We've gone a long way, and we've circumnavigated the globe, and I've reviewed the death drive from far as I know every possible angle, and I think it all leads to the conclusion, the sad conclusion, that when a child is born it is given the choice between life and death by his mother, and healthy mothers, loving mothers, caring mothers, winnigotian good enough mothers, let the child choose that is exactly separation and individuation. Some children choose death regardless of the mother, but the overwhelming vast majority choose life.  Even if she believes that she is choosing life, even if she thinks she is being protective and loving and caring and holding and containing, whenever the mother makes the choice, she is choosing death for her child. And once the child has become intimate with death, there is no going back, because death is the womb, it's an oceanic feeling, it's nirvana, it's the beginning and the end. It is far superior to life, far more gratifying, far more engulfing and encompassing, and soothing and comforting. Once a child gets in touch and gets to know death, it never lets go. And it keeps choosing death into adulthood and into its own physical death. That is a mother's poison gift, that is a legacy. A mother's main role is to push the child away, to reject the child in a loving manner, to serve as a secure base, while the child is propelled by her, encouraged by her, to explore the world out there, externally separate from her.  All the self-styled experts online provide answers to your questions. The answers are rubbish, but they still provide answers to your questions. And I am here to question their answers, and even more importantly, yours. So welcome to Questioning Your Answers session. Today I'm going to tackle four of your questions. I'll start with the first one. Do narcissists hold everyone in contempt? The short and the long of it is absolutely. Narcissists hold in cold, demeaning contempt, the very people that they envy. And they hold in virulent, sadistic contempt, people that they depend on for narcissistic supply, attention, adulation, admiration, and so on. They also hold in contempt people that they need for the maintenance of the shared fantasy, with so-called love. Let me summarize it for you. They hold in contempt everyone. If it moves, they hold it in contempt. But above all, they hold themselves in utmost disdain, self-loathing, and they compensate for this with pretend godlike grandiosity. So that's why we keep saying that pathological narcissism is compensatory. The contempt is on 24, 7, 365. No letter. Consequently, so is the narcissism, the narcissistic defenses. They also own all the time. Next question. Are narcissists capable of love? Narcissists are incapable of any positive emotion, not only love. It's because they are unable to access these emotions. These emotions are walled in, firewalled, buried, repressed, suppressed, out of reach. This is the difference between the narcissist and the borderline. The narcissist is terrified of becoming emotionally dysregulated if he were to access these emotions. First and foremost, the shame. So narcissists are incapable of love. They are incapable of loving. But I think even more importantly, they are incapable of being loved. Consider this. Okay. Are narcissists lazy? Narcissists appear to be lazy. They appear to be indolent slackers, but actually they're not. Narcissists are very hard workers to obtain and to secure narcissistic supply is hard work. Ask any junkie to ascertain or to make sure that you have an uninterrupted flow of the drug of your choice. It's a full time job. But narcissists perceive themselves as God-like, perfection reified. So God created the entire universe in six days and eight short sentences utterances. God didn't have to work hard for it. He just spoke, said something, and here we are. So the narcissist perceiving himself as the absolute equal of God, the equivalent of God, a divine, a divinity, a deity of some kind. The narcissist believes that his words are more than enough. They don't have to be followed with action. He's a great believer in what the Greeks called the logos. He believes, and this is of course, magical thinking. The narcissist believes that if he were only to wish something, to think about something, to contemplate something, it would become true in reality. And so God is also entitled to special treatment, and supplication. And the narcissist is no exception. Being a God, he expects this from other people. He expects to be treated by special people in a special way. And he expects to be serviced the famous four S's, sex, supply, services, safety. And he expects submissiveness, obedience, the supplication part. Other people should labor and toil to realize, to actualize, to materialize the nitty gritty aspects of the narcissist's big picture vision. Yes, the narcissist has the vision thing, and he's above the tidium, above the boring stuff, above the pedestrian, the quotidian, the day to day. He sits in his armchair, contemplating the universe, the big picture. He has a panoramic and synoptic view of everything. And he hands down instructions and