 Okay, precious and precious. This is the second video of the day. I'm involved in a publishing project in Brussels and Zurich and whenever I can I record batches of videos up to five a day. So my apologies if the quality is not what you're used to. I will do my best. Anyone who has worked with victims of abuse knows how defensive they can become regarding their abusers. They would defend the abuser. They would say he's not an abuser. I provoked him. That's the way he shows love by beating me up or by being overly romantically jealous. He had a difficult childhood. Things are getting better. Many victims, if not by my experience, most victims are very very apologetic on behalf of the abuser. They try to recast the abusive acts and reframe them as acts of love or necessity or provocation or exceptions. Why? Why do victims identify with their abusers? Why do they defend the abuser? Why do they advocate on behalf of the abuser? Why do they refuse to collaborate with other victims, with the authorities in order to bring abusers to justice? Could be public justice. Doesn't have to be criminal justice, but some sort of justice. Why many victims are reticent and reluctant to accept that they have been victimized? Now you know my position. You should not adopt a victimhood mentality or a victimhood stance. They should not become your identity. If you dwell on your victimhood, for years something is seriously wrong with you and you need help. But you have been victimized. People are being victimized, usually through no fault of their own. And yet many victims deny what had happened, reframe it, falsify and rewrite history, just in order to shield the abuser from the consequences of his actions. And in order to somehow maintain the illusion or the delusion of a self-deception, that everything that has happened between the victim and the abuser was actually a romance, a fantasy shared or not, love, a form of love. And this is pretty shocking. Today we are going to discuss the psychology behind this. Why do victims identify with their abusers and defend them against others? My name is Samvakny. I am the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and a long-time member of the faculty of SEAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, Toronto, Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom with an outreach program in Lagos, Nigeria. Let's delve right in and start with another Freud, Zygmunt Freud's daughter. In 1936, Anna Freud described an amazing phenomenon. She called it identification with the aggressor. She suggested that there is an unconscious mechanism in which individuals identify with people who pose a threat. People identify with opponents. If you cannot master the threat, if you cannot control the adversary, if your enemy is beyond your reach, if you cannot protect yourself, one of the main psychological defenses is identifying with the abuser, with the aggressor, with the enemy, with the hostile presence, with the adversary or with the competitor. The identification may involve adopting the aggression or emulating some other characteristics of the abuser of the aggressor. Now, we have seen this happening in hostage-taking situations, in extreme conditions, in concentration camps. So, we know that this is real. We know it's true. There have been concentration camp inmates, cut-setniks, who identified with the SS guards and even more so with the SS officers and collaborated with them against other inmates. But they didn't collaborate in order to survive. They collaborated because they were proud of belonging to the order of the SS, however vicariously and in whatever inferior position. Similarly, in hostage-taking, we have had the Stockholm Syndrome, which I will discuss in a minute. So, according to psychoanalytic theory, identifying with the aggressor or with the abuser occurs very early in childhood. When there is a rival father or mother in the Edipus complex, when there is a mother or a father who are dead, not good enough, dead emotionally, absent, not good enough, neglectful, self-centered, depressive, avoidant, absent and so on and so forth, the child feels threatened. And one of the only ways for the child to cope with this threat is to merge and fuse conceptually, mentally, psychologically, to merge and fuse with a threatening figure. Mother and father are the sources of succor, of support and help. And if at the same time they are also the source of fear and intimidation and threat to life, this creates enormous dissonance and anxiety. And to ameliorate and mitigate this, the child simply becomes the threatening figure. He disappears, suspends, for example, his true self, and reappears in the shape of the abuser, at least in his or her mind. And this is identification with the aggressor. I mentioned the Stockholm Syndrome. It's a mental and emotional response in which a captive, a hostage, displays seeming loyalty, even affection, even love towards a captor, towards a hostage taker. Now, the Stockholm Syndrome is a very disputed syndrome. Many, many scholars say that it's nonsense, it's not substantiated, and it reflects the misogynism of the Swedish psychiatrist and criminologist Nils Begerot, who was the first to describe the Stockholm Syndrome. But I beg to disagree. I've seen it happen in prison, for example, where inmates identify with the wardens to the point that they begin to behave like wardens. And we have, of course, the Milgram experiments and others. So in the Stockholm Syndrome, a hostage identifies with a hostage taker, adopts the agenda of the hostage taker, works in favor of the hostage taker, collaborates with the hostage taker, and the hostages come to see law enforcement or other rescuers, or