 גוטן טעבאלס אופס מה אני עושה? אני יעושה בישראלי אוקיי שושנים בוקר טוב ילדים וילדות חביבים וחביבות עכשיו אני אעשה לי פייברית על ארץ אדם אדם אבל לא אדם בפיזיקל שלס אדם מנהל בפיזיקל קרות בלבדי בפיזיקל אדם רגע עכשיו אני אעשה לי פייברית בוקר ומלבדי ובקרות וכי שעשו עשו עשו לתת שאלה נראה אני שם ותנין אני אדם ליגנן סלב, נרסיזם רוויזיטת, אני פורמור פרופסור של סיכולוגי ואני בבקשה סייבס, קומונווילטי בין פרופסיידות אינטרנטי, קמבריג' קינדן, טרונטו קנדאטה ואם שאתה יכולה, שאתה יכולה לסתכל על זה, תמיד, לגוס ניגריה. מילה הילה היא עוד העבור של היום, והיא דבר כפי, הראש היא לגוס ניגריה, אני פורמור פרופסיידות של סיכולוגי ובסילת של הילה, נפלא, נפלא, זה לא יוצא. וואלה אני פרופסייד את הסיכולוגי של מילה הילה. So apart from Lehmann and apart from professionals, my usual cocktail. Now, those of you who want to read more, learn more about the dead mother, I recommend Andre Green's book, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, and there's a chapter there called The Dead Mother. The book was published in 2001 by Free Associations in New York. Another excellent book in my view is The Dead Mother, the work of Andre Green in the new library of psychoanalysis. It was authored by Gregorio Cohen. Get your mind off the gutter. Gregorio Cohen, K-O-H-O-N. It was actually preceded Andre Green's book. It was published in 1999. Now, before we proceed, you should not confuse. You should not confuse. Confusion in general is a bad idea, and you should not confuse a dead mother with a dead father. A dead father was first proposed by Joyce McDougal in 1989. She introduced it into psychoanalytic literature, and it is not the same. It is not the complement or the correspondent of a dead mother. It's actually a really dead father, a father who died physically and in every other way. And she says, McDougal says, the roots of both sexual deviance and creativity may often be traced to early psychic trauma such as the death of a father. Both are ways to overcome the damage done to the mind. So this was the initial proposition of a dead father. And later, Leela Kalinich and Stuart Taylor and others in 2005 and other other papers expanded it, rendered it more metaphorical, and therefore closer to the construct of of dead mother. But still, dead father refers to fathers who lack parental functions or abdicated parental functions. Deadbeat fathers, if you wish. And that, of course, has an effect on offspring. I recommend that you watch my videos on the role of the father in early childhood. It's crucially different to the role of the mother. Father is much less important in early childhood than the mother, vanishingly less important. So the effects of a dead father are different. I wouldn't say they're minimal, but they're different. Back to our topic, dead mother. Andre Green coined this phrase in 1980 to describe the effects of mothers who are unable to provide what mothers should provide. Devotion, selflessness, forgiveness, help to survive, survival, soothing, nourishment, a secure base, love that is essentially unconditional although disciplined, so with boundaries. An idealization of the child. Some mothers who are unable to provide all this because they are absorbed in their own internal world of bereavement, unhedonia, depression, deadness, self-absorption, narcissism, maybe psychosis. This kind of mothers, they raise children who later on as adults are equally unable to provide these functions. They have no altruism, no concern for others, no generosity, no empathy, and no functional object relations, no ability to develop interpersonal relations. We're going to discuss all these effects and impacts as you progress through this video. I just hope you don't end up being dead viewers by the end. So the dead mother complex is a clinical condition and it involves an early and destructive identification of the child with a figure of a depressed and emotionally unavailable mother, a dead mother in the metaphorical sense. And so the complex, the dead mother complex involves a mother who was initially engaged emotionally with her child, but then switched off from emotional resonance to emotional detachment. Maybe she went through a loss, maybe she is in mourning, maybe she became more narcissistic, her defenses kicked in, maybe she was exposed to adverse life circumstances. Who knows? At some point she transitioned from an all-good mother to an all-bed mother, or to use Melanie Klein's pictorial imagery, she transitioned from a good breast to a bed breast. This transition is utterly destructive. It is the main engine of narcissism. But the logical narcissism is a reaction to arbitrariness, capriciousness, unpredictability, indeterminacy, a lack of a secure base, a feeling of un-safety that are engendered by a mother who is intermittently reinforcing, hot and cold, loves and hates, ambivalent, and consequently creates in her child the hypervigilance required to survive. The child monitors the mother constantly and continuously, fearfully anticipating her transitions from one state to another. When the child is unable to restore a feeling of some connection, he internalizes the hardness of the mother, her unresponsiveness, her absent emotional core, her emptiness, and this is what we call narcissism. Narcissism in this sense is an attachment disorder, disorder coupled with a fantasy defense, because to not be attached to your mother is too painful. It fosters a lifelong process of bereavement and grieving and mourning prolonged grief disorder, and this creates in the child a kind of depression, the defense against this depression, which is an existential form of depression, and the defense against this is to pretend that he is not he, the child pretends that he is not he, he is someone else, the false self. The false self is one step removed, you could conceive of it as an exoskeleton or a hard boundary, rigid boundary that doesn't allow the world to come in because the world didn't perceive to be as hostile, dangerous, and painful, above all painful. We're going to discuss all this in the professional part when I analyze Andre Green's Dead Mother Complex. Narcissism is a dead mother complex, but who are these dead mothers and why are they dead and in which ways do they acquire their death-like qualities, their fanatic or distrudo qualities, in which sense? Well, there are three types that I want to single out, although there are many additional types of dead mothers. I want to single out the borderline mother, the narcissistic mother, and the psychotic mother, mother with psychosis or psychotic disorder. Start with the borderline mother, borderline mothers are unstable, they are unstable in a variety of fields, they are unstable in interpersonal relationships, they have an identity disturbance, their