commands and orders to the lesser mortals that surround him. Another question he's like to do with narcissism, it's about intrusive thoughts. What to do with intrusive thoughts, thoughts that occupy your mind, and despite your best efforts, you cannot get rid of them. Here's the thing, the more you try to suppress an intrusive thought, the more pervasive and potent, strong, powerful it becomes. This is known in clinical psychology as ironic rebound. If I were to tell you to not think of an elephant, the first thing that would come to your mind would be an elephant, of course. So try the opposite. Force yourself knowingly and consciously to contemplate only the intrusive content. Focus on the intrusive thought. Dread it up. Provoke it. Evoke it. Elicit it. Consider it. Analyze it. Think only about it. Put away from your mind anything that's not intrusive, anything that doesn't have to do with these intrusive thoughts. Whenever another unrelated thought occurs to you, immediately recall the intrusive thought and focus on the intrusive thought in great detail. You will find out that gradually the intrusive thoughts will cease altogether. And finally I've been asked some people are charitable, altruistic, helpful, they give a lot in a variety of ways. Could this be narcissists? Well, there is something called communal or pro-social narcissists. But more generally, some people know how to love only by giving. Giving is their way of showing and expressing love. But when the gifts of such people are rebuffed or ignored, they panic. They become control freaks. The giving of these people becomes compulsive, coercive, the very opposite of love. So people who give in lieu of love, people who give as a substitute for love, people who are incapable of loving but are capable of giving are actually control freaks. This is their way of mastering the situation and the recipient of their largesse. They cannot countenance being rejected. They take rejection very badly and then they become real monsters. And their giving is out of control. It's absolutely coercive and controlling and compulsive. And you have to take what they're giving.  Okay, this is pathological giving, a sick kind of giving. Okay, I hope I've questioned all your answers.  Why? Because I love the sound of my voice. I'm completing the manuscript to my new book, and I'm glad to inform you that I found the publisher. And I thought it's a good time to give you a glimpse into one of the innovations in this forthcoming book, Mother's Gaze. And how the Mother's Gaze generates the child, makes the child become, creates the child's unconscious, and later on shapes the child's self. All this with the Mother's Gaze.   So this is today's topic. And then when this process goes awry, we have narcissism. And how does this affect you as the narcissist, intimate partner, friend, family member? How does this failure in maternal gaze affect you? How does it impact you? How does it change your life? How does it shape the interaction between the narcissist and you, aka shared fantasy? And what does it render the narcissist? What does it make the narcissist into? The narcissist is, as I keep saying, not fully human. Critical components and modules are missing. How does this manifest in a relationship, in an interpersonal relationship, linking it backwards to the Mother's Gaze? This is the topic of today's video. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the Faculty of Sea Apps, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, Toronto, Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom Outreach Campus in Lagos, Nigeria. So before I proceed, before we start with the topic of today's video, I owe you a correction. I got something wrong in one of my last videos and I wish to thank the viewer who alerted me to this. I welcome any constructive criticism and any amendments to any mistake that I may be making. So I made a claim in one of my recent videos that psychopaths can deceive a lie detector. They can pass a lie detector test. That is not true. I was relying on a study by Ruskin and Hale and Hair, I'm sorry Ruskin and Hair. Hair is the father of the modern conception of psychopathy. And so I relied on the study dated 1978, not realizing that the study has been criticized the very same year by Lycan and later on debunked multiple times over the ensuing decades. Psychopaths, exactly like non-psychopaths, cannot deceive a lie detector. They cannot fake a lie detector test. They cannot pass a lie detector test while lying because a lie detector test measures impacts in the body that are connected to the autonomous central nervous system. However, another claim that I've made is absolutely true and well-substantiated, over 70 years of studies. And that is that people are not good at detecting liars and lying. People cannot detect liars and lying. This is beyond debate and beyond doubt in the scholarly literature. Okay, let's delve right in. I received a fascinating comment from someone who calls himself the coach. Sam, if you came across Narcissus laying there by the pool, would you try to pull him out or just leave him be? I'm not sure myself