If the word love is used, the most primitive meanings of the word must be included, in which love is crude and ruthless and even destructive. Hate is not absent from such love. Sometimes Winnicourt speaks of this destructive primitive love as simply hate. But though it is experienced by the mother as wearing, exhausting and ruthless, we can hardly say that the infant is intentionally ruthless. The infant is rather energetic, vigorous, alive, one might almost say enthusiastic, and he presumably experiences a sense of shock when he finds mother cannot indefinitely cope with his needs. The infant may then grow at first angry and demanding, then frightened and withdrawing. Finally, if no satisfactory solution of the problem is found, if the mother becomes hostile, intolerant and rejected, then the combination of natural vigor, natural anger and natural fear develops into the pathological form of need or love, which is correctly called hate. It seems to me to guard best against confusion, to keep the term hate for pathologically destructive need, which once brought into being may persist throughout life. It is confusing to use the same term love for the unintentional destructive element in the infant's natural vigor of primary need. Similarly, I would keep the term love for the infant's feeling of happy satisfaction and the growing child's and adult's capacity to feel for the object. One can see then why the coexistence of hate causes depression and guilt, but it does not seem to me to be appropriate to use the term love for destructively frustrated need. That is harry country, and that is an excellent description of the narcissist's state of mind. The narcissist is an infant, the average mental age or emotional age of a narcissist is probably around two years old. Some cognitive capacity is developed beyond that, and so many narcissists display traits of a nine-year-old. But as far as emotions, attachment, bonding, the narcissist is two years old. And he has a need, and it's a devouring, overpowering need, and he experiences it as love. He mislabels it as love, but actually as fair burn, as we nick called, and as country head just told you, it's not love, it's hate. The narcissist hates his need. He hates his dependence on you, and he hates you for being there to depend upon. He hates the whole constellation. He wants, he wants away from you. But he can't because he needs you exactly as he had needed his mother at an earlier stage. And so now we come to the complex of the schizoid narcissist. The narcissism of the schizoid narcissist predisposes the narcissist to experience all external objects as bad. You are bad, his boss is bad, his colleagues are bad, his employees are bad, his suppliers are bad, his neighbors, members of his parish. All external objects in the eyes of narcissism are bad. They're all threatening. And so what the narcissist does, he forces, he coerces all objects, all objects, even good objects, good people around him, to actually become bad objects by infantilizing himself. When he infantilizes himself, when he refuses to accept adult chores and responsibilities, when he refuses to commit or to invest, when he becomes unreliable and unpredictable, when he is defined and consummated and reckless and so on and so forth. Addictive. When he misbehaves, he frustrates people and pushes them inexorably to become the bad objects that he had expected them to be to start with. And then if this is not enough, he also abuses them. So he abuses them and he frustrates them and he frustrates them and he abuses them and then he abuses them more and frustrates them infinitely and egregiously. And finally, they end up being the bad objects he had always wanted them to be. And consequently, the narcissist spends most of his life reacting to these manufactured bad objects. And he reacts to these manufactured bad objects in one of two ways, with a depressed angry state followed by a schizoid avoidant state. The schizoid narcissist transforms every external good object, for example, an intimate loving partner into an internal bad object. It's the only kind of internal object he knows. Remember that the narcissist is a two year old who had been abused and traumatized in his early childhood by the most important figures in his life, his parents, the only objects, we call them primary objects. So the only type of object he knows is a bad object externally and internally. The only internal object he has are all bad. So when he comes across you and you're loving and empathic and caring and compassionate and you want to ascertain his well-being and to secure his safety and so he can't grasp this. It's alien to him. He feels threatened and intimidated by this strangeness. You're strange, you're weirdo in his world. In the narcissist's world, it's a mirror world. It's like Alice through the looking glass. What you consider normal and human, the narcissist is considered, considers alien and weird and threatening, menacious and strange. So he has to convert you into an internal bad object because it's the only kind he feels comfortable, comfortable with. He knows the rules with an internal bad object. He knows the ropes. He knows how to cope with an internal bad object, manipulate it and manage it. And so what he does, he starts to frustrate you. He behaves as a childhood, temper tantrums, lack of commitment, lack of investment, lying, lack of horizon, delusionality, etc., etc., fantasy. These are all childish, infantile defenses and traits, splitting. So he becomes a child and he infantilizes in order to frustrate you, in order to push you to become the bad object that he needs you to be, in order to feel comfortable and safe. Ironically, the narcissist feels safe only when you misbehave, only when you abuse him, only when you're