self-image fluctuates, their effects up and down, they have moodlability, their values and beliefs, beliefs change from one day to another, they are markedly impulsive, so this extremely volatile, fluctuating, labile environment is perceived by the child as ominous, threatening the absolute antithesis, the absolute opposite of a secure base. In the absence of a secure base, the child cannot separate from the mother and explore the world because he's afraid that once he had finished exploring the world, mother will be gone. In short, there is a problem with introject constancy, the child is unable to internalize mother, convert her into an internal object and trust that in her constancy, trust that she will always be there for him. Now I'm using he, you can easily replace it with a she, the gender pronouns are interchangeable, women and men are equally represented, Genitalia, equally represented in personality disorders, cluster B personality disorders. Okay, so an unsafe mother creates an anxious child, an anxious child cannot take on the world, cannot let go of mommy, sometimes physically he hugs her legs, he wouldn't let her go, he throws a temper tantrum whenever she wants to move away. This lack, this sense of lack of safety follows the child into adulthood, creates an insecure attachment style. The child is terrified of loss, imminent loss, anticipated loss, catastrophized loss, a loss that is all but ascertained. Now the borderline mother is her entire psychodynamic, her entire internal world revolves around the twin issues of abandonment and engulfment. Abandonment and gender in her anxiety, separation insecurity and engulfment or enmeshment does the same, generates an anxiety. So this kind of mother is approach avoidant and she broadcast to the child, don't abandon me, you're gonna kill me if you abandon me, I'm gonna die so the child doesn't dare to venture forth to go out of his or her way to meet other people, to socialize, to be subjected to peer processes, peer processes are critical in adolescence for example, so this kind of child remains homebound and a mommy's boy or mommy's girl because the child perceives abandoning mommy as a really really evil and wicked thing to do, mommy says so, but when the child tries to be intimate with mother, to love her, to care for her, to show signs of emotions, her engulfment and enmeshment anxiety kicks in, the only way she knows how to relate to her child is via merger and fusion with the child and so she feels consumed by the child, she feels hemmed in, stifled, strangled, suffocated by the child's presence and she rejects the child which again creates in the child an anxiety and of course the child becomes a reflection of the mother, the child also develops an abandonment anxiety so all in all there's this unstable and intense interpersonal relationship between the mother and the child characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation, devaluation is disastrous as far as a child is concerned, it ruins his ability to regulate his own sense of self-worth, his self-esteem, his self-confidence and ultimately his self-perception and self-image in short it engenders in the child an identity disturbance, there's no core identity, there's no one there, the mother hollows out the child, empties the child from the inside by refusing to allow the child to define his boundaries through her gaze, it's the mother's gaze that allows the child to realize this is mommy and this is me, she gazes at me because I'm external to her and so her gaze tells me that I'm not her so now I can individuate, I can separate, I can individuate, I can become me the mother's gaze is the first boundary and the first periphery of an emerging sense of self and so the mother's identity disturbance her own unstable self-image or sense of self washes on the child contaminates the child makes it impossible for the child to create a sense of stable core now you know my view I don't believe there's such a thing as self but I do believe there's such a thing as a sense of self it's deceptive but it's a useful deception what happens with this kind of child who is exposed to a borderline mother this kind of child has multiple self states they do not coalesce they do not cohere they do not do not communicate with each other effectively in short this kind of child becomes dissociative dissociation is a defense against pain and hurt and in the case of the child the dissociation keeps the self states separate from each other so that some of them are better equipped to absorb the mother the mother's emanation of anhedonia depression grieving pain hurt a borderline mother is a painful mother and this kind of mother is also impulsive self-defeating self-damaging self-harming self-trushing self-destructive self-handicapping succeedingly painful to observe a mother who is drinking a mother who is doing drugs a mother who brings strangers home and sleeps with them in front of the child a mother who a mother who is always penniless because she is a reckless spender a mother who drives dangerously בינג איץ gets addicted to tv shows i know what the child is a witness a mute witness but still a witness of the mother's descent into hell and he loves his mother it's a painful thing to behold now imagine a mother 11 percent of borderline women who attempts suicide or keeps talking about suicide suicide ligation a mother who self-mutilates this is intolerable as far as the child is it's hell it's an inferno it's an ongoing nightmare recurrence suicidal behavior gestures of threats self-mutilation in a variety of ways these are figments of a nightmare surreal figments and the child can't wake up ever to the day he dies the borderline mother's affective instability is the outcome of reactivity of moods reactivity of mood simply means ups and downs cycling liability intense episodic dysphoria aka depression wrongly but intense episodic dysphoria irritability anxiety and even brief psychotic episodes during this mood captured in this mood roller coaster the mother is very threatening is it or is an ominous entity she's terrifying she's a kind of monster the child powers in the corner covering his eyes and minimizing himself the way an animal does when she confronts a predator the mother in this case becomes a source of fear rather than the source of comfort but of course this creates a dissonance as many scholars have observed because it is a mother who should comfort and soothe the child and provide a secure base and a sense of safety and stability child has no other recourse to anyone else and yet the child knows should he attempt to extract these goods from mother stability safety is on mother will erupt often unpredictably often vitriolically the mother