says the coach. Interested to hear your take, though. That's a fascinating topic because it goes straight to the heart of Narcissus. The inability to perceive the separateness or even the external existence of other people. Narcissus inhabits a world of one. There's only the Narcissus. Others are passing penumbra shades. They're not real. They're apparitions. They're like ghosts in the Narcissus' mind. This is the demon in the Narcissus' machine. These are the ghosts in his mind. Other people. The Narcissus is incapable of perceiving entities as external. So what he does, he converts them into internal objects and he continues to interact only with these internal objects. But he did too in well over 1200 videos. I didn't go deep into the question of how does this glitch happen? Why this bug in the Narcissus software? What happens? Today I'm going to deal with it. Before we proceed, I'm going to use the word gaze. Gaze is not a physical fact. It's not like here's to looking at you. It's not like a stare. It doesn't involve the eyes necessarily. A gaze is any caregiving, compassionate, holding, containing, loving, idealizing, and sometimes adulating attitude. This is a gaze. When the mother gazes upon her newborn child, she gazes at the child not only with her eyes, but with her mind's eye, with her love for the child, with her bonding, with her attachment, with her caring, with her dedication. And this is the mother's gaze. When the mother, of course, is a good enough mother.  So gaze is actually the interpersonal interaction between two people. We are all subjected to the gaze of others. The newborn baby, helpless, half formed, still forming. As it is, critically depends on his mother's gaze. But I personally believe that many of the giants of the field, including the likes of Winnicott, got it all wrong because they forgot that the infant has no conception of itself. The infant doesn't realize that it exists. The infant doesn't acknowledge its own separateness. So when the infant gazes into the mother's eyes, the infant can never see itself. Never. That's a mistake. Because the infant is incapable of perceiving its own existence. He doesn't know that it exists. There is a stage, it used to be called symbiotic phase, where the infant and mother in the world are all one. So when the infant gazes at the mother's eyes, he doesn't see itself. Infant has no conception of self, of others, of the world. It has no apprehension or comprehension of external and internal. It doesn't make this difference, this distinction. It doesn't differentiate. It is therefore initially unable to identify itself in the mother's gaze. That is a crucial mistake in the work of most of the giants in the field. When the baby looks into the mother's eyes, it sees nothing. Because it sees everything. It sees a mass, an undifferentiated mass. And this mass doesn't include the child, because the child doesn't perceive itself as separate from the mass. It's not that the child is a component of the mass, or an ingredient of the mass. This undifferentiated mass is all there is. When the child finally recognizes itself in the mother's gaze, the child experiences a trauma. It is a schism, a break in the world, the emergence of the other. And the initial other is the child itself. The first other person the child comes across is the child itself. Initially, when the child looks into the mother's eyes, the first few months of life, the child sees nothing there, because it sees everything there. Mother, the child, the world, everything is one. This is just undifferentiated, chaotic mass. But later on, things begin to break down.  And that someone else is actually the child himself. And by the way, when I say himself, it is herself, of course, yes, it applies equally to female babies or female infants. Now, this is a very big difference in my work, compared to the work of Winnicourt, object relations schools, from Melanie Klein to Guntrip and Fairburn. This is absolutely, what I'm saying is not acknowledged or accepted in any of the schools of psychology, mainstream psychology. But I think these people, these scholars didn't think it through. So there are three phases of gaze. The first phase, the child looks into the mother's eyes and sees an undifferentiated mass. It does not see itself. This is not self-perception. And it has no self, no constellated or integrated self to perceive. The second phase, the child suddenly realizes that there is someone there in the mother's gaze. That someone in the mother's gaze is the other. But who is it in the mother's gaze? It is the child himself. So the child self-alienates. The child is estranged from itself. There is the child, and there is the child's reflection in the mother's gaze, the first primordial other. And this creates an enormous trauma because the initial undifferentiated mass suddenly disintegrates, breaks down. The child begins to realize that there is internal and external himself and mother, someone out there, someone in here. The whole world collapses into clumps that are mutually exclusive. And this is absolutely terrifying. It's a trauma. What do we do when we are traumatized? We reject the trauma. We repress the trauma. We forget the trauma, amnesia. We dissociate it. That's exactly what the child does. Having perceived itself in the mother's gaze, the child experiences the trauma of the bicaberal world, of the disintegration of the world. This is a trauma that is too overwhelming even for an adult, let alone a helpless, needy, dependent newborn child. So what the child does, it rejects the mother's traumatizing gaze. It perceives the mother as a source of frustration. It perceives the mother as the agent that brought about the breakdown in his erstwhile, unitary, comforting, safe, stable universe of world.  