bad because that renders his world predictable, understandable, comprehensible. And so he needs you to become a bad object. He frustrates you. And then if that's not enough, he hurts you, he abuses you and the abuse escalates. The more you are understanding, the more you're loving, the more you're accepting, the more you're compassionate, the more you comfort him, the more he abuses you. The more you're a good object, the more extreme and egregious and dangerous the abuse is. So, and he does all this within shared fantasy, it's his way of testing you. Will you become a bad mother, a dead mother, or will you remain a good object? But it's crucial to understand that even if you succeed, if you pass the test, even if you don't fail the exam, he's abusing you, is frustrating you, and you still love him, you're still a good object. That is even worse than failing the exam because that really threatens it. You become something he cannot understand, something he cannot grasp, something out of his control. You see, if you are a good object and no amount of frustration and abuse can convert you or transform you into a bad object, then you are beyond his control. You are alien. You are frightening. You're reptilian in a way. You are out of his universe, out of his world from another planet. He has no, he has no set of rules. He has no user manual. He has no guidebook as to how to deal with good objects. He knows everything there is to know. He has written the book about how to deal with bad objects, frustrating objects, abusive objects, women who cheat on him, business partners who abscond with his ideas and his money. I mean, you name it. The more he's mistreated, the safer he feels, the more secure, because he knows the ropes. He knows how to react. He has reactive patterns, hard wire into his brain. His mind is geared towards hostility. It's a jungle out there. He expects the worst. And so good, good people, good charitable, charitable deeds, being accepted, being loved, being engulfed and hugged. This is threatening. Intimacy is threatening. You must understand that. What to you is threatening to him is comfort zone. What to you is comfort zone to him is a massive, massive threat. And when inevitably, because it's almost inevitable, I don't know of a single case where this rule did not prevail. So when inevitably you end up hurting the narcissist, abusing the narcissist, cheating on the narcissist, treating him cruelly, egregiously, ostentatiously, humiliating him, you know, when you end up being a bad object, the narcissist reacts to this bad object. As he had learned to react to bad objects throughout his life, starting at age six months, he reacts by going through a phase of anger, short phase of anger depression. This phase could last weeks, months, up to a year. So the short phase of anger depression. Aggression, externalized aggression directed at you. Actually it's projected aggression. It's the kind of aggression that the narcissist is afraid will push you away. We'll come to it a bit later. But never mind that. So there's a first phase of aggression, which is manifested as anger and depression. And it's followed by years in a schizoid state. So the narcissist transitions from anger depression to a schizoid state. He withdraws. He avoids you. He shuns you. He's indifferent to you. He's sexless. He doesn't have sex with you. So anger depression followed by a schizoid phase. We will discuss a bit later why the narcissist goes through these phases and not through other possible reactions. Why is he angry? Why is he depressed? Why does he externalize it and so on? But at this stage, it's important to realize that this is an inbuilt part of the hardware, not even software. This is the way narcissists react to bad objects. So he converts you to a bad object. Then he's angry at you. Then he becomes depressed. Then he withdraws from you. The schizoid narcissist reacts with depression, anger and schizoid withdrawal states to external bad objects. These external bad objects are real or they are manufactured. And when they are manufactured, they are manufactured inside. The narcissist cannot really change you at the beginning. So what he does, he internalizes you. He creates an internal object which represents you. And he gets to work converting this internal object into a bad object. In defiance of reality, counterfactually, you're still a good object, but already in his mind, you're a bad internalized object. So there are actually two phases. You're a good object and your internal representation in the narcissist's mind is becoming worse and worse and worse and worse until it had become a bad object. Then there is a gap because you're good. The internal object that represents you, that stands in for you, is bad. And then the narcissist, this creates a dissonance because everything you do, everything you say, every way you behave contradicts the bad internal object and it's intolerable. Either the narcissist admits it is insane or he must push you to conform to the internal object. Now the internal object is bad, you must become bad as well so that there's no longer a clash, no longer a conflict, no longer an inner dissonance which creates anxiety. To ameliorate and reduce this anxiety, the narcissist pushes you to become the bad object that he had internalized to start with. And once you do, once you really become bad, once you mistreat him and abuse him and cheat on him and steal from him and I don't know what else, once you maltreat the narcissist, all is fine. All is fine because now there's complete correspondence between the external bad object and the internal bad object and he continues his interactions with the internal bad object because it faithfully represents the external bad object which is you. So these are the