will annihilate him eradicate him psychologically if not very often physically so the child is caught in an approach avoidance situation of his own and gradually the child learns to negate himself to officiate himself to empty himself so that he doesn't exist if i don't exist i cannot be harmed this is the child's message also as an adult i am not here i am my false self i am not here i am a fantasy i am not here i am what you want me to be a codependent or borderline i am not here because you own my mind let alone my body i am not a strategy this kind of child develops is a strategy of self negation the message is i'm in absence i am not a presence i am not a being i'm a non being not an entity i'm a non entity even the narcissists the overt narcissists or the grandiose narcissists protestations that he is the world this is compensatory this deep inside there's nobody home the mother the borderline mother hollows her child she's like a huge excavator she excavates the child's soul and trashes it never to be returned at least not in his pristine condition this is this chronic feelings of emptiness are also described by andrey green as you would see those of you who want to will see in the second part the mother flares up with inappropriate intense anger she has anger management problems difficulty to control anger frequent displays of temper recurrent physical or other fights and so on so forth the child regards the mother as a bully as a bully as a as a crazed person as a i don't know what a criminal you know it's terrifying to be around and so this creates in the trial transient stress related paranoid ideation hyper vigilant dissociative symptoms which reflect the mothers this is the borderline this is the outcome of the borderline mother this is the borderline mothers offspring and everything i've just described survives well into adulthood borderline mothers often create narcissists codependence or borderline children their effect on children is bigger than the effect of narcissistic mothers and equal perhaps to the effects of psychotic mothers that's why it started with the borderline mother now let's proceed to the narcissistic mother narcissistic mother is the exact opposite of the borderline mother the borderline mother uses the child to self-regulate she imposes on the child parental functions she parentifies and instrumentalizes and objectifies the child in this sense the borderline mother is hyper focused on the child the child is getting too much attention in a way it's equivalent the equivalent of hyper reflexivity in psychosis as we shall see so in the borderline mother's case the child is the eye of a twister a hurricane you know that is swirling around him about to consume him with the narcissistic mother the problem is exactly the opposite the child is not getting attention neglected ignored repressed suppressed the narcissistic mother is self-absorbed she revolves around herself she is the only object in her world she is solipsistic there's no one else there she converts external objects including the child into internal objects introjects and she continues she snapshots the child and she continues to interact only with the internal objects now that's a no way in catch 22 situation because she idealizes the child's she idealizes the internal object that corresponds to the child she idealizes she photoshop's the snapshotted introject that represents the child in her mind and if the child deviates from this internal object if the child diverges contradicts the internal object shows any signs of אוטonomy or independence or agency this infuriates the narcissistic mother and she penalizes the child horribly child is not allowed to separate because a separated child is a child that is not the equivalent of the internal object does not conform fully to the internal object and this threatens the inner equilibrium and balance of the narcissistic mother's mind narcissism is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity in fantasy and in behavior and grandiosity is of course a cognitive distortion the mother coerces the child to become a source of supply she insists on the child affirming confirming reflecting her grandiose inflated fantastic construct narrative story piece of fiction about who she is so it's very coercive it's a coercive environment and if the child fails to אגיליטה to admire her to the child is punished child learns gradually to become a service provider and his mother's parent again his her yeah gender pronouns are interchangeable don't start with this don't get me don't get me start okay grandiosity distorts the entire world the mother's cognition is erroneous it's glitchy is bugging and because the child initially in the first twenty or thirty six months of life the child has access through the world almost exclusively through the mother's cognition the child obtains a deformed defective and distorted view of his reality is he acquires impaired reality testing child also learns that his existence is conditional contingent upon the mother's gaze the child learns that to exist means to be seen to be noticed yes child is becoming a narcissist and this deformity of reality leads the child of course to wrong decision making this wrong decision making persisting to adulthood in mate selection for example the child also learns to associate the world with his mother because as I said initially the child is symbiotic with the mother child is one with the mother and everything is mediated through the mother's view including getting to know the world the mother has a lack of empathy and she cannot understand the child in the deepest sense of the world and again because the child understands himself and the world through the mother a lack of empathy implies that the child cannot empathize with himself he needs the mother's empathy to acquire empathy including self empathy so he cannot empathize with others and he fails to empathize with himself he wrongly perceives his own needs emotions and so on and because he keeps failing ultimately he divorces his emotions and he denies his self he creates a false self the false self is objective it's out there it's a piece of fiction it's easier to relate to and later it's easier to become the false self the true self cannot be apprehended cannot be comprehended it's a mother faith the narcissistic mother fails to provide the child with the most basic tools of gauging internal states in other words she hampers obstructs the development of an internal working model and a theory of mind children of narcissistic mothers know nothing about other people and even less about the world solipsistic exactly like the mother they revolve around themselves swirling into the black hole self-consuming now