 I just finished watching the magnificent South Korean television series, The Good Bed Mother. Following an attempted assassination, a 34-year-old man is reduced to the mental age of 7 and forced to live again with his mother. And there, in the new-old relationship, everything comes to the surface. All the unresolved conflicts, all the grudges, all the love and all the hatred, the ambivalence, the aggression pent up and expressed, the dynamics between mother and son. A stunning series for those of you who are interested in psychology, human psychology, and or narcissism. And this is precisely the topic of today's video. Many of you have been asking me, why doesn't the narcissist settle his accounts with his biological mother? Why doesn't he simply revert to the primary object, to the initial caregiver? Why doesn't he resolve early childhood conflicts with a person who has provoked them in the first place? In short, why doesn't the narcissist tackle his issues in tandem with his mother, whether dead in a physical sense or alive? The mother, the narcissist's mother of origin, his biological mother, leaves a trace in his mind, it's known as an introject. Why doesn't the narcissist interact with this introject if his mother is dead or with the Israel mother if she is still alive? Why does he bother to go through the hyper complex process of locating a potential intimate partner, converting her into a substitute mother, reenacting with her older dynamics of the early relationship with Israel mother in his childhood, and then attempting to separate from her by rendering her an enemy or a secretary object, devaluing her, discarding her? Why all this mess? Why does the narcissist need all this mess? It's inefficient, and if there's one thing we know about biology and psychology, especially evolutionary psychology, is that we are efficient. If something is not useful anymore, it withers and dies away. If anything can be done, it will be done with minimal investment. For example, we invest minimally in our cognitive processes. Even though had we invested more, we would have been able to attain better outcomes, we still invest minimally. The path of least resistance. And so why in this particular case does the narcissist defy everything we know about psychology and biology and evolution, and actually goes the long torturous, torturous way, rather than simply picking up the phone and say, Mom, I got to talk to you. We have a few unresolved issues. Well, today I'm going to explain to you why, and I'm going to do it in two parts. The first part is for laymen. It's shorter, and I hope more understandable or comprehensive. The comprehensive and comprehensible. Now the second part is for professionals, and it includes an overview of Margaret Mahler's theory of separation, individuation, and in-depth interview. Finally, many of you have been asking me, what is separation? What is individuation? We keep using these words. You keep explaining them in layman's terms, but we are not getting it. There's no depth. Well, today I'm going to provide the depth. I'm going to describe separation individuation as a part of a much larger process of gray up, and I'm going to describe it in minute details. Now, it's not for everyone, I think, but it's up to you. You may find it fascinating, even though you're not mental health practitioners or psychology majors. It is a fascinating process that unfolds in each and every human being's mind from age zero to age three. Each and every one of us goes through these phases, and when these phases are disrupted, when they go awry, this is when mental illness erupts and remains with us lifelong. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignance of Love Narcissism Revisited, and with this new haircut, I am a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CIAPS. I hope they don't eject me on account of this. Okay, Shoshanim and Shoshanot. Let's start by asking a simple question. The narcissist's mother of origin is biological mother, or the person in his life who has fulfilled the role of a mother. A grandmother, for example, could be a father, anyone who fulfilled the maternal role. So the mother of origin in the narcissist's life, in its childhood, especially early childhood, between the ages of zero and three years, she is a source of frustration, of hurt, of pain, of shame, of rage, of fear, terror because she's unpredictable and arbitrary and capricious, of yearning and sadness because she's absent, self-centered, depressed. And all these, the frustration, the hurt, the shame, the rage, the sadness, all these are unconscious. The child represses them. The child cannot allow himself to experience these emotions consciously because they are likely to provoke aggression against mother. Now, when I say he can use she, when I say she, you can use he. Clear gender pronouns are interchange. Half of all narcissists are women. You could easily say that the narcissist's mother mortifies him. She shames him in public. She humiliates him with her absence, with her neglect, or with her smothering and pampering him. She breaches his boundaries. She doesn't allow him to separate from her. She treats him as an extension of herself or as an object. She objectifies him. She instrumentalizes him. She wants him to realize her unfulfilled dreams. She insists to be parentified, to be parented by the child. Or she wants the child to act as a substitute spouse. In all these cases, this creates enormous frustration because the child is not allowed to develop and become himself. There's a process of mourning and grieving over unfulfilled potentials. All in all, this is the first time the narcissist experiences mortification. Now, you remember the rule of mortification? The narcissist never hoovers. Never hoovers someone who causes him mortification. That's one of the main reasons the narcissist never returns to his mother in order to settle the accounts, resolve early childhood conflicts, and somehow gain closure because she's mortifying. But on the other hand, mother is an illegitimate target of aggression. It's not okay to hate mother. It's not okay to be violent with mother. It's not okay to aggress against mother. So this aggression remains pent up, unexpressed. And what the narcissist does, he redirects it. He redirects this aggression. That by all rights should have been directed at his mother, at his real mother. He redirects this aggression at mother substitutes. It's not okay to attack mother. It's not okay to confront mother. It's not okay to punish mother. It's not okay to be angry at mother. Because mother is all good. Mother is a saint. Mother is a Madonna. The child needs to believe this because the alternative is too threatening. If mother is bad and neglectful, the child may die. So the child needs to idealize mother to render her all good while he becomes all bad. And so his aggression, his rage, his hurt, all his negative emotions are redirected from the real target, which is the mother of origin, to a mother substitute, you, the intimate partner. Narcissus tries to accomplish separation by proxy. He attempts to become, to individuate with a mother substitute that is safe. The mother substitute is not a full-fledged clone of the original mother. She is not a replica. And the big difference is, while it is not legitimate to be aggressive with real mother, it is legitimate to be aggressive with mother substitute, with a maternal figure, with an intimate partner. So the maternal figure, the intimate partner, the mother substitute, the maternal figure in the Narcissus' life allows him for the first time to express his frustration, his anger, his hurt in this way to separate from the intimate partner, who is a second mother, to separate from mother by proxy, vicariously, and then stand a chance to individuate. Now individuation is not about becoming an adult. It is about becoming an individual with boundaries, with a self, a constellated, integrated self, with an ego, and one of the