even hostage negotiators. They come to see them as the enemy, because they can endanger the hostage taker, endanger the captor, or provoke him to acts of violence and aggression. So this is the Stockholm Syndrome. It was a real case. It was a woman who was held hostage in 1973 during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. And she became emotionally attached, actually, she fell in love with one of the robbers. And she was so infatuated and besotted by the criminal who took her hostage that she broke her engagement to another man. And she told her mother, her own mother by phone, that she's in love. And she remained faithful to this criminal, to this former captor on hostage taker, during his entire prison term. And to this very day, I've seen an interview with her. She denies. She denies that there's such a thing as a Stockholm Syndrome. So, but this is an example of identifying with the aggressor. Now, what is this identifying? What does it mean? Identification is a clinical term. It's a psychological process. It's a process of associating the self closely with other individuals, with the characteristics of other individuals, their values, their views, their beliefs, their thought processes and cognitions, their emotions. Identification takes many forms. It starts in infancy when the infant feels part of his or her mother. It used to be known as the symbiotic phase. The mother and the infant are one. The child gradually adopts the attitudes, standards and personality traits of the mother later on of the father. The second phase of identification occurs in adolescence. The adolescent in puberty, the adolescent takes on the characteristics of a peer group, and especially influential peers. Adults also identify with a particular profession, with a political party, with a charismatic leader. Identification operates largely on the unconscious level. Now, in psychoanalytic theory, identification is actually a defense mechanism. The individual incorporates aspects of his or her objects, other people, inside the ego in order to alleviate the anxiety associated with object loss, or to reduce hostility between himself or herself and the object. So there are two reasons in psychoanalytic theory. There are two reasons for identification. Identification with someone else. Either you are afraid to lose that someone. This is object loss. And so symbolically, you're identifying with that person because you are afraid to lose them. By becoming one with that person, you are no longer able to lose them. And this is precisely what the narcissist does. He snapshots, he takes a snapshot of his potential intimate partner, and he internalizes the snapshot. He introjates it. From that moment, his abandonment anxiety is much reduced because there's no possibility of potential for object loss. Even if his intimate partner were to abandon him, he would still have access to the internal object that represents the lost object in his mind. And the other reason for identification is when there is enmity and hostility and aggression between the individual and another person. One way to mitigate it. One way to overcome it. One way to reduce the anxiety attendant upon such conflict is to assimilate, to identify with the adversary or the enemy or the abuser. From that moment, you become one with the source of your fear and your fear is gone. So this is identification. Now we have two types of identification. Defensive identification and anaclytic identification. Defensive identification is when a victim of abuse psychologically identifies with a perpetrator or with a group with which the perpetrator is identified. It is a defensive strategy against continuing feelings or vulnerability to further victimization. So the victim of abuse feels helpless, hopeless, vulnerable, exposed, under threat. And by identifying with the abuser or with a group that the abuser belongs to, SS officers in the concentration camp, the victim loses this vulnerability. He is no longer exposed to victimization. He is now the victimizer in his mind. He has become one with the abuser. So he can no longer be abused. He can only abuse others. This is defensive identification. Now in classical psychoanalytic theory, Sigmund Freud's defensive identification was a part of the identification process in which a child identified with a parent. And that parent was perceived to be powerful, threatening and punitive, a harsh parent, a sadistic parent. So the child identifies with his parent. It is a defense against punishment by the parent. So this is defensive identification and a clinical identification again in the classical psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. It's the first phase of the identification process. It is rooted in the child's initial dependence on the mother as well as on other caregivers and caretakers. So the child depends on other people, adults, for biological needs and emotional needs. This dependency is intolerable, it's terrifying, it's ominous, it's frightening, and what the child does, it identifies with these people. The child acquires the mother's characteristics and that way he becomes his own mother. The child self-parens via anacletic identification. He becomes the mother and he then becomes the source of his own reinforcement, comfort, sense of safety, stability, and predictability. So when the external parent is dead, not good enough, threatening, harsh, frightening, and so on and so forth, child is likely to engage in anacletic identification. Subsuming the characteristics, traits and behaviors of the parent, becoming his or her own parent self-parenting, thus removing the anxiety. Even if the parent is neglectful or abusive or hateful, the