we mentioned grandiosity which is a sense of self importance this kind of mother exaggerates achievements and talents expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements and is manipulative and often successful what the child learns is that a fake biography is much preferable to a real one pretension is preferable to being true lying is both more convenient and more סלפפי קשש than the truth an inconvenient truth mother teaches the child this narcissistic mother teaches the child that appearances matter much more than substance and if they are if appearances are not will be all you have to do is just say pretend that they're there then the child of the narcissistic mother is groomed to become a con artist later in life the mother is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success power brilliance beauty or ideal love and she instrumentalizes the child she tries to force the child to realize these dreams she uses emotional blackmail she says i had such high expectations of you you know i couldn't become an author but you can you can do it for me so there is an incestuous bond between mother narcissistic mother and child child becomes an extension of the mother and by implication one with the mother when do we become one with another person sex there's a lot of sexual tension between the narcissistic mother and the child and in this sense the interactions between narcissistic mothers and children their children are histrionic interactions the mother believes that she is special and unique she can be understood by or associate with um high special status uh people only very few can grasp who she is and what she has to offer she often complains of being discriminated against envied uh pulled down taken down by people who are much inferior to her the child learns that the world is a dangerous place when you engage in excellence and when you're a giant and that this is a price to be paid for accomplishing and attaining things ironically this creates in the child a perverse incentive the child says well if i truly accomplish things uh people will try to take me down they will try to destroy me they will hate me they will envy me but if i just pretend to accomplish things maybe i'll get by maybe no one will no one will really envy me because i'll be playing the game of faking it without making it and so the mother creates a pseudo human an imitation a parody of a man or a woman or human being a caricature in effect and this caricature of a child later adult adult requires excessive admiration has a sense of entitlement and so on but the mother also feels entitled she feels entitled to her child's unbridled admiration to her child's time and physical presence she has unreasonable expectations of the child she demands favorable treatment automatic compliance and so on so forth the child learns to obey it's obey or die because the narcissistic mother if i mean would not hesitate to neglect the child to the point of death a child who does not fulfill her needs who does not cater to his psychological demands a child who does not serve her is a dead child anyhow she doesn't have the necessary resources emotional or other to invest in anyone who is not a perfect ideal source of narcissistic supply child learns to mold himself in accordance with the mother's expectations on pain of death imagine imagine the effect the effect this has on the child there is a mind melt between the mother the narcissistic mother's mind and the child's mind anyhow there's symbiosis until age 24 to 36 months anyhow they share a single mind until then almost not fully of course but almost but in the case of the child of the offspring of a narcissistic mother this mind מלד continues indefinitely there's no separation no individuation child remains a figment in the mother's mind later on when this child becomes an adult the child's the child misidentifies existence as being present in someone else's mind insinuating oneself into someone else's mind נאססיסט אקסקלי לבודליאנסט exists only through other people's minds they are parasites they exist only through other people's gaze this is a lesson emanating from the narcissistic mother you as far as i'm concerned she says you exist only if you service my mind only if you are a part of my mind only if you're my extension otherwise you don't exist this kind of mother is interpersonally exploitative of course she takes advantage of the child to achieve her own ends she is unwilling unable to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of the child so the child needs and learns to not have feelings and to not have needs to self-deny don't be impressed by the narcissists coercive techniques of gratifying himself he's not gratifying himself he's gratifying a harsh master his false self which is often coupled with a harsh inner critic so the child of a narcissistic mother learns to deny his needs to eliminate his wishes to suppress any demands he may have actually the false self is his mother he designs he creates the false self to resemble his mother the false self is godlike omnipotent, omniscient, exactly like mother, infallible, never makes mistakes, harsh, demanding, disempathic it's mother, false self is mother it's an aborted internalization identification introjection process where instead of creating an introject of mother which is impossible because mother is conditionally there there's no object constancy so it's impossible to create a stable introject of mother even when the mother is narcissistic so what when the child does he creates an outer introject this outer introject is the false self the child perceives the false self and the child turned narcissistic adult perceives the false self as an introject as an internal object in reality it's not it's mother mother still there out there pretending to be in here it's pernicious it's literally vicious this kind of mother is envious of other people she believes that others are envious of of her and that does not exclude her child she competes with her child she's envious of her child she undermines and obstructs her child she renders her child self-defeating and so destructive and self-hating and self-loathing narcissism is compensatory and so the mother this kind of mother would steal her daughter's boyfriends she would compete with her with her child's literary work or literary output she would use the child to aggrandize herself at his school or university she's arrogant and haughty in behavior and in attitude but many mothers narcissistic mothers gradually migrate and become covert inverted narcissists so they bask in the glory of the child they instrumentalize the child to obtain supply and then they abscond with this supply the hijack the supply so to speak so if