two phases, discrepancy between internalized bad object and you, the external good object and then pushing you to become the internalized bad object by pushing you to become a bad object. And I call this thing manufactured bad object. So schizoid narcissists react with depression, anger, and then with schizoid withdrawal states to this manufactured bad object and sometimes to a real bad object with it. Could be that the narcissists will really come across an abuser. So the thing is that bad objects, whether internalized or externalized, whether manufactured or real, all bad objects create modification, produce modification. And so the narcissist from the second he started to groom you, from the moment he started to love bomb you, from the week that he started to try to co-opt you into his shared fantasy, to introduce you into his shared fantasy, to suck you into his shared fantasy. From that moment, he assumes the worst. He assumes and he's right to assume that ultimately you will become a bad object and will modify him. He anticipates actual or imagined modification and he conducts himself. He behaves as though modification is inevitable. And everything is geared towards ameliorating the extremely life-threatening, dangerous effects of modification. Schizoid phase is a defense against modification. If I don't care about you, if I avoid you, if I'm indifferent to you, if we are not having sex, you cannot modify me. So, at some point, there is an internal bad object which represents you. The narcissist interacts with this internal bad object, not with you, but it creates dissonance, creates contradiction, creates conflict between the internal bad object and the external good object, which is you. So the narcissist pushes you to become a bad object. You become a bad object, modification. Notification. The narcissist knows that this is the inevitable conclusion of every single relationship in his life. And the long sexless stretches in his relationships, these are artifacts of the reactive schizoid state. These are not primary features of his psychosexuality. Narcissists, even schizoid narcissists, are essentially auto-erotic, kinky, even sadistic at times. Sexlessness or asexuality and its manifest behavior, corresponding behavior, celibacy, these are outcomes and artifacts and elements or dimensions of the schizoid solution, the schizoid state which comes after the anger and depression. So they are not primary features of any narcissist, including schizoid narcissists. Okay. We said that once a narcissist had succeeded in converting you into a bad object, he reacts with anger and depression and then he withdraws. He avoids you. He becomes indifferent and sexless. What is depression? Why depression? I mean, there's a whole, I can think of 20 possible reactions to a bad object, real, imagined, internal, external, manufactured, whatever it is. I can think of 20 reactions to a bad object. Why depression? Depression is aggression. Simply. Initially, when the narcissist converts the internal object into a bad object, the bad object is threatening and there's a fight of light or freeze or phone response. In the case of the narcissist, it's a fight response. The initial response is a fight response. Or I have an internal bad object inside me. I need to annihilate it. I need to eliminate it. I need to destroy it. So his initial reaction is fight. But then this internal bad object represents an external object upon which the narcissist depends for many crucial functions, psychological functions. It's like his mother. This external object is now his mother and he's like a baby, a two year old baby. And as a baby, he's afraid to destroy mother. If he were to be aggressive towards mother, if he were to be violent with mother, if he were to truly express his aggression in an unbridled, uncontrolled manner, he may lose mother. He may kill mother. Mother may go away and abandon him. So the narcissist is terrified of his own aggression. He's afraid that his anger at the frustrating bad object is can drive this object away. He's terrified to provoke abandonment and loss which he cannot tolerate because he's two years old. It's life threatening. So what he does instead of externalizing the aggression, instead of being totally aggressive towards his intimate partner, the object in his life could be a friend, could be a business associate, doesn't matter, instead of externalizing the aggression, he takes a big part of the aggression, not all of it, he takes a big part of the aggression and he internalizes it. Let us summarize again. These are difficult concepts. The narcissist comes across a source of narcissistic supply, a possible intimate partner in a shared fantasy, a business associate, a friend, never mind moving. The narcissist immediately creates an internal object corresponding to that person, that is snapshotting. And then he gets to work to convert this internal object into a bad object. That creates dissonance because the external object is still good. The internal object is all bad. So the narcissist pushes the external object to become bad. As the external object reacts and becomes really bad, a manufactured external bad object, this creates modification. Terrified of modification, the narcissist reacts into ways. One, he becomes very angry, he becomes very aggressive with an aim to eliminate, to destroy the external bad object and of course, consequently, the internal, most of the internal bad object. But this aggression, this anger, this rage, this rather, they can push the external object away. He can lose the external object, he can even kill the external object. And he needs the external object because he's a two-year-old and the external object is a parental figure, mommy, daddy, so he needs the external object. He cannot