main functions of the ego is reality testing. So the ability to be in touch with reality, to realize one's boundaries, to learn from reality, to evolve via friction with reality, via defeats, via failures, via losses. So individuation is critical to the process of becoming you, developing personhood, what we know euphemistically as a self. And it has nothing to do with adulthood, because it starts much much earlier, at age 36 months actually. What the Narcissus does, he reframes his real mother, known clinically as the primary object. He reframes the primary object, his real mother, by splitting her. In his mind, she is either all good, a martyr, or she is all bad, an evil witch. Correspondingly, he is either all bad, a grandiose monster, or all good, a grandiose victim. So I'm going to repeat this. In early childhood, the child does not allow himself to see mother the way she is, realistically, dead, dysfunctional, a bad mother. The child is terrified to acknowledge this, because if mother is bad, the child stands a chance of dying. The child is dependent on mother, for shelter, for food, for care. If mother is bad and neglectful and absent, that spells death. So initially the child doesn't allow himself to see mother realistically, he idealizes her. He makes her an all good object, and himself an all bad object. And this is the famous bad object that I keep describing, I keep referring to or alluding to. Typically, bad mothers encourage the bad object of the child. They keep telling the child, you are unworthy, you are a failure, you disappointed me, you let me down, you don't love me. Look how much I'm sacrificing for you. I'm a saint, a martyr, and so on and so forth. So the dynamic is two-way. The mother encourages the bad object of the child, thereby elevating herself to sainthood. To an angelic position, which the child concurs with. He sees her as all good. When the child grows up and becomes much older, there is a reversal. The child, especially if the child had become a narcissist. The child will split the real mother, the mother of origin, and will see her as all bad. And then he will see himself as all good, so she would become a monster and he would become a victim. Throughout the narcissist's life, he oscillates and vacillates and alternates between splitting views of his mother. Melanie Klein called it the bad breast and the good breast. Get your minds out of the gutter. So splitting views of the mother accompanied by splitting views of oneself. When she is all good, the child is all bad. When she is all bad, the child is all good. And of course this gives rise to narcissism because the child tries to compensate by distancing himself from himself, by creating a false self, and then redirecting everything to the false self. False self is like a buffer, a firewall, a shield. And by developing grandiosity, grandiosity is a compensatory mechanism. Whenever the narcissist feels all bad, whenever he adopts the bad object as his self-image or self-perception, whenever he has inferiority complexes, whenever he feels ashamed, whenever he is humiliated or mortified or narcissistically injured, he has this defense, he has this defense of grandiosity. So the narcissist's splitting is grandiose splitting. He is either a grandiose bad object, totally bad, or a grandiose victim, totally moral, totally good, total hero, total rescuer, total healer, total savior. And all this emanates from the work of a pediatrician who later became a child psychologist. It's a very similar trajectory to Donald Winnicott, who started off as a pediatrician. And as I keep saying, the overwhelming majority of contributions to psychology were made by non-psychologists. People with no academic degree in psychology. Mahler is no exception. She made her discoveries and her contributions when she was still a pediatrician in charge of a kindergarten. She observed children for many, many years, and then she had a whole team observing children for decades. And these were her conclusions. She said, interpersonal relationships become internalized within the ego or the self. So she was a proponent of object relations within ego psychology. She married the two. That was her major contribution. I mean, Gantry and Winnicott and Fairbearing and others, Bion and others, they all said the same. But she really came up with an integrative, coherent, cohesive, sensical, even commonsensical framework. And she said the self, the ego, what we call the self, what we call the ego, that's simply a reflection of our relationships with others. And all clinical manifestations, all mental health disorders or mental illnesses are problems with interpersonal relating. They're relational problems. They're problems of object relations. Now separation individuation is a name she gave to a process. And it is a process of creating internal maps of the self and of others. Later, this would be called a theory of mind and an internal working model. So she said, when we interact with people as even as children, even as infants, even as newborns, we keep creating representations of these people in our minds. And these representations are not just reflections and thinking, passive reflections. They are maps. They are navigational. They contain relevant and crucial information which helps us to interpret the world, to make sense of it, to imbue it with many. These experiential maps, these internal representations are constructed through interactions initially with mommy, with mother and other caregivers. And this is between birth and three years old. And of course, when you interact with other people, you're likely to have positive experiences, but you are as likely to have negative experiences. What do you do with it? How do you reconcile the fact that the same source, the same person, the same object, gives you good experiences and then gives you bad experiences? Mother feeds you and then she refuses to feed you. She frustrates you. Mother is in the room, makes you happy, your smiling baby, then she leaves the room. He abandons you. It's a bad thing, bad mommy. How do you put good mommy and bad mommy together? According to Mahler, it is the ability to integrate frustrating and pleasurable aspects of experience with another person. This ability to integrate is what we call a stable, constellated self, an integrated self. An integrated self includes negative and positive information in perfect balance, equilibrium, harmony, homeostasis, call it what you want. The negative does not impact on the positive, the positive does not impact on the negative, there's no bias. Because there's no bias, the self is stable and is able to tolerate fluctuating, dysregulated, labile emotional states within the self and also within others. Mahler assumes that all of us experience a modicum of dysregulation, sometimes emotions are overwhelming and a modicum of lability, moods and emotions cycle ups and downs. But if we have a stable core, core identity in a self that takes into account the negativity of life, losses for example, frustrations, inability to control what others would do and think. If you have such a self or such an ego, you'll be okay because you'll be able to stabilize yourself, you'll be able to regulate yourself. But the inability to integrate negative and positive aspects of experience leads to psychopathology and that's not only Mahler by the way. Other scholars such as Pine and Bergman said the same. Now Mahler divided the phases before, the phases that precede separation individuation. She divided these into two stages. One is called the autistic state and the other is called the symbiotic state, which I've mentioned in many other videos. Now we no longer use these terms, we no longer use the term symbiosis and so on. So if you use it in university, you will never graduate and you have been warned. But I find Mahler's work generally brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I think she's one of the neglected giants of psychology, together with Freud