the if the child is famous the mother is famous for being the famous child's mother she's famous by proxy vicariously through the child child becomes a mere channel to the outer world a suction cup sucking narcissistic supply from the environment even more virulently and it's not a topic for today's video the symbiotic connection between the mother's mind and the child's mind and later the child and adult's mind is never severed never goes away this is a topic for another video the narcissistic mother inhabits colonizes her child's mind forever by processes such as in training and others this is a unique phenomenon it's a hive mind um and requires its own treatment suffice it to say that the child watches the world observes the world through his mother's eyes it's eerie it's reminiscent of hitchcock's cycle the 1960 movie whenever you look at a narcissist and you meet his eyes you are dealing with his mother she never goes away she's there tentacles all over octopus like and it's a lesion keeps dictating the narcissist's life but it has also amazing cognitive artifacts and emotional consequences the narcissist's inability to access positive emotions is an outcome of this colonizing process but again it's not the topic for today's video let's talk about the psychotic mother now psychosis is a general term it's actually a family of disorders known as psychotic disorders schizophrenia is the most famous uh but there are other psychotic disorders even even schizotypal personality disorder is a psychotic disorder in effect these are abnormalities involving delusions hallucinations disorganized thinking and speech grossly disorganized or abnormal motor behavior sometimes catatonia and what we call negative symptoms delusions these are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence so the delusions can be the secretary or referential someone is talking about me or somatic or religious or paranoid or grandiose uh great um and so this kind of mother creates an alternative universe an alternative world very similar to a count where it's the mother and the child against a world that is almost always hostile and sometimes it's the mother and the child and god against such a world it's always a coalition involving the child in the majority of cases and sometimes god himself and so this coalition is a coalition of the willing fighting the axis of evil and it involves beliefs the dictate behaviors beliefs beliefs conspiracy conspiratorial beliefs in many cases the dictate behaviors the child learns child grows up in a siege mentality where everyone and everything is suspect nothing is what it seems so there's a problem with reality child begins to believe in a hidden text in a reality that is essentially fantastic fictitious and he inhabits the narrative way more than he inhabits reality in other words the narrative to him is much more realistic than reality itself he becomes in short delusional hallucinations are perception like experiences that occur without an external stimulus when the child is very young a mother who has hallucinations would try to convince the child that these are not hallucinations that she has special powers special powers somehow to see things and hear things that other people don't and so it's a form of self-aggrandizement but founded on real experience hallucination is perceived by the psychotic as real it's actually a projection of internal objects on to the world it's hyper reflexivity it's a mirror image of narcissism narcissists internalize external objects psychotics externalize internal objects the child especially a very young child convinces himself or herself that mother is right and that mother is superior she sees and hears things that are real but only she can see and hear so this duality of a superior being who has who is privy to information that is privileged persist with the child throughout life and the child could become for example a rabid religious person or someone who believes in conspiracy theories or someone who develops paranoid personality disorder the mother's speech and thinking are disorganized she switches from one topic to another this is known as derailment or loose associations she answers questions which are only obliquely related or completely unrelated questions that were never asked and this is known as tangentiality she also goes on tangents the speech is disorganized and sometimes it's so severely disorganized that it's incomprehensible it resembles aphasia incoherence word salad yes word salad is in psychotic disorders narcissists don't engage in word salad self-styled experts learn psychology so word salad the speech is non-specific and so the child learns to decode and decipher mother her speech and thinking impair effective communication the child substitutes the child speculates later on the child learns to confabulate he bridges the gaps he makes sense in his mind he creates plausible scenarios and narratives in short he is busy speculating most of the time and this creates in the in the child a hypnotic or translike state this kind of child and as an adult as well will be immersed in himself trying to make sense of the world gradually the child will learn wrongly that the only sense prevailing is inside himself only his inside makes sense only his internal world is organized and communicative and not chaotic the world out there is the opposite so the child learns to become schizoid self-reliant self-containing solipsistic because the child believes that the world is crazy chaotic nonsense cannot be made sense of there's no meaning out there and everything comes from the inside child sinks deeper and deeper into himself this is especially true if the mother exhibits grossly disorganized or abnormal motor behavior for example catatonia she sees steel or stupor or mutism or whatever now negative symptoms are very common in psychotic disorders especially schizophrenia but also in others it's they involve diminished emotional expression reduced affect display and what we call abolition it's like withdrawal it's like self self negation it's like not being but ostentatiously not being like the mother shuts herself it's not catatonia which requires immobility physical immobility it's emotional catatonia if you wish the mother stops to become stops being she does not interact with the child emotionally or expresses emotions or effects in any way shape or form and she lacks will there's nothing motivating her from the inside she becomes expressionless she avoids eye contact the intonation of her speech her prosody is very monotonous movements of hand head and face that normally give an emotional emphasis to speech disappear body language is muted abolition is a decrease in motivated self-initiated