afford to lose the external object. He cannot afford to really show his violent, aggressive, angry, rageful streak. So what he does, he takes his anger, he takes his aggression, he takes his rage, and he divides it in two. The bigger part, he internalizes. The bigger part, he directs at himself. And the smaller part, he sublimates. He expresses aggression and anger in socially acceptable ways. So the narcissist's aggressive reaction to the presence of a bad object, aggressive, angry reaction, is divided in two parts. Self-directed aggression, which is another name for depression. And externally directed aggression via sublimatory channels, in other words, in socially acceptable ways. So depression is aggression towards the external object, which had been redirected inward for fear of destroying the desired and exciting, though frustrating, external object. The schizoid state, in the case of the narcissist, is also a self-defense. First of all, it fends off modification, as I said. If I'm no longer with you, if I don't care about you, if I avoid you, if I shine you, if I'm indifferent to you, if we are not having sex or intimacy, who cares? You cannot modify me. It's one thing, but there's another thing. The schizoid, in narcissists, there's another thing. In healthy people, this is the function. In narcissists, there's another thing. The schizoid state is a self-defense. It protects the grandiose self-perception of the narcissist. And it prevents the narcissist from being consumed by the hunger for a rejecting object. Fairburn added another reason. Fairburn said that the schizoid state protects from consuming the external object. That the love is so strong, or the attachment is so strong, that there is a fear of consuming the external object. That may be true with healthy people. I'm not quite sure if it's true with the narcissist. But the narcissist, the three overwhelming functions are protection for modification, butchressing grandiosity, restoring grandiosity. Schizoid state is, I'm in control. I'm the one rejecting. I'm the one avoiding you. I'm the one withdrawing from you. I'm the one not giving you sex. I'm superior. I'm in charge. So there is a restoration of grandiose self-perception via conversion of the modification from external to internal. And the third function is to prevent the narcissist from being consumed by the hunger for an object which by now had become bad rejecting. So it's a defense. Schizoid state is a defense, multiple defense, complex defense kind of set of mechanisms. What happens to good objects in safe relationships with healthy people? They are internalized as well, but they're not internalized as objects. Healthy people don't snapshot. Healthy people do not create internal objects corresponding to good objects. If you are the intimate loving partner of a healthy person, he's not going to create an internal object which represents you and he's definitely not going to interact with any internal object instead of interacting with you. These are pathological reactions as beyond fair bearing, fair bearing, country, many others had observed. Good objects in safe relationships with healthy people are internalized, but they're internalized as memories, not as objects, not so with the narcissist. When the narcissist first comes across you, when he first meets you, when he first lays eyes on you, and he decides that you are a potential social supply, an intimate partner, fan, playmate, mother in a shared fantasy, a possible friend to be manipulated and leveraged and used, etc, etc. When you decide that you're a potential, what he does, the first thing he does, the first thing he does is create an internal object. Now at the beginning the internal object is an empty framework. It's like opening a blank document in Microsoft Word. There's nothing written, but the template is there ready with all the functions. So there's an empty internal object. And then as the narcissist continues to interact with you, he picks up elements of your personality, some of your traits, some of your behaviors, situations you've been in and he had observed or witnessed, information from other people, information from you, self-recording, visual cues and visual information, audio cues and audio information. Your history, he picks up all these things and he puts them inside the empty template of the inner object, of the internal object. Now I use the word pick, I use the word select. This is not indiscriminate. In a healthy person, all the information becomes memory. With the narcissist there is something called confirmation bias. The narcissist needs to idealize you because if you are ideal, if you're perfect, if you're brilliant, if you're elegant, if you're intelligent, if you're drop dead gorgeous, if you are sexy and desirable, even by other men, if you're all these things and you are an internal object, then the narcissist is all these things. He's in possession of an ideal internal object and because it's internal, it's part of him. So he needs to idealize you so that he is able to idealize an internal object, so that he is able to idealize himself and this process is called co-idealization. So the narcissist cannot, cannot be indiscriminate. The narcissist has to have a confirmation bias, a filter, it's a filter. He filters out everything that is less than ideal, less than perfect. Stupid things you said, misbehavior. When you didn't look so, so good when you woke up in the morning, he pushes all these things away. He ignores them, he denies them, he represses them or he reframes them, but at any rate, he picks and chooses and selects only elements or your traits, your behaviors, speech acts, interactions with other people, personal history, visual information, audio information, only elements that he can