and unafroid and so on. I think we have committed a crime against ourselves. Crime against ourselves by abandoning the vast rich literature that these people had created based on observations. Mahler had observed children more than all of us combined. Anyhow, autistic state and symbiotic state precede separation individuation. And even the process of separation individuation is broken down to sub-phases, differentiation, practicing, rapprochement and on the road to object constancy. Now I'm going to describe all these phases and stages, so stay tuned. I just want to say that separation is clinically defined as the emergence from a symbiotic state with a caregiver. When I say caregiver in 99% of the cases it's mother. So when the child emerges from the symbiotic state with mother, the child is by definition separating, but individuation comes later. Individuation consists of individual accomplishments and of characteristics acquired in order to form an identity. And don't you worry, I'm going to delve deep into the deep dive, I'm going to delve deep into each and one of the terms that I mentioned. Let's start with autism. Now this is not autism spectrum disorder, that's not a neurodevelopmental disorder. Everyone goes through what she called normal autism or the autistic stage. These are the first four weeks of life. During these weeks the infant spends most of its time asleep, not aroused but asleep. Now that's very important. The infant is not exposed actually to the environment, including mother. Infant kind of isolated self, isolated self from the world, from reality because it's too much. Remember that the infant is exiting, the newborn has just exited from a deprivation tank, a place with very dim sounds, immersed in what? In liquid, immersed in fluid and almost no sensor, no sensory inputs. So it's a defense, avoiding the world, isolating oneself, shutting one's eyes, going to sleep essentially. It's a defense. In a way you could say that the newborn is defending itself against overwhelming fear, terror, the terror of the new world that it finds itself in and a resulting depression. So the infant creates this closed system. And because the infant barely opens its eyes, except to eat or something, the infant can't tell the difference between in and out, internal and external, inner and outer. The infant is protected by what Mahler called the stimulus barrier, a protective shield against overwhelming stimulation by a new world of colors and sounds and moving and motion and objects and so on. So the baby, I'm talking about the first few weeks of life, the baby focuses on internal stimuli, very primitive ones, hunger, defecation, elimination, bodily functions, bodily comforts. The life of this kind of infant, the newborn is, as Freud had observed, focused on satisfying needs or and or reducing unpleasant, uncomfortable tensions and feelings related mostly though to internal states. So whatever the baby does, he eats, he defecates, he urinates, the baby does not interpret these actions as an interface with the world. The baby interprets these actions as something that is happening inside, internally, not externally. When the caregiver, the mother, satisfies, gratifies, meets, caters to the baby's needs, the baby is happy, the baby is smiling, the baby feels pleasure and it is out of this experience of gratification and pleasure and being taken care of and being catered to that the infant begins to differentiate good and bad. Good experiences are pleasurable experiences, comfortable experiences, experiences the baby wants more of. Bad experiences are painful experiences, frustrating experiences, uncomfortable experiences that the baby, of course, naturally wishes to minimize. But all these experiences and attendant feelings and even glimmers of planning for the future, I'm going to behave in a way that maximizes pleasure and minimizes displeasure, is a way of planning for the future. All these are still isolated. There are islands, there are no bridges between these islands, they're not linked together, it's not a peninsula, these islands. There's no sense of self that is the glue that cements all these experiences together, makes sense of them, provides you with an identity, none of this. And of course, similarly, there's no perception of the other as a separate coherent cohesive entity. It is at this stage that the baby begins to attach. Attachment is an intense emotional bond, especially with the mother. Attachment is the initial glue, the rudimentary thread that begins to connect experiences with a specific entity, the mother, although this entity is still perceived to be internal. It is as if the unitary inner world of the child breaks, fragments, and there's a mummy fragment and a mean fragment. So the child begins to realize in a very blurred and fuzzy way as if the child were drunk or on drugs. The child begins to realize that there is something called mummy, there is something like mummy, mother. But mother is still an internal part, a shard, a fragment of the child, and yet the child begins to interact with this fragment. And so this consolidates the child's experiences around a theme, the theme of mother. A mother is like a classification system. The child says, this experiences, for example, when I defecate, or urinate, this experience has nothing to do with mother. But when I eat, when I smile, and when I smile back, when I'm held, when I'm hugged, this has to do with mother. So part of me has nothing to do with mother and part of me has to do with mother because it is mother. There's a part of me that generates pleasurable good experiences and bad negative experiences, but somehow these experiences occur only when I interact with this part of me that I call mother. So the child begins to get attached to this part of himself which he identifies as mother. He attaches to caregivers and develops the capacity to attach to other people later in life, which is the absolute foundation and precondition for mental health. The absence of attachment-seeking behaviors such as smiling at mummy, reaching out, anticipatory nursing postures and so on and so forth. When a baby doesn't display these attachment behaviors, doesn't try to trigger care and nurturance in his caregivers, that's a problem. It's usually a result of constitutional or basic cognitive deficits that interfere with the infant's ability to organize experience. So the absence of these behaviors is tied to some problem in the environment or some problem in the baby. Either the baby is cognitively impeded or impaired, that's one option. And the other option is that the environment is not conducive to attachment. There's a lot of stress in the environment or the mother is seriously dead in the metaphorical sense. There is no feedback that allows the child to develop the necessary attachment style and attachment behaviors. This is the work of Rutter, R-U-T-T-E-R. Children who are unable to form attachments or whose attachments have been ruptured through separations, abuse, etc. These kind of children are withdrawn, they suffer from depression, this is the work of Spitz. And so you see that the initial phase, the autistic, the normal autistic phase, is a defense against depression. Because when the child exits the normal autistic phase, tries to interact with his environment, although he mistakes the environment, he believes this external environment is actually internal. But still, he tries to interact with the environment, he tries to develop attachment. If this doesn't work well, it results in depression. The autistic phase is an antidepressant. And so during this period we see, in case of failure of the autistic phase, failure of subsequent attachment, we see many clinical issues emerging. For example, anxiety disorders. There's a sense of loss of self. Or conversely, a wish or an attempt to deny any differences between self and other, merger, fusion, measurement. This is the work of Pine. There's a failure to establish attachment