child can parent himself or herself because he has an internal parent, anacletic identification. The child incorporates the mother into his or her super ego. We will discuss the ego idea a bit later. Now, the child does the same not only with mother, children tend to do it with role models, teachers, influential peers, and so on and so forth. And it comes in two waves, up to age six usually, formative years, and later during adolescence. Identification is not the same as incorporation. These are all mechanisms used by victims of abuse to neutralize the overwhelming drowning feeling of impotence, helplessness, prevailing threat, ominous victimization, catastrophic or catastrophizing doom and gloom. To counter these victims of abuse, identify, they use identification, which is an infantile process. The first time it happens is in infancy when the child assimilates the mother in order to do away with abandonment and object loss and get rid of the more threatening aspects of the mother. So this is a primitive infantile strategy, but victims of abuse are regressed by the abuser to infancy. Abuse regresses people to infancy. It renders them as helpless as babies. So obviously, they deploy infantile, baby-like defenses. Identification is one. Incorporation is another. It's not the same as identification, as I said. It's a fantasy. It's a fantasy defense. And it's a fantasy that one has ingested an external object. And this external object is felt to be physically present inside the body. It first occurs in very, very early childhood when the child fantasizes that it has ingested the mother's breast, a melanocline expounded on this in her work. So incorporation is an early form of identification and interjection. It's super primitive, and it's a superstition in effect. It's a childish, super-infantile superstition that there is a possibility of swallowing the external object. Now, we have echoes of this in mythology, chronos. We have echoes of this in war, practices of war, where prisoners of war are eaten, having succumbed, having surrendered, or having died in battle, they're eaten. Parts are eaten, like the liver, the heart, in order to acquire their properties or their characteristics. So if there's a dead enemy soldier who fought valiantly and bravely, eating his heart and eating his liver would give you the same qualities. These are all examples of incorporation in action. And the third mechanism used by victims of abuse, these are all total mechanisms. They are all baby mechanisms. The third mechanism is interjection. Narcissists use it because narcissists are children. Victims of abuse use it because their narcissistic defenses are triggered. It's a process where an individual unconsciously incorporates aspects of external reality into the self. Artitudes of other people, values, qualities of another person, part of another person's personality. Intrajection, for example, occurs during mourning and grieving for a loved one. And so now you understand why narcissists are addicted to interjection as almost the exclusive mechanism of object relations, of referring to other people. Because narcissists are constantly in a state of grief. Narcissism is a prolonged grief disorder. I have videos dedicated to this comparison. In psychoanalytic theory, the interjection is a process of absorbing the qualities of an external object into the psyche in the form of an internal object or a mental representation, an interjection. And then it has an influence on behavior. The process is a normal part of development. We all interject parental values, attitudinal forms of parents. We create a super ego by internalizing, interjecting our parents and other influential figure in early life. But sometimes this utterly normal process goes malignant and awry and becomes a defense mechanism in situations that arouse anxiety. So then people interject in order to reduce anxiety about an external object. So if you're anxious that you may lose an external object, that this external object may abandon you, you would interject the external object and it would become a part of you. To become a part, to become a figment in your mind, it will become an element in your fantasy and you would no longer be so afraid of losing that object or being abandoned by it. Because now it's in your mind, it's incorporated, it's interiorized. So this is an example of interjection as a defense mechanism. And of course, all these involve representation. Representation is that which stands for or signifies something else. In cognitive psychology, for example, representation denotes a mental representation. In psychoanalytic theory, it refers to an introject. Introduction creates introjects which are mental representations of significant others. So it's a symbol. It's a symbolic thing. We convert people into symbols in effect and then we manipulate the symbols. There is a connection here because symbols are also used to represent repressed impulses, urges and drives. In a way, introjection is used to suppress or repress forbidden propensities, forbidden wishes, forbidden urges, forbidden drives and to some extent forbidden content. This is a very interesting connection. I will discuss it in another video. Okay, so what picture do we have here? People, when they are faced with abuse, especially extreme abuse, especially life-threatening abuse, and when you're a child, every form of abuse is a life-threatening abuse. So people identify with the abuser. They come to merge of use with the abuser at least mentally. They identify and it's a defensive form of identification. They incorporate the abuser symbolically. They interject the abuser. They represent the abuser in their minds mentally. A mental