profitably and productively use in constructing a perfect ideal internal object. So this is a highly discriminatory, a highly filtering process and this is snapshotting. He does create a snapshot, but it is photoshopped. It's not a real snapshot, it's not a snapshot of you, it's a kind of snapshot that you post on Tinder, if you know what I mean. So he photoshopped your snapshot until it conforms to an ideal, perfect, brilliant, elegant, intelligent, amazing, drop dead, gorgeous internal object, which he owns, which he is. The internal object is a part of him, so that makes him perfect, ideal and so on. Now, why would analysis do this? Why would it instantly convert you to an internal object and then spend the rest of your relationship interacting with this object, altering it, changing it a bit, etc., but mostly interacting with this object, which is largely immutable, largely fixed? Why would he do that? Question number one, question number two, if it is such an ideal and brilliant and perfect object, doesn't this contradict the need to convert the object into a bad object? Can we have perfect and ideal bad objects? One by one, let's start with your first question. The first question is why would he do that? Why can't he simply interact with you? Why does he need this internal object? Because he has abandonment anxiety and he anticipates injury and mortification. From the second he meets you, he expects you to hurt him, he expects you to reject him, he expects you to abandon him, as his mother had done in numerous ways. He expects you to abuse him and he expects fully to sustain narcissistic injuries and mortification at your hand. So you're the enemy, you're the potential enemy, you're the future enemy admittedly, but you're the enemy, make no mistake about it. So he needs to control you, he needs to control you, he needs to control above all his abandonment anxiety, he needs to reduce his separation anxiety, his fear, his terror, it's a horror movie. The partner is perceived as a bad, threatening external object. Each and every one of you is Freddy Krueger, each and every one of you needs to be internalized in order to possess, neutralize and control the threat that you represent. You see, if you are external, the narcissist cannot control you, cannot possess you, cannot neutralize you because you have autonomy, you're independent, you're self-efficacious, you have agency, it's dangerous, if you can't control something 100%, it's bloody dangerous. So the narcissist internalizes you and from that moment, he can possess you, he can own you, he can control you, he can merge with you, he can fuse with you, you're his 100%, no risk, threat eliminated, mission accomplished. That's the reason he internalized you. What about bad objects? On the one hand, I'm saying the narcissist needs to convert you from good object to bad object. On the other hand, I'm saying the narcissist needs to internalize you as a perfect ideal object. So what gives? Well, what gives is that you assume that a perfect ideal object has to be good, but of course it's not true. Mother is perfect in the eyes of the child starting at age six months. Mother is a perfectly good object. Mother is perfect, she's ideal, she's wonderful, even when she's a dead mother, even when she's not a good enough mother, even when she's neglectful and absent and rejecting and hurtful and abusive, even when she doesn't allow the child to separate and individuate when she idolizes the child, thereby instrumentalizing the child, objectifying the child, whatever bad things mommy does, she is still perfect and ideal. Here's the flashing news. Bad objects, all bad objects are idealized. Idealization doesn't lead to a good object, never in the narcissist mind. He is idealizing you as a bad object. It is when he devalues you, he devalues you as a good object, exactly contrary to all the nonsense you hear online. When he idealizes you, he idealizes you as a bad object, as his mommy, rejecting mommy, painful mommy, but exciting mommy, desirable mommy. When he devalues you, he begins to see how human you are. And for the narcissist to be human, to have empathy, compassion, to show emotions, it's a despicable weakness. The narcissist devalues you because you're a good object. You had failed to become a bad object. If you insist and persist in being a good object, the narcissist holds you in contempt because you're weak, you're needy, you're clinging, you're stupid. In other words, you're human. And to be human, there's no bigger scene, no greater scene in the narcissist's catechism than to be human. And so it's exactly the opposite of what you were led to think by self-styled experts and so on. And so the process of idealization is actually an integral part of the process of snapshotting. The snapshotting idealization and conversion to a bad object via idealization, because the idealization renders you the narcissist's mother, his first primary godlike perfect object. And then he discovers that you're not his mother. You're not bad. You're not rejecting. You're not hostile. You love him. You accept him. You're empathic. You have emotions. You're inferior. You're human. You're weak. You're stupid. What a mistake he had made. No, he didn't make a mistake. Sorry. He never makes mistake. How you had deceived him into believing that you are something else, that only goes to show that you are essentially a bad object pretending to be a good object. So you're also fake, devaluation, and then discard. The narcissist's object relations are only internal. Narcissist does not have external object relations. Narcissist lives in habits, resides 110% within his mind, and he has only internal object relations. In this sense, every narcissist is a schizoid. And the narcissist is driven crucially by