in attachment. It leads essentially to what we later know as psychopathy. The roots of psychopathy are extremely early in life. And they are probably the outcome, psychopathy is probably the outcome of cognitive deficits in the child. And a depressive stance as a reaction to the constant failure to attach and to find loving figures and caring figures in your life. The child does not elicit, because the child is defective, deformed, problematic, has cognitive deficits. The child fails to elicit love and caring in caregivers, even in his own mother. The child becomes a psychopath. So it's not only a problem of attachment, a loss of self, an inability to tell the difference between oneself and others. Perceiving others as your property, as your extension, not as separate entities with any rights. So there's an inability to keep rules, antisocial behavior, a lack of empathy for others. And yet there is still a deep craving for attention, with an inability to form lasting relationships to satisfy this craving. And I refer you to early work by Powellby. More or less at the same time as Harvey Clackley wrote his Masks of Sanity. Powellby wrote seminal works about the emergence of development of psychopathy in very early childhood. So this is the autistic or normal autistic phase. It gives place seamlessly to what mother called normal symbiosis. The normal symbiotic state. It starts on the third or fourth week of life, and it is because sensory processes have become much more complex, much more mature, and much more attuned to the environment and much more realistic. They reflect reality much better. It's like the senses are honed by the contact with reality. So now the infant begins to show increased awareness of the outside world. There is something called alert inactivity. The child is like frozen. It's very reminiscent of a post-traumatic reaction, like the freeze reaction of CPTSD. The child is traumatized, of course. Birth is traumatic. Encountering the world for the first time is traumatic. The fact that there is a part of you perceived as mother who can be frustrating and negative and uncomfortable and unpleasurable. That is traumatic. The child is immersed in trauma throughout these first few weeks of life, and yet he's developing an awareness of the outside world. So what he does, he freezes. The child freezes and scans the world passively. His eyes dart from one side to the other. He takes in the world without acting on the world. The child is known as alert inactivity. And during this period there is an increased responsiveness to the caregiver. The caregiver becomes what we call an auxiliary ego. The caregiver at this stage, the symbiotic stage, takes on two important functions. External regulation. The caregiver regulates the child's internal processes. So the mother regulates the child's moods, the mother regulates the child's emotions. And if the child gets stuck at this stage, this kind of child, having become an adult, would always look for external regulators. He would always look for other people to regulate him, to stabilize his moods, to regulate his emotions. Borderline personality disorder, for example. Borderline, she looks for an intimate partner who would fulfill this early maternal role of external regulation. So this is what the mother does. This is one of the functions of the mother during the symbiotic phase. Another very important function. The mother becomes the world. The mother fulfills ego functions. And one of the main functions of the ego, or the nascent ego, is reality testing. It's the ability to discern reality, to realize its externality, to act in it and on it in a self-efficacious manner that guarantees favorable outcomes. Now, mother brings the world to the child. Mother is the world. She becomes the world. And in this sense, she serves as an auxiliary ego, or proto-ego, if you wish. Memory traces of these first interactions help the infant turned toddler, turned child, turned adolescent, turned adult. These memory traces of these initially first interactions help this kind of child tell the difference between inside and outside. And this is a major failure in pathological narcissism, in psychotic disorders, where the patient is unable to tell the difference between out there and in here. External object and internal object. Internal object and external object. Everything is one. Everything is blood. Everything is oceanic. It's almost a state of nirvana, if you wish, but in a bad sense. There's a feeling of dissolving. The narcissist experiences constant dissolving, like being diluted in water, like losing oneself, like being ephemeral. A very famous painting, Galatea, by Salvador Dali, where you see a beautiful woman's face dissolving into molecules. That's a constant state of the narcissist. His analysis is unable to tell the difference between inside and outside, because he got stuck at the symbiotic phase. He never separated. We'll come to it in a minute. Okay. To summarize, these are the roles of the mother in the symbiotic phase. Number one, external regulation. Number two, reality testing. At this stage, there's something called mutual queuing. Mutual queuing is when the caregiver, the mother, selectively responds to the infant's needs. She sets up a process of interpersonal relating that leads to the development of a core concept of the self. This is the work of Führer. Sorry, I didn't invent this name. This is the work of Führer in 1963, F-U-R-E-R, to be clear. The social smile is another concept in mother's work. And later, social smile is a developmental milestone. The social smile is when the child smiles back at mommy. Why is the social smile so important? Why are we so excited about it? Let me get a drink before I tackle this honorary issue. Don't you just love my $10 words? Okay, Shoshani. Social smile is indicative of two very important developments. Number one, attachment. When the baby smiles at mommy, it's a sign that he's attached to her. And number two, acknowledgement that mommy is external. The baby smiles at an external object. The first time, the baby acknowledges that he is not the world. That there's something out there. And that a smile can communicate with that outward something and motivate her to be nice. So the smile is also manipulative, but in a good sense. Clinically, disturbances in care, as we say, a dead mother or an absent mother. By the way, it could be also absent physically. She could be sick, she could have died, you know. Inconsistent care leads to deficits in the organization of the self. When such care is not stable, predictable, reliable, determined, not arbitrary, not capricious, when care induces a sense of secure base, safety and stability, the child evolves to become a well-balanced adult. But when the care is the opposite of all these things, infants precociously develop their own resources defensively. This is what is called the false self. The false self is a statement. It says, I don't need you. I'm self-sufficient because I'm God-like. I contain everything. I am everything. I am everyone. I am all-powerful and all-knowing and perfection. So I don't need you. The child rejects the inconsistent care and starts to self-care, to administer care to itself via the agency of an imaginary friend in a paracocin. The imaginary friend is the false self that is Winnicott's observation in 1953, a pivotal moment in understanding narcissism. Attachment is affected when there is difficulty in establishing what is called self-object differentiation. Differentiation between self and object. In here and out there, me and them. I stop here. Everyone starts. The world stops here and I start, a.k.a. boundaries to some extent. So self-object differentiation, when it fails, this creates enormous difficulties later in life because such individuals lack a core sense of self. They don't have a unitary integrated, constellated self. They manifest a defensive detachment to others. They reject other people, they push them away. They