representation is a hypothetical entity that is presumed to stand for a perception, a thought, a memory or something similar during cognitive operations. So when we do mental arithmetic, so we have mental representations of digits and numerical operators. When you imagine looking at the reverse side of an object, which you cannot see, the dark side of the moon, you operate on a mental representation of that object. And when you repeat a phone number allowed, when you dilate, you operate on a mental representation of the name attached to the phone number or the digits of the phone number. So mental representation brings the external world into your mind, allows you to capture it, domesticate it, tame it, cultivate it, embed it in a symbolic network and then manipulate it in a way that reduces your anxiety, that reduces your anxiety. So and all this of course is connected to cognition, to thinking. Thinking involves mental representations. And so the question is, when we interiorize, when we internalize, identify, incorporate, interject, never mind, another person, an external object, starting with mother and father, and then other caregivers, and then influential peers, teachers, role models, much later in life, intimate partners, and so on. When we do this, we create internal objects, we create mental representations, hypothetical elements of thought, which are experienced and manipulated. You can do anything with a mental representation, you can use on it various operations, you can do imagining with a mental representation, you can do remembering, you can do problem solving, daydreaming, free association, concept formation, all these processes operate on mental representations. So thinking can be covert, not directly observable, but inferred from actions, or it could be symbolic, it could involve operations on mental symbols or representations. All the processes that are described with victims of abuse, all of them are essentially symbolic. What victims of abuse do, because the abuse is intolerable, terrified, unacceptable. Victim of abuse convert the abuser of the perpetrator into a symbol, a mental representation, and then operate on it, operate on this mental representation and deceive themselves into believing that they've attained or gained control over the threatening menacing object. By manipulating the internal object that represents the abuser, victims of abuse come to believe that everything is under control, that nothing terrifying is going to happen, that they're not going to be victimized again, because they possess the object, they own it. If this sounds familiar, that's exactly what narcissists do. Narcissists perceive other people as abusers, all of them, even intimate partners. Everyone is a potential persecutory object. Most people are perceived by the narcissists as potential enemies or hostile. Actually, the vast majority of introjects, internal objects in the narcissist's mind end up becoming persecutory. The narcissist converts almost everyone in his mind at least into an enemy and frequently converts people, real people out there into enemies. So the narcissist inhabits this very hostile environment, and what he does, he incorporates this or interjects these people. It allows him to deceive himself into believing that he is the master of the universe, therefore not vulnerable and not amenable to victimization. That's how he reduces his anxiety. Now I mentioned before the ego idea. In psychoanalytic theory, this is the part of the ego that is the repository of positive identifications with parental goals and values that the individual admires, wishes to emulate, and so on and so forth. So integrity, loyalty, ambition, and so on and so forth. It's a model of how the person wishes to be. New identifications, new interjections are incorporated into the ego ideal throughout life. So the ego ideal evolves, it develops, changes, and it becomes gradually into a part of the super ego. Now victims of abuse have a problem with this. When they interject the abuser or the perpetrator as a defense mechanism against the anxiety of being victimized, when they merge and fuse at least symbolically with an object of frustration, pain, hurt, and life threat, when they do this in order to remain egocintonic, in order not to create internal dissonance, which would raise the level of anxiety even further, they also adopt the values, beliefs, worldview, convictions of the abuser or the perpetrator. In short, they truly become a replicant, replicant, a clone of the abuser or the perpetrator. And this is, narcissistic contagion. And I made a video about this, 20 signs that you've been infected by a narcissist. The vector of infection is via interjection. When the victim of abuse tells herself, I am no longer going to be victimized, I am safe now, because I have internalized my abuser. I have become my abuser. I've interjected my abuser. My abuser is now just an internal object in my mind. I don't need to be afraid anymore. I don't need to be worried anymore. At that point, she must accept her abuser fully. If she internalizes an object, if she creates an introject of the abuser and she disagrees with the abuser's conduct, beliefs, values and so on, this would create a clash inside her mind. She would be fighting the internal object. So she needs to conform to the way the abuser sees her. And this is coercive snapshotting. And she needs to become the abuser. She needs to develop symbiosis with the abuser. She is regressed to the point in life prior to age six months, when she used to be one with her mother, the symbiotic phase. We no longer use this term, but still, it's very, very telling. The ego ideal gradually becomes part of the superego. It