anxiety. And in this sense, every narcissist is borderline. And these are not my observations, of course, that schizoids are actually, that narcissists are actually schizoids. That has been a school of thought throughout the 1960s object relations. And that borderlines are actually narcissists or narcissists are actually borderlines. That's Otto Kellenberg. We could say that narcissism is a schizoid borderline position, taking off on Melanie Klein. Bad internalized objects are foreign to healthy people. They create dissonance and anxiety, and they have to be projected. That's with healthy people. Bad internalized objects with the narcissist restore the comfort zone, egocintin and reduce anxiety. Narcissist is a mirror image of a healthy, normal human. Everything is reversed. Left is right. Right is left. It's an isomer, if you wish. So let's summarize what we have learned in the past 10 lectures. Most narcissists have a primary schizoid style, I'm sorry, bordering sometimes on schizoid personality disorder. Some narcissists are also sadists, both psychological sadists and sexual sadists. Grandiose narcissists sometimes just have a narcissistic style, and sometimes they have narcissistic personality disorder. And narcissistic personality disorder is always secondary. It's always a comorbidity. In most narcissists, it's a comorbidity with a schizoid state. In some narcissists, it's a schizoid, it's a comorbidity with a Buddhist or some other disorder. All narcissists up where I tell us they are eternal adolescents, they have the Peter Pan syndrome. They're actually stuck developmentally. They're stuck. I don't want to use the phrase arrested development. It's taboo now, but their development had been arrested emotionally at age two, cognitively at age six or nine. So all narcissists are cases of arrested development. Narcissists are not codependent. The narcissists are not full-fledged borderline, but they have elements of codependency and borderline. And so sadism, the narcissist sadism, if there is, and his grandiose narcissism, whatever the narcissist has is at the service of his schizoid style. The narcissist's main preoccupation is to push people away to secure his solitary space. When he's alone, he's much more creative, for example. He feels much better. And he pushes people away and he secures the solitary space because he anticipates abandonment and modification. Even gregarious narcissists, pro-social narcissists, communal narcissists end up pushing people away, egregiously, badly. Now the schizoid needs solitude and he prefers solitary pursuits. And he feels depleted when he socializes or when he has to court women. The schizoid regards small talk, having fun, gift-giving as wasteful activities which are not pleasurable is unhedonic, is bored by conventional reciprocal adult activities, including adult sex. This is the schizoid and this is the underlying structure of the narcissists. Sometimes it's manifest and takes over, for example, after-botification in the schizoid phase. Sometimes it's dormant, it's latent. It's latent, but it dictates behavior throughout the narcissistic personality structure. Overlaid on the schizoid state is narcissistic grandiosity or overt narcissism or sadism or whatever. So I propose sadism. The sadist enjoys humiliating people. It gives him what I call sadistic supply, especially if he does it in public and exposes their inadequacies, weaknesses and failures. The sadist is aroused sexually only by dispoiling and degrading women, breaking the toys, so to speak. So, but a small fraction of narcissists are sadists. That's rare. I'm mentioning sadism because when sadism is present, it is equally at the service of the schizoid state. It's intended to push away intimate partners. The grandiose narcissistic overlay is much more common than the sadistic overlay. In other words, the schizoid state very frequently goes with a grandiose narcissistic state. Ironically, the overt narcissists, who crucially depends on input and feedback from other people, critically depends on narcissistic supply. This grandiose narcissist is actually at heart in the core schizoid. He would rather live in a world without people and he prefers anonymized, anonymized and commoditized and commodified narcissistic supply wherever possible, millions of fans, an audience in a theater, faceless, anonymous. The grandiose narcissists create recognition of narcissistic supply, but he prefers, as I said, anonymized, statistical or distanced, non-interactive type of supply. Actually, most narcissists prefer schizoid narcissistic supply garnered via objects like works published, videos posted on YouTube, a Wikipedia entry, money in the bank, possessions, mentions in articles and books, interviews. These are all schizoid types of narcissistic supply because they don't involve meaningful interactions with other people in depth, emotionally tinged, intimacy producing and inducing interactions with other people. So the grandiose narcissists feels entitled to recognition and riches, even without investing, committing, working diligently and conscientiously, without studying, without planning, without implementing a plan of action. You could say that the grandiose narcissist is an indolent slacker, a loafer, the big Lebowski, and he values his freedom, is a freedom addict. The grandiose narcissist in this sense resonates with the schizoid. He wants to be free of people, he wants to be free of frameworks that people generate and create, he wants to be free of institutions and this sits well with his antisocial tendencies, like defiance and contumatiousness. So he's both asocial and in some respects antisocial. He needs to be free to do as he pleases, when he pleases, my way or the highway, to tell everyone to f off if they disagree