purposeful activities the mother begins to resemble a robot in a very basic robot with very basic programming primitive programming she sits for long periods of time she shows little interest in participating in work and social activities there's also a logia anhedonia asociality a logia is or logia is diminished speech output anhedonia is decreased ability to experience pleasure and asociality is apparent is a lack of interest in social interactions um the mother withdraws she isolates herself she often doesn't wash for weeks or and the child observes all this he's exposed to all this mother is vanishing bit by bit like the cheshare cat you know only the smile remains it's the most terrifying thing imaginable because mother is disappearing incrementally gradually part by part and it's inexorable there's nothing the child can do about this imagine the sense of helplessness and hopelessness and the ensuing anxiety and depression אוקיי, these are the types of dead mothers and their effects on their children i want to talk a bit so this is the part for laymen if you're a layman let alone a laywoman get your minds off the gutter if you're a layman or a laywoman it's you can just move on with life if you're interested in the dead mother complex andrey green's dead mother complex stay tuned as i said the complex of the dead mother was first described by andrey green in 1980 he said that he suggested that we come to know about the dead mother complex through something called transference depression transfers depression in therapy is a repetition of an infantile depression that is often not conscious so there is some depression in the room in the therapy there is infantilization there is regression as far as behaviors and and emotivity effect display and so you see that it is an infant which who is depressed and this says andrey green proves that there has been a dead mother in the background of such patient and the essential characteristic of this depression is that occur it occurs in the presence of an object that itself is absorbed in mourning so this depression is reflective or reflexive secondary the child regards his mother the dead mother as a mother in mourning as a grieving mother as a mother that is self-absorbed because she said child is very primitive ways of interpreting the world he doesn't have a lot of repertoire or experience in his binary you know i feel good i feel bad mommy's feeling bad mommy said mommy's mourning the child through mirror empathy the child reflects her becomes her the symbiosis of that stage remember child is one with the mother she's said he said she's depressed he's depressed and this is transference depression and the causes of these mornings can be many but the mother does not admit them does not verbalize them does not communicate them it's ambient it's in the atmosphere the maternal object is very very threatening because something is happening there mother is sinking and and disappearing and avoiding and hurtful and yet the child can't make sense of it because mother is not telling him anything this is a non-communicative mother a cold mother a hard hard mother and this is the mother the child interjects that's the mother the child identifies with and internalizes she's hard he becomes hard she's unfeeling he becomes unfeeling she's cold he becomes yes you guessed it cold and this is the result of the process of cathexis and decathexis the child tries to cathect mother child last mother he tries to imbue mother with his newfound budding emotions but mother is rejecting frustrating i refer you to work by winnichort and gantry and others in the british school of object relations in the 1960s mother creates a schizoid core because she's rejecting and frustrating the child learns to decathect we draw from her and the decathexis is a horrendous brutal process the child loves mother more than anything in the world you know what mother is the world the decathexis that we draw the avoidance of mother is the decathexis and we draw an avoidance from the world the child isn't it's suicide isn't it when you withdraw from the world totally because the world is frustrating and rejecting and cold and unfeeling and hard what are you doing you are killing yourself and not softly the child tries approaches the mother this is called reparation it's very common in the rappo schmo please the child approaches the mother reparation but keeps being rebuffed one way or another the mother is self-absorbed she's not narcissistic the mother is volatile and labile she's a borderline the mother is no longer with us she's floating somewhere in the upper stratosphere she's psychotic whatever the reason may be the child keeps being rejected frustrated abandoned neglected the reparation keeps failing and the child develops a profound sense of helplessness impotence and threat and they become dominant at some point they become dominant how can you survive like this you can't you need to defend against this because if this is your state of mind you'd rather not have a mind so this creates complex defenses and these defenses associate a mirror representation of the disinvestment in the mother with an unconscious identification with the dead mother so on the one hand the child withdraws from the mother disinvent disinvesting her dick affects takes takes back his emotions doesn't attempt anymore to bond with her to attach to her doesn't regard her as a secure base on the one hand and the other hand he still needs her he still loves her he still depends on her so he internalizes her it's a compromise i will not attempt to connect with my mother in reality because that's painful that's hurtful that's frustrating instead i will attempt to connect with my mother internally as i control the internal space i will not be hurt or at least i can minimize the pain this is of course the narcissistic solution isn't it snapshotting introduction and the result of this process is the psychic murder of the mother there's no hatred involved it's just necessity the child needs to kill the mother by internalizing her he also objectifies her she becomes an internal object and he takes away her life because his control over the internal object is so total she is no longer alive in any meaningful sense except by his permission he becomes godlike גרנדיזity now of course it's mother so the child cannot do any of this explicitly aggressively the maternal affliction prohibits any aggressive expression because if you reject mother if you reject mother if you tell mother i'm gonna kill you if you aggress against mother she's gonna withdraw further this would guarantee maternal detachment and this is something the child doesn't want so it's all harsh harsh it's all very secret the whole