There's aggression there.  He pushes her away. But it is exactly this act of pushing mommy away because she is traumatizing me. Exactly this act causes the child to realize the mother's existence as an external object. The child pushes away the mother so clearly she is external to the child. He realizes the mother's externality. It is the child's first experience at object relations, not a very positive experience, but still there's a dawning realization that mother is not me. There's me and there's mother. There's me, this internal introspective experience and there's mother, the other, out there, an external object. Moreover, it's a frustrating and traumatizing and hurtful object. So it's an object over which I have no control. The symbiosis breaks down, dissolves, disintegrates. And ironically, it is precisely this rejection that leads to differentiation. It is the first instance of proto-separation. Lacan called this a perception, a perception, a form of self-objectification, ambivalent self-annihilation, self-alienation, I'm sorry, the Lacan said that when the child beholds itself in a mirror, the child sees itself in a mirror, it realizes that there's someone there in the mirror, but he doesn't know that this someone in the mirror is the child itself. But of course, you're not in the physical mirror for that. The mother is the initial, the primitive, the first, the proto-mirror. When the child beholds itself in the mother's gaze, the child breaks down. There is me, internal, innate, and there is someone out there in the mother's gaze. And that someone out there, is it me? Is it not me? And this is Lacan's a perception. The child objectifies itself. It says the other child in the mother's eyes, in the mother's gaze, that other is an object. The child self-alienates. It's as if the child divorces its own reflection. This is very early on. It's around the age of six months to 12 months. Lacan suggests that the unconscious, the seat of repressed traumas, is a continuum of other people's gazes. Now I'm going to repeat this because this sentence is crucial to my work, actually. Lacan said that the unconscious is an anthology, a collection of other people's gazes, the information that we gather and glean from the way other people perceive us. Other people, as individuals, other people, as collectives, society itself. So there's a gaze of society via socialization. And we internalize all this, we interject to it, we identify with it, we incorporate it, and it becomes us. Intrajects are representations of this process of formation of the unconscious. And we perceive intrajects as egocintonic. We perceive intrajects as part of who we are. We don't perceive them as alien or estranged or external to us. These voices become us. And this is what Lacan said. The unconscious is simply a collection of all the people that have ever meant anything to you and became a part of you via the process of interjection. But I want to add to this, in my work I add to this another layer. And this one is borrowed from Freud. The unconscious is also a collection of repressed trauma, traumas multiple. In other words, the unconscious is a collection of voices, gazes, gazes of other people. The unconscious is the other or the others on the one hand. And on the other hand, the unconscious is also the seat and repository of all of life's repressed traumas. And this is the linkage that I found, which allowed me to develop my work. The mother's gaze in my work is the cause of the formation of the unconscious. It is the mother's gaze that creates the initial unconscious. The mother's gaze, remember, traumatizes the child, because the mother's gaze informs the child that there is something or someone out there. The mother's gaze breaks the world for the child. The mother's gaze reflects the child, so the child realizes there's something or someone out there and rejects the mother.  