is the moral component of the personality. It represents parental and societal standards. It's an artifact of socialization. It determines personal standards of right and wrong. It incorporates the conscience, as well as aims and aspirations in the ego ideal. In the classical Freudian treat-partite structure of the psyche, the ego, which controls personal impulses and directs actions, the ego operates under the command, under the supervision, principles and rules of the superego. The parental demands, prohibitions are there, internalized, and they control the ego via the superego. So we continue to see the world through our parents' eyes till the day we die. And then the abuser enters our lives. Someone starts to abuse, and the only defense available is to become a baby again and internalize the abuser, interject the abuser, as a parental figure, and this leads to my concept of dual mothership, as a parental figure. So what happens is the abuser triggers the superego. On the one hand, the abuser forces, coerces the victim of abuse to interject him, to internalize him, as a model, a role model, to hand over her ego functions to him. The abuser becomes a figure for imitation and emulation, admired, adored, adulated, can do no wrong infallible, godlike. So this is the coercive element. The abuser taps, reaches into the victim's ego ideal, and forces her to incorporate him, the abuser, in her ego ideal. Now she wants to become the abuser when she grows up. The abuser becomes what she wants to be. The abuser becomes what she genuinely admires, what she wishes to emulate, a paragon of everything that's good and everything that should be imitated. Summertimeously, via the ego ideal, the abuser reaches into the superego and forces the victim to regress to her very early childhood, and to interject him, the abuser, as a parental figure. Thereby replacing her original values and beliefs and principles and demands, parental demands, replacing all these with his. Originally, she had values and beliefs and principles that she had inherited from her father and mother via the process of socialization. She incorporated these values and beliefs and demands and morality and everything in the superego. Here comes the abuser and supplans substitutes his values, his beliefs, his demands, his principles for the original parental ones. He becomes a substitute parent. And having regressed his victim to a very early phase of life, the victim interjects the abuser and creates a totally new ego ideal and a totally new superego, that of the abuser. She essentially suspends herself. She disappears and allows the abuser to invade her vacated mind, to make a claim or claim a stake, and establish himself there, monopolize the area, and become her mind. The abuser becomes a mind. This is an exceedingly pernicious process, because as the abuser implants, installs a new ego ideal and a new superego in his victim's minds, at that moment he gains control of the victim's ego and her access to reality, because access to reality is mediated through the ego. This is all unconscious and the processes of identification and rejection are all unconscious. That's why I say that this is a pernicious process. And unbeknownst to her, the victim is colonized, as I said, invaded. It's like an invasive species. The abuser is like an invasive species. And because at some point the victim's ego ideal is a foreign body implanted by the abuser, her superego equally is an app installed by the abuser in her mind. Her ego is now compromised and under the direct control of the abuser. At that point, she feels no difference between herself and the abuser, they are one. There's no ego distance here. She doesn't feel bad or uncomfortable or threatened. She feels this is the normal state of things. This is how it should be. This is love. She mislabels love. She mislabels emotions. There's a total semantic shift in her inner world, what we call the overt and the hidden texts. Lacan would have loved it. And so at that moment language itself is subverted. The victim is incapable of using language properly. On a mundane level, if you ask this victim, you say, he beat you up. Don't you hate him? Aren't you angry at him? She says, no. I made him do it. He's very jealous and I looked at another man and by beating me up, that's the way he signals his love for me. I know that he's jealous because he loves me and he's beating me up because he's jealous. That's a chain. That's a linguistic chain. Language itself is corrupted beyond words by narcissists and psychopaths. This is true only in the individual level. And of course it is true on the collective level. The Nazis subverted language totally to this very day, innocent words in Germany, in German, are reminiscent or a redolent of, resonate with atrocities because they've hijacked these words. Narcissists does the same. Psychopath does the same. They hijack the language mechanism which represents the unconscious. And within the unconscious, more specifically the super ego and the ego and the ego ideal. They mind snatch. I keep talking about internal objects and so on and so forth. What is an object? The word object has many meanings in various schools of psychology. It could be an entity in the environment, a real thing, a real person, it could be a condition, a circumstance, anything that stimulates, any stimulus, anything that elicits a response from an organism and this is known as a stimulus object. It could be the target of attention, perception or some other cognitive or other mental process. That's an object. It could be other people, any person or symbolic representation of a person that is not oneself. And a representation that somehow is connected or