process of internalizing the mother interjecting the mother killing the mother inside inside the mind all this is done secretly the child learns to keep secrets from mother he learns to construct an alternative universe which uh is inhabited by mother and interject a maternal figure but real mother has no access to this alternative universe so the child becomes solipsistic you're beginning to see the rudiments of pathological narcissism that's why i consider the dead mother complex is super critical in narcissism way more than many of the suggestions of free that's why i keep mentioning the dead mother in many of my videos the pattern of object relations is destroyed and instead there are what there's what we call peripheral cathixis getting attached to people who are not threatening or not significant or not meaningful sources of narcissistic supply there's a hole in the middle it's a black all consuming sucking hole and you surround its periphery with people who cannot hurt you because they are not meaningful they can't do anything to you they don't have the power you don't give them the power you don't experience emotions or empathy you use them they're instruments you objectify them the same way you have been objectified by your mother this silent destructiveness doesn't allow the child to re-establish object relations with people he cannot overcome the conflict he cannot the internal conflict with his mother he cannot open the way to connections that would strengthen his ability to overcome the conflict there he creates a shield that prevents access to the conflict so the child breaks in two in one part of the child there is an unresolved conflict with mother and in the other part of the child there's a fake false version which interacts with people who would never be mother would never be given the power the powers that mother had the child is trying to heal the first part the part involving the conflict by teaming up with maternal substitutes with stand-in mothers you the intimate partners of the narcissist so the only thing that endures in the adult narcissist life is a dull psychic pain some feeling of hollow hollowness and emptiness an incapacity to bond or attach or love any object um no effects i can't begin to tell you how it feels it feels like you have to hold yourself together all the time actively or you will disintegrate into molecules and be spread over the floor and never put yourself back together it's a constant Humpty Dumpty situation hatred hatred is as impossible as love by the way um instead of hatred there's devaluation the narcissist the child who grows up to become a narcissist under the dead mother this child doesn't deal with love or hate he deals with functions he deals with she can serve me she can't serve me and if she can't serve me she's persecutory she's frustrating me on purpose she's the enemy but there's no hatred involved it's just okay you know she's useless let's discard her and this is what many victims can't rack their minds around they are not sufficiently important to be hated as they are not sufficiently significant to be loved they are nothing their buttons their instruments their tools their functions their obstructions their narratives and victims don't understand they they've never been three-dimensional to the narcissist the narcissist is incapable of deep emotions hatred included is capable of envy and anger but hatred is the opposite of love the principle of ambivalence narcissist is incapable of the former as he is incapable of the latter he discards you coldly and calculatingly your piece of trash at the end of the process who hates trash so the narcissist feels that it is impossible to receive without feeling obliged to give back now i know that this flies in the face of everything you are being told by self-styled experts notice the self-styled part narcissists are transactional i just said that you are nothing but instruments and functions and so the narcissist makes a deal with you so in the love bombing phase the narcissist will make a deal with you i'll be your mother you'll be my mother the dual mothership thing later he will offer your money or freedom i'm bridal freedom to do as you please with whoever you please it's also a form of bribe the narcissist bribes you into being in his life because he grew up in an environment where to obtain his mother's attention let alone love he needed to perform he has the same expectations from you and from himself it's a deal it's a business that's why narcissists are shocked when their former intimate partners are angry at them they don't understand what have they done wrong there was a deal they kept their end of the bargain why is the other party angry because narcissists are incapable of introducing into the calculus of interpersonal relationships emotions for example so they narcissists don't want to owe anything not even masochistic pleasure nothing and if there is a situation where they receive more than they give they devalue you yes i know it flies in the face of everything you've heard so everything you've heard is wrong one of the main reasons that the narcissist devalues you is he begins to feel that you are superior to him that in some way you have advantages over him maybe you are more regulated maybe you're more self-efficacious and maybe you give him more than he's able to give you and so he is in your debt he owes you which is a position of inferiority the dead mother is omnipresent but she is she she kind of seized the child she seizes the child she makes the child a captive of his mourning for her the absent mother the dead mother believes that if she makes the child if she forces the child or coerces the child to grieve for her to miss her that's the surest way of keeping him around it's a form of emotional blackmail so she fosters in the child prolonged grief by withdrawing by avoiding by neglecting by ignoring by chastising and castigating and criticizing and humiliating shaming and blackmailing you know you owe me if you don't do this i will die all these techniques are intended to produce in the child a sense that mother is tantalizingly close but unattainable and the resulting grief grief is as strong as love and as strong as hate in binding people together and the only mechanism of attachment the dead mother trusts because she's been grieving all her life and she's attached to herself she's narcissistic remember and this clinical picture develops against the background of the child's inability to grasp the reasons for it so the whole world looks totally crazy senseless arbitrary and consequently menacious we mentioned i mentioned at the beginning that there's depression infantile depression there's a loss of meaning the feeling of