The differentiation, the distinction between the child and the rest of the world becomes incontestable, undebatable. This is a major trauma. The child represses this trauma. It is the process of repressing this primal trauma that creates the unconscious. The mother's gaze and the trauma induced by it are the two pillars that when put together create the unconscious. Now I've put all the pieces together. The child beholds itself in the mother's gaze. This traumatizes the child. The child represses the trauma and the gaze. These are the two components of the unconscious. The trauma represses traumas and other people's gaze, so this creates the unconscious. Within a few months of life, six to 12 months, the child has made leaps and bounds that are nothing less than astonishing, but also cataclysmic. The child symbiosis disintegrates. He begins to perceive external objects. He begins to initially to objectify himself and other people. He perceives the existence of the other. He is traumatized. He rejects his mother. He develops the unconscious. What is this primal trauma that we are talking about? I keep mentioning that the mother's gaze traumatizes the child. What is this trauma? It's the trauma of being seen. The child is seen through the mother's gaze. So why does the unconscious emerge to resolve the existential dissonance between the need to be seen and the traumatic impact of being seen? Initially, the child, the infant, the newborn, is critically dependent on the mother. The child needs to be fed, needs to be sheltered, needs to be attended to, needs to have skin contact, needs to be loved, needs to be held. The child, in short, needs to be noticed and needs to be seen.  So the need to be seen is a survival strategy, but it has a cost. It carries a cost with it. Whenever the child is seen, the child is reminded of the existence of the external world. The child is reminded that mother is an independent, autonomous, agentic entity outside the child's control and sphere of influence. The child develops extreme abandonment anxiety. The child needs to develop object constancy. The child has to cope with the fact that being seen is also being set apart, being separated. The only way to be seen by mommy is to become a separate object. The only way to be noticed by mommy is to push her away. The only way to be taken care of by mommy is to set oneself apart from mommy. So the cost is enormous. The oceanic feeling of being one with the world and one with mother, the very fact that the child is incapable of perceiving separateness, externality, this is very comforting. This imbues the child with a sense of safety and stability and the ability to cope with the existential dread, the angst of being one thousand percent dependent on someone else. And here there is a conflict. There is a dissonance. For the child to be seen, the child needs to separate. For the child to be attended to by mommy, the child needs to push himself away from mommy. Mommy's gaze being seen by mommy informs the child of its own separateness. Let's the child know that mother is an external object, an object that can abandon him any minute. It's terrifying. It's a mega trauma, the likes of which one never experiences again. So this creates a dissonance. The child wants to be seen, but is terrified of the trauma attendant upon being seen to resolve this existential dissonance between the need to be seen, which is a survival strategy, and the trauma of being seen, the child invents the unconscious. The unconscious emerges to solve this dissonance. The trauma of being seen is repressed in the interest of survival. The unconscious is formed as a container, as a repository, as a space within which the child can deposit the trauma of being seen and enjoy the benefits of being seen without being re-traumatized time and again. Repression is the mechanism that the child uses to continue to separate itself from the mother and not experience existential dread, anxiety, terror and trauma. This is the solution known as the unconscious.  Now that the child has perceived the mother's externality, her existence as an external object, its own separateness from the mother, the very fact that there is a world out there, the child is ready to proceed to stage two, which is objectification and instrumentalization of the mother as a mirror.  The child beholds itself in the mother's eyes. The child is able to form a well-informed view of itself, concept of itself, delineation and demarcation, an illustration of itself, using the mother's eyes as incontrovertible mirrors. But why use the mother's eyes?  The proto-mirror, her love for the child, her gaze, the function of caregiving. So the child feels safe.  The child feels safe to use her gaze, to use her as a mirror. The child knows that if he were to look into the abyss, the mother's eyes, the abyss is not going to look back at him. The child is not afraid to venture forward into the mother's eyes, and it is the first time the child takes on the world, attempts to explore the universe, discover things beyond the child. And this of course gives rise to personal boundaries. The mother's mirroring function, via her loving gaze, allows the child to safely explore the exterior, the world out there, and realize the boundaries between itself and that world. And again, the mother gaze is a secure base. It's a safe environment. Where the child to behold itself in another person's gaze, not the mother, there would have been the risk of psychosis. Because exactly as Nietzsche said, when you gaze into the abyss, sometimes the abyss gazes back at you. Hyperreflexivity, the mechanism at the heart of psychosis, is an attempt to deny the mirror. And the mirror is threatening and terrifying. You deny the mirror. You say, the world is me. There's no external. Everything that's happening in my head, my voices, they're all external.  