triggers behaviors, cognitions or effects directed at the external object that is represented by the internal object. This is why narcissism is a breakdown in the process. Because narcissists directs behavior, cognitions, effects, negative effects in his case, towards the internal object. When he should have normally, had he been normal and healthy, he should have directed it at the external object. In psychoanalytic theory, object is a person, a thing or even a part of the body through which an instinct can achieve gratification. I don't want to go into all this, object catexes, object relations and so on and so forth. Object is also a person who is a real person or imagined person, who is loved by an individual's ego, a love object, I've made a video about it a day or two ago. And so these are the various meanings of object. Now we distinguish between good object and bad object. The victim of abuse comes into the interaction, enters the relationship, steps into the shared fantasy, either with a good object or with a bad object. A good object is a set of sentences. I'm good, I'm worthy, I'm accomplished, I believe in myself, etc. A bad object is the opposite. I'm unworthy, I'm corrupt, I'm bad, I'm a failure, I'm a loser and so on. So some victims end up with narcissists and psychopaths because they have a bad object. And the narcissists and the psychopath are punitive. In other words, they use the narcissists and the psychopath in their lives to punish themselves for being a bad object. These kind of victims would actually not interject the abuser. They would wish to preserve the abuser as a disciplinarian punishing figure. So they're unlikely to incorporate or to identify with the abuser or to interject the abuser because if they do, then the abuse will disappear in their minds. There will be no anticipation or catastrophizing of victimhood and there will be no punishment. And they need to be punished. So victims with a bad internal bad object, victims who regard themselves as unworthy, corrupt, losers, failures, ugly, stupid, you name it, and worthy of punishment, victims who are self-punitive, they would preserve the abuser's status as an abuser. They would even push the abuser to be more abusive. They would use projective identification to force the abuser to be more abusive. When the abuser is not abusive enough, they would become abusive. They would become aggressive. Victims with a good object, however, when they start a relationship with an abuser, they would interject the abuser, identify with the abuser, emulate the abuser, thereby importing, ingesting a bad object and becoming a bad object. So the first type of victim who already considers herself worthy of punishment, self-destructive, self-defeating, self-loathing, self-hating, self-trashing, self-handicapping, this kind of victim would seek to enhance the abuser's abuse. She would revel in the abuse. Victim with a good object would be terrified, would be anxious, would feel pain and hurt. In her defense, she would identify with the abuser and interject him in order to reduce her anxiety. Now let me define for your bad object, good object and part object, so that in future videos you'll be able to be on the same page. The whole concept of objects was first introduced rigorously by Melanie Klein. In psychoanalytic theory, a bad object is an introjected part object. In a minute I will explain what is part object. And this part object has negative qualities, as I mentioned before. It is an early object representation and it derives from splitting of the object, usually the mother, into parts containing negative qualities, the bad object and positive qualities, the good object. And so the creation of the bad object is a way to manage internal anxiety over destructive impulses arising from frustration. The mother frustrates a child. She doesn't feed the child when the child insists. She leaves the room when the child is abandoned exactly. The child becomes very aggressive. The child wants to destroy mother, but of course the child depends on mother. So what the child does, the child splits mother into all good mother and all bad mother, good object and bad object. And the ego projects the aggressive destructive impulses onto the bad object. And the bad object feels like an external threat or persecutor, even though it's only a mental representation. So this is a bad object. But what is a part object? Because good objects and bad objects, they are both part objects. So what is a part object? In psychoanalytic theory a part object is an object towards which there is a direction of an instinct. It's usually a part of the body, not another person, but it could be another person. If an urge or a drive or an instinct is directed at something or someone, that thing or one is called the part object. Now Melanie Klein took the concept of a part object and ran with it. And she says that a part object is this object representation that is the outcome of splitting the object into negative and positive qualities. So when the baby splits mommy into bad mommy and good mommy, bad mommy is a part object and good mommy is a part object. This is the infant's first experience of the world. And so he perceives the world in terms of good objects and bad objects. Good objects gratify the baby, satisfy the baby, make baby happy, make baby smile. Bad objects frustrate the baby, hurt the baby, make baby cry. So internalizing part objects is the beginning of the inner world of objects whose and the relationships between these internal objects gradually mature, evolve and become what we call the personality. And finally the good object is an introjected part object that is benevolent and satisfying. It is an early