with him or impose on his time and attention. Okay, you see, understood, you see I'm optimistic. Why not alone? Why doesn't the narcissist generate commodified anonymous narcissistic supply, but lives alone by himself? Well, there are several psychodynamic psychological reasons why narcissists, most narcissists, opt to not be alone. Why, in other words, they generate shared fantasies all the time? Why do they need the vehicle of a shared fantasy? Number one, to dilute, the narcissist wants to dilute himself and to dilute others, to in a way deceive others, that he is normal. A shared fantasy conceals his severe mental illness. Number two, he wants to ensure regular access to narcissistic or in rare cases, sadistic supply. His intimate partner is his punching bag one way or another. Number three, he wants to have all these needs, including narcissistic supply, needy, infantile, learned helplessness. He wants all these needs catered to. He wants to be serviced, room service. And finally, he wants to be mothered by an adoring maternal figure or fathered by an adoring paternal figure, if it's a business associate or whatever. And so in this, in this kind of environment, he feels safe and secure because it harkens back to the period of his childhood. And he maintains a connection with internally with bed objects, which is his comfort zone. He knows how to relate to bed objects. What about the narcissist or the schizoid narcissist or narcissists, psychosexuality? As I said, the narcissist sexlessness and celibacy are artifacts of the schizoid state. They usually appear after modification or after some kind of narcissistic injury. The minute the narcissist had converted you into a bed object in reality, so that you conform to the bed internal object, that moment he begins to be angry at you, then he becomes depressed, then he becomes schizoid and sex stops. So the narcissist engages in autoerotic, non-reciprocal, immature, kinky fetishistic, and sadistic sex only. So, and he does this when he had settled on someone, a woman if he's heterosexual, on someone as a target, until he had settled on someone as a potential target, he remains in the schizoid state and is very likely to be asexual. And during the last bombing and grooming phase, the narcissist is sexually active and whenever abandonment is looming or imminent. So the narcissist is sexually active on three occasions. When he had settled on you as a target, when he is love-bombing and grooming you, and when he fears abandonment, when he fears abandonment, and if you keep threatening him with abandonment, the relationship could be full of sex throughout, I mean for years, as long as you threaten him with abandonment. But when you mortify him or narcissistically injure him, when he had confirmed that you're a bad rejecting object, the sex stops. Within an active stable, non-destructive shirt fantasy, the narcissist gradually slips into premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction followed by consensual sexlessness. And within the shirt fantasy, women finally cut off the sex because it is either autoerotic or selfish or sadistic. Or if they do insist on having conventional sex, the sex becomes rare and perfunctory and the narcissist becomes very abusive, you remember in the bargaining phase, the narcissist tries to push you away. So sex is always very disrupted. Periods of hypersexuality alternates with periods of sexlessness, and then you demand conventional sex, and then he pushes you away, and then he abuses you, and then you agree to have sadistic or kinky sex, and then he escalates, he wants three sounds, it's a mess. Sex life with narcissists in a shirt fantasy is a mess because you had become in his mind and outside, externally sometimes, a bad rejecting object. And so the narcissist is widely perceived as creepy, creepy, a weirdo, and is often very rejected in dating and so on, so forth. It's difficult for him to find an intimate partner for a shirt fantasy. That's why I keep saying that the profile of the woman who ends up being with the narcissist because the narcissist is indiscriminate. If you can give him supply, he will go for you. But 99% of women would reject the narcissist if they have a healthy core. Well, I'm exaggerating. Let's say 85% of women would reject the narcissist. Only women with particular vulnerabilities, broken, damaged, and so would finally settle for the narcissist. Why not with an asexual woman? If anyhow every shared fantasy ends with sexlessness, why not choose an asexual woman to start with? Why insist on a woman with healthy sexual appetites? Well, because if the narcissist were to choose an asexual woman, it would defeat the primary reason to have a shared fantasy, the projection of normalcy. The narcissist wants to tell himself and inform the world that he is normal. How can you be normal if your partner is asexual? You need a sexual partner with healthy appetites. Even one who cheats on you because if she cheats on you, if she cheats on you, it shows that she is normal and if she is normal, you're normal. It's a normal situation, cheating. So you want someone who is sexual so that she can broadcast to the world, I am normal, he is normal. It's like I'm okay, you're okay. Sex, even the memories of sex, guarantee addiction in the intimate partner. And sex generates delusional hope. The intimate partner binds with the narcissist. Pathfully, sex reduces the risk of abandonment. So sex is also instrumental. The narcissist on purpose chooses a sexual woman, a woman with sexual needs and appetites, because he can give her sex. And by giving her sex, he gets her addicted to the sex. He gives her false delusional hope and it binds her to him. And this way, he reduces the risk of abandonment. Generally, the narcissist will