would rather be hated than loved. They would rather be abused than taken care of. They reject any dependency on the kindness of strangers, of others. There is low self-esteem compensated for by a grandiose self-structure and this is known as pseudo-self-sufficiency. There is inability to create any meaningful connection with other people because there is no practice with attachment and no practice of telling external from internal. So the child, later on the adolescent, later on the adult, the child knows that it's hopeless. He will never be loved. He will never be taken care of. He is incapable of forming long-lasting relationships. If anyone tries to get close, is perceived as manipulative or pitting, humiliating or stupid. If anyone tries to come close to a narcissist, she must be stupid or she must be manipulative. She's a gold digger, she's looking for something or something's wrong with her, she's herself as mentally ill in some way or narcissist would invent a million explanations why it's wrong for you to love him and if you do, it's threatening because he is incapable of managing this. So here we come to separation individuation. Separation, you remember, is the exit from the symbiotic phase and it starts with a sub-phase known as differentiation also called hatching. Hatching, it is 4 to 10 months of age. Hatching, differentiation, psychological birth is the phase when the infant differentiates out of the symbiotic unit. It's been described wonderfully by Pine and Bergman, among others. It is characterized by an alert state. So there's a transition here from alert inactivity to alert activity. The child acquires agency. The child begins to operate in the world and on the world as an agent. So there's an alert state with distinct periods of wakefulness and even I would say hypervigilance. At about 6 months, the infant begins to engage in exploratory behaviors of the caregiver. And this is called as customs inspection, tongue-in-cheek customs inspection. The child pinches the mother's nipples, her cheeks. He shoves the finger up her nose. He bites her lips and her ear lobes. That's his way, child's way of exploring this monolithic monumental thing that is out there and is the source of his negative experiences and positive experiences alike. The child starts exploring first and foremost the mother. This consists of visual and tactile exploration, not only touching or probing, but also looking at the caregiver, at the mother's face and body for hours. It's a kind of peek-a-boo game, physical separation through crawling away, venturing back, playing nearby mommy, pretending that she's not there. The child is beginning to dabble in separation, taste it, experiment with it. And through all this process, the infant engages in visual checking back. He plays around, he separates, attempts separation, then he panics. There's an anxiety reaction. And the child checks whether mommy is still there, the visual checking back. It's a developmental function. It's intended to help the child discriminate the familiar from the unfamiliar. And then the child develops something called stranger anxiety. It's again a developmental landmark. It's very important. Stranger anxiety is when the child is able to tell that mommy is known, a known entity, a known quantity, familiar, and all the others are not. And that includes father, by the way. All the others are not. So all the others are strangers and they provoke anxiety and mother reduces, ameliorates and mitigates the anxiety. The mother's function is a secure base, and her ability to regulate externally the child's anxieties and moods and emotions allow the child to venture into the world and take the risk of becoming labile and dysregulated because he can always run back to mommy and she will re-regulate him. And gradually the child transitions from mommy, from mother to an object. And this is known as the transitional object. It's a teddy bear or a soft blanket or any other object the child chooses for comfort. It's also known as a comfort object. So the comfort object is very important because it allows the child to separate from the caregiver in a risk-free fashion. The teddy bear will never spank the child. The blanket will never kill the child or beat the child. So it's risk-free. A pillow, you know, a carpet, children adopt the most amazing objects, transitional or comfort objects. But they're all safe, a sleeper, old sleepers. They're all safe. And so it is safe to abandon mommy and to experiment with an object that is not mommy but is still comforting, utterly controllable and always with the child. It provides object constancy and reduces the child's abandonment anxiety. The transitional object represents the comforting functions of the mother that the infant can now generate from other objects on its own terms. The mother is available to the infant during these early attempts at separation. The infant must build confidence, a confident expectation and basic trust in the mother. Only then is the child capable of developing basic trust and confident expectation regarding the world. It's as if the mother is a recharging station or a safe place to run to if you fail. I refer you to work by Benedict in 1938 and Erickson in the 1950s. So if there's a failure at this stage, if the mother is not available, doesn't encourage the child to explore the world, takes away the transitional or comfort object cruelly, is sadistic, critical, harsh, her love is conditional on performance, is absent, dead, selfish, depressive, you name it, if it's a bed-dead mother. If there's a failure at this stage, this is the root of borderline. So remember, psychopathy starts much earlier, borderline is a later development. So borderline phenomena start to develop. Borderline is characterized by an unstable sense of self, unstable relationships with others and chaotic fluctuating internal states. As a chronic feeling of emptiness, this intense separation in security, separation or abandonment anxiety, the inability to be alone for long periods of time and the constant concern about the availability of others to help manage intense internal tension, external regulation. I refer you to work by honor. So this is the first phase, differentiation. Second phase, sub-phase. We are in the separation phase and we are discussing the second sub-phase of separation, which is known as practicing. It's between the ages of six to ten months and up to 18 months. So some children are late bloomers, takes them much longer to go through the phase of practicing. It's a shift to autonomous functioning and it is also divided into two parts, early practicing and proper practicing. In the early practicing sub-phase of the practicing sub-phase of the separation phase, so in the early practicing sub-phase, which there's a big overlap with differentiation as you may have noticed. So in the early practicing, the infant is able to move away from mother by crawling, climbing and pulling itself up and holding on to a supporting object, a ladder, a chair and so on, many injuries during this period. During these explorations, the infants check back, check back with mother to emotionally refuel. By the way, that's where I took the word fuel. In my writings on narcissistic supply, I say that narcissistic supply fuels the narcissist and I took it from Margaret Marlon, emotional refueling. The child looks back at mommy in order to emotionally recharge. The child is terrified, will mommy be angry at me that I'm separating? Will she encourage me? Will she be there when I look back? Will she abandon me because I dare to crawl away from her? So the child needs this constant reassurance from mommy and it is known as a secure base. The child is reassured about the availability of the caretaker and here bowel-based work on attachment is much more important than malice. During the practicing proper, the infant is attains certain physical accomplishments. The infant starts to walk. He stands upright. He resembles much less a