object representation, splitting mommy usually, not always, but a caregiver. If mommy is a caregiver, splitting mommy into positive and negative qualities. The difference between my work and Melanie Klein's work, Melanie Klein says that the baby internalizes the good object and regards mommy as a bad object. And I say exactly the opposite. Melanie Klein says that the good object forms the core of the infant's budding ego, immature ego. I think it's exactly the opposite. I think the baby wouldn't dare to consider mommy a bad object. That would be very, very life-threatening. If mommy is a bad object, she would forget to feed him. She would kill him. He cannot contemplate that mommy is a bad object. So what the baby does, he splits mommy into bad object and good object. He internalizes the bad object and mommy remains the good object. That way he cannot, he does not allow himself to direct destructive aggression towards mommy. Mommy is all good. There's no need to be aggressive with her. Baby is all bad. There's a need to be aggressive with baby. My belief is my work is the mirror image of Melanie Klein. I think we all start by regarding ourselves as bad objects. It is the role of good enough parents and especially good enough mothers to convince us laboriously that we are good objects, not the way Melanie Klein says. Okay, I also mentioned the ego. The ego is often conflated erroneously, as Jung said, conflated with the self, particularly the conscious sense of self, the I, yes, the ego in Latin. It refers to all the psychological phenomena and processes that are related to the self and comprise the individual's attitudes, values, beliefs, concerns, cognitions, emotions, etc. That's the layman's perception of the ego, but that's not true. The clinical term ego in psychoanalytic theory is a component of the personality that deals with the external world and the practical demands of the external world, the constraints that the external world imposes on one's wishes, drives, urges, and instincts. You want to do things and the ego tells you don't. The consequences will be dire. You will be punished. Don't do that. The ego enables the individual to perceive, to reason, to solve problems, to test reality, to adjust instinctual impulses of the id to the demands of the superego, mediate between them, etc., etc. The narcissist does not have a fully formed, fully functional ego, which is why narcissists engage in seriously stupid actions. It's as if they feel immune to the consequences of their decisions and choices. They are not necessarily anti-social as stupidly social. It's stupidity. It's pseudo-stupid. Now finally, there was a guy called Fairburn. Fairburn was a British psychoanalyst, Romald Fairburn, in the 60s, in the 50s and 60s. He was a major figure in object-relations to Europe. Fairburn saw the personality structure developing in terms of object relationships, rather than in terms of id, ego, superego, and so on. Fairburn was the first to suggest that we are the sum total of our relations. We propose the existence of the ego at birth, and then it splits apart during the paranoid schizoid position. In this sense, he agreed with Melanie Klein. And then the ego forms the structures of personality. And in response to frustrations or excitement, experiencing relationships with mother, the infant's ego is split into a central ego, which corresponds to Freud's concept of the ego, libidinal ego, which corresponds to the id, and anti-libidinal ego, which corresponds to the superego. So Freud's three-part structure is the breakdown of the ego, of the primordial pregenital ego, the ego that the newborn has. This ego breaks apart when confronted with reality and its exigencies and vicissitudes mediated by a mother. And now that you have all the tools, let's go back to the victim of abuse. The victim of abuse has an object inside. According to my work, everyone starts with a bed object, and then mother, father, and other influential figures convince you that you're a good object. The victim of abuse reacts to the abuse in accordance with the part object that she has. Is the part object bad or is the part object good? As I said, if the part object is bad, she will encourage the abuse, incentivize it, enhance it, magnify it, feel rewarded when she's abused, and therefore reinforce the abuse. And the abuser would develop the belief that he is doing her bidding. On the other hand, if the part object is good, she would then defend against the abuse by internalizing and interjecting the abuser into the ego, the superego, and the ego ideal, whether we believe, whether we adopt Freud's point of view, or whether we adopt Fairburn's point of view, that's beside the point. The anti-libidinal ego in Fairburn's work is very similar to Freud's superego. It's a non-pleasure gratifying, self-deprecatory, or even hostile, self-loathing, self-hating, self-image. It develops out of the unitary ego presented at birth. When the libidinal ego experiences deprivation at the hands of the parent, and the infant suppresses frustrated needs. It's also called the internal saboteur. I mentioned Fairburn and I'm mentioning the anti-libidinal ego because this is exactly what happens when you're exposed, when some victims are exposed to abuse. People according to Fairburn, all people develop self-hate, self-loathing, self-deprecation, self-hostility, negative self-image. All people develop this because every single human being on earth is exposed to frustration, deprivation, conflict, strife, and so on. Everyone is exposed to this. Anti-libidinal ego is a natural reaction because what the baby says unconsciously, I have needs. These needs are not being met, and they're not being met