end up being, although it's not his preference, he has no type preference. But he does end up being dependent, immature women with borderline, histrionic, narcissistic or psychopathic features. No woman, especially of these types, would accept the narcissist unless there was sex. And all women who are with the narcissist end up abandoning him, rejecting him, betraying him, and sometimes cheating on him. They're faced with sexlessness, lack of love, lack of intimacy, they have their needs. They sometimes do it, they act out sometimes, and sometimes they just gradually, incrementally degenerate in their moral values and so on, and they become weak. The narcissist weakens the immune defenses against immoral behavior. And so finally they act out of character, and they're shocked by their own behavior, they feel very egodistonic, very bad. The shared fantasy, the shared fantasy reflects schizoid elements and narcissistic elements. As a schizoid, the narcissist confides in and derives validation and reality testing from only one family member, spouse, intimate partner. He sadistically, verbally abuses his partner in order to accomplish several goals. Sadistic supply of his asegis. He wants to test her unconditional maternal love and faithfulness. He wants to reenact early childhood conflicts, repetition compulsion, and he wants to re-establish his solitary personal space because he's a schizoid. By undermining intimacy, by denying it to the partner, by pushing the partner away, it creates the solitary space which caters to the most basic need of the schizoid. Following the love-bombing of the grooming phase, the narcissist settles into a sexless, abusive, transactional diet. Services and adulation against monetary compensation. He converts the intimate partner into a kind of housekeeper, companion, fan, provider, employer, business partner. He permits the partner, the narcissist, who is at core a schizoid, permits the partner to outsource her needs for love, intimacy, and sex. Let someone else take care of these needs. He can't provide her with these needs. He doesn't want to provide her with these needs. So let her take care of herself. All the schizoid narcissist cares about is the continuity of the shared fantasy. Reducing and ameliorating is abandonment anxiety. He's not romantically jealous, he's not possessive, he's not competitive with other men, except when there is a risk of abandonment. He reacts, the narcissist reacts with possessiveness and romantic jealousy, and he attempts to resume sex, reclaim sex, only when abandonment is a clear and present threat, especially when the triangulation or ostentatious cheating or love affair is tinged with revulsion, malice, hatred, envy, neglect, or indifference on the part of the partner. If the partner cheats on the narcissist, in his face, knowingly, in his presence, and thus so with, while demonstrating how revolted she is maliciously, she hates him, she envies the narcissist, and so on. So these are signs of irreversible break and imminent and the narcissist suddenly becomes jealous and possessive. In extreme cases, when the narcissist is disrespected and held in contempt or pity, he reacts with modification. So any attempt to bargain, for example, revert to conventional sex, demand commitment, demand investment, ask for change, share something, extort something, any attempt to bargain with the narcissist, disrupts the shared fantasy, and converts you instantly into a bad object. You become an external bad object, which corresponds to his internal bad object, and it destroys the shared fantasy, and it leads to your devaluation, discard, and replace. You're a bad object, but you have weaknesses and so on. Perhaps you're a bad object because you have weaknesses. As a human being, your empathy leads you astray, your compassion causes you to behave stupidly. And so he embarks on grooming a new partner and the cycle restarts. The same concept of shared fantasy is applicable to all other settings in the narcissist's life, not only to interpersonal intimate relationships. He behaves the same way in business. He behaves the same way with friends. As a schizo, he hates to socialize. He hates to have any exchange with people. He hates to have, he doesn't want to have friends. He's a schizoid. He wants to be left alone to do his own thing. But he charms and he makes promises. He grooms other people. When he's goal-oriented, when he needs money, access, power, media exposure, he suddenly becomes charming. He's goal-oriented, so he grooms. And whenever abandonment is an option. His business partner is about to walk away. Some medium is about to shut down his column or whatever. Whenever he's about to lose something, then he suddenly becomes very gregarious and social. But in between, obtained goals, when his accomplishments are secure, he minimizes contacts. He avoids any intercourse, human intercourse of all types. His relationships are strictly transactional and very cold and sterile. They're shallow. They're surface relationships and very goal-oriented. That's the anti-social streak in him. And he reacts with narcissistic injury and narcissistic envy. Only when abandonment is a clear and present threat, when he's about to be replaced with someone else. Especially when Mali's envy or indifference are evident in his rejection, when he's rejected. Any attempt to bargain with him in a business relationship, in a friendship, any demand that he can meet, invest, befriend, communicate. Any bargaining leads to instant explosives, sadistic and ostentatious, devalued, discard, replace. The narcissist then embarks on finding new business associates, new friends. And the cycle recommences exactly as he would do in his so-called intimate interpersonal relationships with his insignificant other.