There's no distinction. I'm one with the world. Psychosis is the perfect merger and fusion with the world. It's a regression to the premier stage, to the stage where the child still perceived everything as a single mass undifferentiated when the child did not separate and did not have a self-perception, because he didn't have a self. That is psychosis. But when the child studies itself, studies mommy, explores the world, discovers external objects via the mother's gaze, there is a sense of safety. There's a secure base. This gives rise to primary narcissism, the healthy kind, the kind of narcissism that persists into adulthood as the foundation for a sense of self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-regulation, most importantly, a self-concept that is young. That's not what I mean. This introversion is intimately connected with narcissism in Jung's work. Anyway, the mother actively reflects the child to itself. And what does she reflect to the child? Does she reflect a true, fact-based picture of the child? No, because she loves the child. So she reflects to the child and the child an idealized, aggrandized image of the child. But this is very, very crucial. Healthy narcissism, ironically, is founded on the wrong information. It involves grandiosity because at age 18 months or two years, you have to be seriously grandiose to take on the world, to separate from mommy, to explore the next door neighbor, to climb up a tree or to try to climb up a tree, to let go of mommy and move into the world adventurously. You need to have an impaired reality testing, a misperception of a proportion between you and the world. You need to perceive yourself as much bigger, much larger than you are, much more powerful than you are. In short, you need to be idealized. Healthy narcissism, primary narcissism relies on the mother's idealizing, fantastic, aggrandizing gaze.   It's an apotheosis. I have become a God and now, and it's an epiphany. It's religious, it's a religious experience. I've become a God and now I'm ready to let go of mommy for a short period of time, of course, and explore the not mommy, explore everything that is not mommy. And this is what I call the whole of mirrors, whole of mirrors effect. The mother reflects through the child, through her gaze, an image of the child, which is not real, which is grandiose, which is idealized, thereby misleading the child to believe that it has the capacity to take on the world safely. This is what renders her a secure base to borrow a term from attachment theory. This affords the child the grandiose energy to take on the world and to affect the world, to emotionally invest in the world. The mother's proactive, benevolent gaze, idealizing gaze is synonymous with her secure base status. And it gives rise to healthy attachment, healthy narcissism, mental health in general. We need to transition as children through this phase of narcissism, laughable grandiosity, being idealized and loved essentially unconditionally, adulated and admired, albeit passively. We need this. Then reality pushes back and the friction with reality informs us about boundaries and limitations that's a later stage in life. Mother's gaze engenders in the child this capacity to venture forth, separate from her and become an individual, process known as separation, individuation. But the mother gaze is another very important function known as mentalizing. The mother's gaze informs the child of the fact that the mother is external to the child, is not the child. So the child has to develop a theory about who is mommy. If mommy is not me, who is mommy? And this initial proto-theory is the first phase of a process known as mentalizing. Mentalizing is perceiving other people as separate to you, external from you and with their own mind and state of mind. And the mother's gaze triggers mentalizing in the child and once it's triggered it persists. The child uses mentalizing to form theories of mind about other people, especially significant others. And later on a theory of the world known as the internal working world. The mother's gaze is also, as I said, the initial primordial form of object relations. Object relations are the relationships that people have with other people. Other people have received these objects in psychology, which tells you a lot about psychology. Okay, but this is object relations. It is founded on the separateness of other people, on other people being external to you and on secure attachment. Object relations are founded on attachment to other people. If the attachment is insecure, the object relations are disrupted. If the attachment is secure, object relations are healthy. The mother's gaze, the loving mother's gaze, the good enough mother's gaze to use Winnicott's phrase. The mother's gaze teaches the child to relate to other people as if they were secure basers, as if they were copies of mommy. So the child learns, other people are separate to me. Other people are external objects. They're not me. And other people are safe. They're secure basers. They're not going to hurt me. They're not going to hurt me. They're not going to traumatize me. And this all comes through the mother's gaze, although the trauma attendant upon the mother's gaze initially is repressed and forms the foundation of the unconscious.  