because I'm a bed object. In this sense, Fairburn is much closer to my work, I mean my work is much closer to Fairburn than to Melanie Klein because I agree with Fairburn that we all end up having a bed object initially, and the aim of the bed object is to inform us you are not good enough for your needs to be met. You deserve frustration, you deserve deprivation, you deserve conflict, you had it coming. The infant or the baby suppresses his needs and tells himself, these are my needs, they're not being met, but they're not being met for good reason because I'm a bed unworthy object. This is exactly what happens to the victim of abuse. The abuser activates or reactivates her anti-libidinal ego, and what she does, she suppresses her needs and she tells herself, I had it coming, I provoked him, he is the best I can do, I deserve him, he loves me, etc. She lies to herself, she becomes self-hating, self-deprecating, self-hostile, self-trashing, self-loathing, abuses, invoking the victim of abuse. The primordial bed object, which is the outcome of splitting in Melanie Klein's work and Freud's work and or the breakdown of the primordial ego in Fairburn's work doesn't matter, the bed object is there, it's dormant, it's been deactivated and lusterized by good parents. Good parents told you, you are worthy, you are wonderful, you're a wonderful child, you are capable, you're talented, you're skilled, you're beautiful, you're handsome, you're good, and this constant positive reinforcement suppressed the bed object, put it to sleep, here comes the abuser and he reactivates your bed object and he takes over you at that moment in time, when you consider yourself bad and unworthy and corrupt, you also consider yourself worthy of abuse, worthy of punishment, the abuser becomes an instrument of morality, the abuser restores cosmic justice, the abuser hands out or meets out well-deserved punishments, because that's all you deserve, punishment. At the same time you develop object loss, object loss is the actual loss of a person who served as a good object, object loss precedes introspection and is involved in separation anxiety, it's anxiety about the possible loss of a good object, it begins with the infant's panic when mommy leaves the room, ugly grief and mourning are related to object loss and separation anxiety in infancy and childhood and this intensifies and complicates the grief reaction, separation anxiety is normal, it's the normal fear or apprehension experienced by a young child when he is away or when he is faced with a prospect of being away from the person or from the people to whom he is attached, particularly mother but not only mother, separation anxiety, separation insecurity, abandonment anxiety, it's very very active, it's an active force between the ages of six and ten months of age, separation from loved ones in later years elicits the same anxiety, activates it and creates separation distress, separation distress is discomfort, it's anxiety felt by an individual upon losing contact with an attachment figure, a child loses contact with a caregiver, an adult traumatically loses a spouse or a partner, this creates separation distress, where's the difference, the abuser convinces the victims of abuse via in training and coercive snapshotting and all the mechanisms I described, the abuser convinces the victim of abuse that she's a bad object, the abuser reactivates her bad object, at that moment the abuser is misperceived as a good object and is introjected because if you as victim of abuse, you're a bad object, you're a bad girl or a bad boy, you deserve punishment, then the abuser is automatically your mother, automatically your parent and parents can never be bad, parents are always good, they're good like, they're good objects, splitting kicks in, you're all bad, your abuser is all good, moreover if you deserve punishment, if you deserve self denigration, humiliation, if you deserve to feel shame for who you are, then the abuser is a moral agent, he doesn't inflict moral injury on you, he is doing God's work, he's fulfilling the tasks of justice by punishing you, he's doing a good thing, he's acting ethically, you deserve punishment, you had it coming, someone should do it, he's doing it, so in your mind the abuser, in the mind of the victim of abuse, she becomes a good object, the abuser becomes, she becomes a bad object, I'm sorry, the abuser becomes a good object and a moral, an agent of morality, a punitive agent of morality, similar to a policeman or judge and then he is all good, she's all bad, she interjects him, she tries to become all good, it's very difficult to experience, to have the experience that you're all bad, so you want to become all good and her solution is to internalize the abuser because the abuser is not perceived as all good, by internalizing the abuser she also overcomes the fear of loss of object, she overcomes her separation anxiety and her abandonment anxiety because now the abuser who is all good is in her mind, she is all good, he would never abandon her and she controls him fully, this is the convoluted totally sick dynamic between some victims of abuse and their abusers, the abuser convinces you that you are the abuser, you are bad, you are bad, you're unworthy, you're sinful, you're corrupt, you're stupid, you deserve, you deserve what he's doing to you, he's acting in a morality play where he is all good and you are all bad and your only option to become all good is to become him, to internalize him, to become an extension of him, to merge and fuse with him somehow, to develop symbiosis with him as a mother figure, mother, a mother who could love you unconditionally only if you perform by becoming her