monkey or an ape than before. He's impervious to injuries and bumps and falls because mommy is there to comfort him and to solve his wounds. This period is the totalist love affair with the world. There's a sense of omnipotence, newfound skills and functioning. Green Care was the first to suggest in 1957 that exploring, taking on the world when you are 10 months old or 18 months old, taking on the world requires grandiosity. You need to have an unrealistic assessment of yourself and of the world to undertake such a massive, terrifying task. And so Green Care suggested that at this stage infants develop a sense of omnipotence, godlike omnipotence. And if the infant remains stuck at this stage, this developmental phase or subphase is disrupted, this sense of grandiosity, omnipotence, godlike features, attributes remain with a child as an adult. And these are known as narcissists. Games during this phase reflect a growing awareness of separateness. They need to be reassured of the caregiver's availability for support. So all the games are actually tests. The infant runs away to be caught by mother. This is a test. Infants play games at this stage to explore features of mother and features of the world. Mother noted that children at this age often show a preoccupation in an attempt to create a mental image of their caregivers when these caregivers are no longer available. So this constant testing via gamification, gamification of testing it is intended for the child to accumulate a database of information about mother so that when mother is out of the room or on a trip the kid can access this relational database and recreate mother in his own mind. These are the rudiments of object permanence to use Piaget's term object constancy to use mother as term. The major shifts in cognition from sensory motor to representational thought and the beginnings of language and symbolic play they add to the child's increased autonomy in interacting with the outside world. And this is where Piaget's contribution comes in. His work actually focuses on separation and individuation. So what does a child accomplish in this subphase? If this subphase goes right, what are the accomplishments? Well, healthy narcissism. The beginning of a sense of self-esteem fueled by pleasure in one's own abilities and autonomous functioning. So yes, narcissism has its roots here but it's healthy narcissism. It's a realistic assessment of one's strengths and limitations and the knowledge that mother has your back, your loved, your cared for, your sent out of the world because she trusts you and she will always be there if anything goes wrong. This is a healthy environment. If this phase is disrupted the clinical issues arising from this level of development reflect problems with premature object loss. Instead of taking pleasure and delight in newfound skills and the world revealed to them this kind of children worry about the primary object, about loss, about abandonment, about the care that they require, the extremely insecure, anxious, attached to mommy's apron unwilling to walk away, unwilling to experiment or to explore. You see this kind of kids in kindergarten in narcissistic phenomena there are disturbances in the ability to maintain self-esteem to regulate a sense of self-worth. Individuals have an inordinate need for outside validation and admiration of their abilities to reassure themselves of their value. So this kind of individuals create an inflated sense of importance they tell themselves I'm special, I'm unique and they feel grandiose, the same grandiosity that they had initially acquired in order to explore the world, they redirect inwards and explore themselves because the world has proven to be unsafe. The mother's lack of availability has rendered the world unsafe. The grandiosity that should have been consumed in exploring the universe taking on reality and life this grandiosity is preserved and directed inwards towards the maintenance of an inflated fantastic self-image and self-perception these kind of feelings defensively, word of the need for others the child tells himself I've tried the world I attempted to connect with others this sucks, it doesn't work I don't know why it doesn't work maybe something's wrong with me, maybe something's wrong with the world but I prefer to think that something's wrong with the world I prefer to think that other people are the problem I'm okay I'm okay in the sense that I'm perfect I crave constant admiration and reassurance from people because I still doubt this hypothesis but this is the working hypothesis this is what I came to believe this is the theory that I've developed about myself, the minds of others in the world at large this is my internal working model I am perfection, I am Godlike I'm flawless, I'm infallible I'm perfect, I'm brilliant, I'm this and that the problem is with the outside how do I know? because I've tried the outside and the interaction failed and it could not have failed because something's wrong with me it has failed because something is wrong with the world the child refuses to acknowledge that the problem has not been with the world and very rarely is with the child but it has been with the mother he can not correct aggression at the mother he cannot criticise mother he cannot admit that mother obstructed his growth, his separation, his individuation his personhood, he cannot admit to this so he's left with only two options either something is wrong with him or with the world because mother is perfect, mother is all good mother is idealised at this stage of life narcissistic individuals feel entitled and yet they are dependent on other people they demonstrate a lack of empathy and concern, they abuse, they exploit and then they demand, they expect when others disappoint them they arrange and this seeming contradiction between actions and consequences antecedents and consequences this seeming contradiction is because it's a missing part and that missing part is in mother's shame the child fails to interpret the world properly to understand reality in life and himself because he wouldn't introduce mother into the equation he's protective of mother, she's perfect, she's all good indeed this is reflected in the third sub-phase known as rapprochement the period of rapprochement spans the ages of 15 to 24 months it is behaviourally active it is actively approaching the caregiver going back to the caregiver, reverting to the caregiver children begin to realise when they've explored the world grandiosely they begin to realise the limits they're alleged omnipotence they have a new awareness of their separateness and the separateness of mother in short, the world has broken down there's a schism in the world there's a break, a very traumatic break suddenly the child realises I'm not one with mother, mother is separate from me I'm separate from mommy and so there must be a limit to what I can do my omnipotence, my primary narcissism my grandiosity, they were all wrong I was all wrong and this creates a sense of overwhelming, dysregulating insecurity lack of safety, lack of stability and thus confronted with uncertainty and indeterminacy and the threat of the unknown huge world out there, the child runs back to mommy he runs back to mommy and it is a symbolic attempt to eliminate the new gained knowledge of separateness I'm running back to you because I don't want to be separate from you I hate what I've found out I hate what I've found out about the world, about others and about myself and about you I don't like the fact that you are not me, mommy I want us to be one again I want to go back to the womb I want to go back to the symbiotic state and this is precisely what the narcissist does to you he encourages the narcissist encourages you to give up on the world and on your own separateness and to merge with him as a maternal figure to go back to the womb, to the matrix narcissism, narcissistic abuse and relationships with narcissists are grounded firmly in