inability to repair the mourned object to awaken the lost desire and passion to connect with this object the mourning is not only for the lost mother the mourning is for the lost potential to have bonded with mother and the lost potential to have become who you could have become there's multiple layers of mourning which are replicated to the letter in narcissists in relationships with narcissists and sometimes there are some significant realizations that displace the source of the conflict into the external world the mother's desire becomes inaccessible compared to what the child believes that he has observed and he blames a failure of subjective omnipotence in relationships he blames himself for having failed to bond with mother or to attach with with mother so and he tries to compensate for this because it's an intolerable feeling when the child experiences guilt and shame for having failed to make mother love him he reinforces his omnipotence in other areas he says okay maybe i failed with mother but i'm a genius so narcissism is compensatory also in this sense repression erases the memory traces of the mother's touch her smell how good she feels any contact with her and the child's cathesis with her before the morning the sudden end to this forgotten relationship repression sets in repression is so massive in such children that they become dissociative they learn to repress not only this but generally they repress memories they repress life itself because life is painful memory is threatening emotions are deadly lethal so repression and dissociation becomes become dominant mechanisms in such people it is repression it is it is a way to bury the mother alive even when repression and dissociation demolish everything even when they demolish her own memory her tomb in andrei grain's words even when repression and dissociation eradicate her past existence and anything the child has had with her it's a price worth paying because what winnicott called holding has collapsed the object is encased encisted encased within a firewall and then the whole thing is cast into outer oblivion and darkness aka unconscious not traces left to it the identification then it's not with the mother because the mother is gun in every possible way it's because she's been killed and buried and her tomb was desecrated and everything was burned to the ground scorched earth policy the only way the child could cope with his pain and hurt and impotence so what's left a hole a whole vacuum in the shape of the mother the disinvestment the decaf axis that we draw the avoidance the disconnection the detachment they live a trace behind which is not a trace of the mother but a placeholder where the mother should have been it's a hole in the shape of the mother and the absence of all meaningful reference points is very important the modification of the maternal attitudes is inexplicable the child can't explain to himself why am i being rejected suddenly ignored hated even child can't wrap his mind around this and this inexplicability this mystery leads to all sorts of questions which arouse feelings of guilt aggravated by secondary defenses displaced into elements and other people i mean the child is flailing about trying desperately to solve this conundrum which is unsolvable of course because it's not the child's fault to feel guilty and at fault and responsible for the mother's behavior is a grandiose defense even i would say a bit psychotic so any attempt to block problems not governed by repression of this untenable situation this provokes significant pathological reactions it's major etiopathology the purpose of these defenses is to keep the ego alive or somehow coherent and functioning although this often fails narcissists narcissistic children for example don't have a functioning ego to some extent borderlines of a compromised ego and so but there is a desperate attempt to keep the ego alive through a secondary secondary hatred of the of the mother but of course as i just said narcissists are incapable of hatred which is precisely why this defense fails there's a frenetic unquenchable search for maternal love substitutes for example pleasures attempts to find meaning in displacements you know in other things there's an attempt to there's a kind of crazy race to reanimate the dead mother to get her interested to distract her to seduce her sex remember to give her back the taste for life to undo her mourning and to say you know um mommy don't grieve don't mourn i'm here am i not a reason to to be happy and to feel pleasure to breathe into her by any means possible artificially if necessary the joy of of living and then to compete with the object of mourning in a kind of precocious triangulation ignore the reason your mourning look at me says the child the dead mother complex is a powerful and intense element and it's it affects all the systems of of the of the psyche and that includes fantasy defenses attempts to make life the world intelligible קומפטטיב relations with other objects sudden mourning periods reawakening of the pain pains and so on so forth there is a kind of apocalyptic sense this kind of impending catastrophe because the child feels that he has to retaliate against the maternal object and the child undulates oscillates between indifference because the mother is gun somehow and the terror of knowing that he's about to conflict with mother the fantasy takes him away from this conflict but the fantasy itself involves maternal elements or reminders the edipus complex is an example by the way i don't want to go into into this there's impotent rage in such a child there's paralysis he's helpless against the violence inside him against his own aggression there's an intensified feeling of emptiness the most deleterious effects on on everything that makes a human human and red green hypothesize the destiny of the primary object is a framing structure for the ego hiding the negative hallucination of the mother he said that the dead mother complex demonstrates the failure of this process forcing its representations into a painful vacuity and obstructing the capacity to bind together in any pre-conscious thought pattern the dead mother complex opposes hot castration anxiety links to the vicissitudes of object relations which can be threatened with corporeal mutilation and this is all converted into a cold anxiety which is linked with losses suffered on a narcissistic level negative hallucination flat psychosis dull morning resulting in the clinical treatment of negativity end quote it is a dead a dead mother that creates dead children who become dead inside adults death is intergenerational transmitted intergeneration not so life life requires effort life is a project death is a default