rapprochement because a narcissist never attains separation he doesn't know how to do separation, individuation he doesn't allow you to separate and individuate from him he regresses you to very early infancy he becomes your mother and then he forces you to abandon your own accomplishments at separation and individuation and to regress and go back all the way to rapprochement during this phase in a healthy child's life he increases in cognition and motor development and this is known as unbeat tendency shadowing and darting away from the caretaker the child follows the caretaker, like a duck but doesn't interact with her when she turns around, tries to talk to him, he runs away and then he shadows her again, follows her like in bad B movies these behaviors reflect the child's simultaneous need for autonomy and need for support the child is hesitant, he can't make up his mind does he want to be separated from mommy or does he want to be one with mommy it's like now the child realizes there's been a symbiotic phase and there is a separation phase what do I prefer, do I prefer to remain stuck with mommy for the rest of my life symbiotically or do I prefer to separate from mommy and potentially lose her the future to lose mommy is shocking to the child it's traumatizing, it's terrifying, it's a nightmare and so there's an increase in aggression seen in behaviors such as pushing away whining, clinging these behaviors represent the struggle to reconcile the good and bad aspects of the self and the good and bad aspects of mother the child needs mother and yet by now there is a separation phase and the fact that she is not on good so there are many struggles here you know, toilet training is part of it the child is encouraged to become autonomous and in control of bodily functions it's a part of gaining personal autonomy and independence and separating from mommy children at this stage become non-no-bears they keep saying no, this is a way to test their agency, their power newfound power and so autonomy, Ericsson called it the stage of autonomy the child doesn't regard autonomy as an unalloyed good the child is terrified of autonomy anxiety is high, he doesn't know how to cope with it and Rappo-Schmo is typical of borderline phenomena which are characterized as we said by unstable inner states, unstable relationships and a fragile sense of self in borderline phenomena there are feelings of loss of support the loss of approval of others which are maternal proxies there's aggression, there's anger that arise out of intense feelings of vulnerability, dependency failure to separate, the need for external regulation and the major defenses employed in borderline phenomena are those of splitting and projection, splitting keeps the good and the loved aspects of other people separate from the bad and hated aspects of these very people so the borderline splits everything the way she splits her mother during the separation phase mother on the one hand is a secure base, pleasurable and comforting but on the other hand mother is very frustrating because she's separate she's separate and she doesn't always accommodate the demands and the wishes of the child so that's very very bad of mother that's bad mommy and the borderline carries this attitude forward in life and when she's not immediately gratified for example she devalues she splits the frustrating object projection is used by the borderline to read herself of felt unwanted bad aspects of the self the borderline attributes these bad aspects of the self these unwanted parts, these rejected parts to another person narcissists do the same it's not limited to borderline, psychopaths but failure of what was more usually yields borderline borderline problems internally because of a lack of integration of good and bad internal representations of the self and of others individuals with this defensive structure are subject to fluctuating internal states feelings of disorganization and low self-esteem the failure of integration and constellation leaves the borderline and by the way the narcissists without a self self is an organizing principle even if you adhere to my theory based on Philip Bromber, a theory of self-states there is an assemblage of self-states a coalition, a consortium of self-states the borderline and the narcissists don't have this organizing principle it's all a bloody mess and it's a mess because of the failure of integration and constellation processes healthy people transition from the last phase of separation of individuality or the road to object constancy this is the age this is between 24 and 36 months and it involves all the aspects of all the previous stages in particular the trust and confidence of the symbiotic phase there are advances in cognition during this phase representational thought becomes the dominant dominant cognitive mode and language begins to be used the use of language mediates reality but also defines consciousness and defines reality it is through language that we become aware of ourselves, of others and of the world children have an inner picture of mother and their relationship with mother and this inner picture has formed as a result of soothing, gratifying and organizing functions that the mother provides I refer to work by Tolpin it is at this stage that the famous mechanisms and processes of identification internalization, incorporation and interjection they take place in this phase internalization is a process of recovering what has been lost in the actual relationship with the mother so toddlers create an internal picture of an all good gratifying mother and this now becomes a part of their internal structure they carry around an all good mother because real mother is a composite of good and bad and so she is frustrating and she is the cause of discomfort and unpleasant feelings at times at this stage the child needs to carry in his mind an introject an internal object that represents mother but is idealized, unrealistic when children get stuck at this stage they become narcissists and this is exactly what the narcissist does to you he takes a snapshot of you as a maternal figure he idealizes you, you become all good in his mind and when you start to deviate from this image he becomes very angry to you he begins to see you as an enemy and regard you as a persecutory object this leads to devaluation back to healthy children the developmental achievement in this last phase is individual identity with stable internal representations of both oneself and of other people and this achievement is a condition to forming one-on-one relationships in the future because in every one-on-one relationship in the future especially intimate relationships, romantic relationships love relationships in the future when the child had become a crescent and adult there are always problems with separation relationships always lead to a modicum to some measure of merger and fusion and enmeshment and then there is a need for healthy separation but if the child did not graduate through early childhood separation in a healthy manner the adult will perceive every separation as abandonment and every closeness as engulfment this is the problem of the twin anxieties in borderline personality disorder the fourth sub-phase of separation teaches the child that separateness is not abandonment that intimacy is not engulfment that it is possible to preserve in his mind a representation of mother a representation of himself that are balanced, that are realistic that are good and gratifying or idealized but not in a way that is shall we say that leads to enmeshment or to fusion or to merger so individual identity relies crucially the formation of individuality relies crucially on the ability to create internal objects of oneself and of others that on the one hand don't threaten the self with anxiety internal objects that don't threaten with abandonment don't threaten with engulfment don't threaten with enmeshment good internal objects mother like internal objects but on the other hand don't deviate too much from reality idealization can be based on the mother's good aspects, real good aspects now if this sub-phase is disrupted there is ambivalence towards mother and other caretakers and their functions there is there's a lot of bad feelings and bad blood regarding needs how needs have been met or have not been met there is depression associated with the threatened object loss in a sense that important needs have never been met this is Horner's work but you can say wait a minute Sam what about fathers, don't they have a role I keep being asking well search the channel I answer this question, I'm going to answer it again because I'm a really really nice guy you can safely internalize and interject me and idealize me, fathers father is much less crucial it almost has no role in all the phases that I've described in the early stages of homeostasis and equilibrium, the father provides some complementary services or functions so he perhaps sheds light on the infant's behavior patterns he helps the mother actually he helps the mother to soothe the baby, to regulate behaviors to stimulate the baby one way or another, but it's like mother has 90% of the job and father has 10% during the symbiotic period the father is totally absent clinically speaking is available as another level, a secondary level he adds depth to certain experiences he serves as a litmus test, kind of a checksum, you know, so the child loves the mother and then he tries out his love or his catexis his emotional investment, he tries it out on his father it's like a secondary test the father engages the infant in interactive ways that complement the mother's comforting functions but they are not critical or relevant or integral to or incorporated in separation during the practicing phase fathers become more significant they become the significant other and they help to modulate aggression they provide a secondary blanket or secondary layer of security a base to return when the toddler can't find money for some reason but the toddler would always prefer money to daddy when the toddler ventures out and experiences and explores the world he will always run back to money as if daddy is not there, totally transparent there's of course much later in life let's say around 3 years there's the question of gender differentiation the father provides a gender for comparison and identification, gender differences the father is available during the Rappo-Schmo he helps the child to organize and modulate feelings of frustration and aggression the father is totally auxiliary secondary, it is a fact and I'm sorry, it is a fact the children who grow in fatherless families are absolutely okay mentally father is not critical to healthy emotional and psychological maturation fathers teach skills father teach social mores and conventions and sexual screens fathers are agents of society they are agents of socialization but they are not psychodynamic agents they are not psychodevelopmental agents they are not even neurodevelopmental agents father can set limits for example he can support autonomous strivings but can limit them to appropriate behavior he can signal when the child transgresses he can punish, he can help children tolerate and integrate ambivalent feelings fathers play an interaction with children is more active and more exciting but it is the mother who is soothing and comforting and it is the mother who is the engine of development I mean personal development, psychological development the experiences or personality differences between father and mother gives the infant varied, varied experiential environment that allows the infant to be more fully expressive of emotions and participate with others and so on so Bellingham, those of you who are interested Bellingham has written a lot about the father's role was promulgated in the 50s, 60s and 70s so it's old, it's old but it's based on numerous observations and it's still very solid over the years there has been a lot of critique of mother's theory of separation and individuation especially from the field of infant and attachment research I refer you to studies by Lyons Ruth and Stern, one of my favorites research demonstrates that infants are pre-wired for relatedness from birth they do not experience an autistic or symbiotic phase say some of these scholars from birth, Stern for example says that from birth, infants experience subjective sense of self and a subjective sense of others from which experience is organized, structured and restructured according to cognitive and effective developmental levels by the way to a large extent Fairbairn and Winnicott say the same only using different terminology and much earlier than Stern attachment theories, they also cast doubt on the validity of the symbiotic phase symbiotic phase is very doubted to this so we don't use it anymore attachment theories pointed to infants readiness for birth with evolutionary behaviors such as crying, sucking, smiling to elicit caregiver attention in care Baulby's work goes into this I think there's a confusion here between reflexive empathy and actual empathy reflexive empathy and attachment reflexive empathy and separateness there's a confusion in regarding reflexive empathy even today in the study of empathy people say the narcissist has cognitive empathy wrong the narcissist has both cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy and this is why I coined the phrase called empathy because it includes these two variants of empathy together there are points of convergence between Mahler and attachment theories the concepts of internal working models self other representations these are all rewordings and rephrasing of Mahler early relationships become internalized and form expectations of relationships in general even in attachment theory I refer it to work by Maine, Kaplan, Cassidy and others Mahler's concept of emotional refueling and Baulby's notion of secure base is like they underscore the need for the caregiver for the mother to be available during the exploratory behavior of the world Baulby and Mahler come to different conclusions regarding the behavioral manifestations of the underlying psychodynamic but I don't think they are too different when it comes to the psychodynamics itself Mahler sees the practicing in rapprochement phases characterized by active separations with a bevelance towards reunions with the mother is a threat to the emerging autonomy attachment theories disagree they see this period as an increase in the awareness of an interest in the mother's availability during exploratory behaviors ask me this is her splitting and nitpicking in my view these two can be easily combined coherently within a single framework infants seek proximity to mothers during the exploration of the world period this is not clinging this is not ambivalence this is not aggression as described by Mahler this is attachment on the other hand ambivalence aggression and clinging do exist who can deny this any mother would tell you that this is true attachment theories say that clinging, ambivalence and aggression are problematic interactions between infant and mother they characterize problems in the quality of attachment tyson and tyson for example I disagree I think these are perfectly understandable and healthy reactions to a situation which is very terrifying very frightening, very unclear, very unfamiliar I'm going to abandon mommy, I'm going to explore the world oh my god, it's an oh my god reaction by the baby, by the child it's a baby attachment theories forget that it's a baby so I still stand by Mahler to a large degree with modifications by Bauerby and others in my work and I integrated with Bromberg's self states ok, I've done my best to give you in-depth background to my work I hope this helps and I wish you all separate and individually weakened and don't interject me too much and if you do watch my videos about eradicating the narcissists internal serpent voice