What about a dead mother, Andre Green, coined this phrase in 1978, to describe mothers who are absent, who are depressive, who are selfish, who instrumentalize the child, or parentify the child, pedestalize the child, idolize the child, use the child to realize their own fantasies and dreams, et cetera. These are dead mothers.  They objectify and instrumentalize the child. They don't see the child, they see what the child can do for them.  So there's no process of gaze with a dead mother.  She has no gaze. The child, when he looks into the eyes of such a mother, physically or metaphorically, when he looks into her gaze, when he tried, when the child tries to latch onto her gaze, to decipher her gaze. In other words, when the child tries to attempt to use the dead mother as a mirror, he cannot see himself because the dead mother doesn't see him.  He cannot also see the mother because these kind of mothers are empty inside. They're black holes. They're voids. They don't exist. There's nothing there. What the child sees in the dead mother's gaze is the infinity of deep space, the devouring of the black hole, the predatory nature of the world, the symbiosis that is undisturbed and undisrupted, the merger and fusion and measurement that never give rise to separation and individuation. It's very sick. This kind of child fails to develop a concept of the external, fails to embark on operative object relations, and never constellates and integrates a self or even an ego. Such a child is also incapable of mentalizing because he doesn't develop his own states of mind. He doesn't perceive himself because there's no self. This kind of child cannot attribute states of minds to other people. This is known as non-mentalizing. I'm going to deal with it in a separate video soon. So there is a disruption in the process of mentalizing. The child remains stuck in primary narcissism, which as time passes becomes pathologized, becomes malignant. It's a kind of narcissism that is known as secondary narcissism, adulthood narcissism. And it's bad because it doesn't allow the narcissist to separate from other people. He doesn't let the narcissist individuate. So what the narcissist, the grown-up narcissist, offers his partners, including his intimate partners, is the whole of mirrors effect, because that's where he's stuck. He's stuck at the whole of mirrors effect. The mother's gaze should have provided him with a whole of mirrors, but he didn't because the mother was dead. So the narcissist tries to recreate this with his partners, especially his intimate partners. And he offers them the whole of mirrors effect. He says to them, you can conceptualize yourself through my gaze. You can see yourself idealized and loved unconditionally and accepted through my eyes.  But I will mirror you the way you've always wanted to be.  So the narcissist false advertises. He says, I can be a good enough mother to you. I can idealize you. I can energize you to explore the world safely. I can be a secure base. I can offer you the whole of mirrors effect. Yes, but that is not true because the narcissist has never experienced the whole of mirrors effect. The narcissist has never separated, never individuated, never saw itself through the mother's gaze or her mirror was never seen. The narcissist cannot offer this to his partner or intimate partner. He cannot mentalize her. He cannot have an object relations with her. He cannot perceive the partner as separate external with our own mind and states of mind and emotions and cognitions and hopes and dreams and wishes. He cannot perceive this. As far as the narcissist is concerned, she is a figment of his imagination, an internal object in his mind. It's a manipulative gain within his mind. It's all self-contained. So when he offers the partner to be a mother, to become a maternal figure to her, he is unable to conceive of her. She doesn't exist and it never progresses beyond grandiose catechesis, emotional investment in the grandiose fantastic idealized image which has nothing to do with the partner. It's not real. These causes in both partners in the narcissist and in his partner causes them to regress, to become infants again because it triggers the original trauma that has been repressed and had become the unconscious. The narcissist taps into his partner's unconscious by regressing her to the phase where she has been seen for the first time. The narcissist takes the partner by the hair, pulls her by the hair and regresses her to age, I don't know, six months, 12 months, 18 months. It's a time when the partner, when the narcissist partner has first been seen by her own mother or caregiver. And so she goes through this phase again but this time there's no protection against the trauma of being seen. In a way the partner exports, outsources her unconscious to the narcissist and he becomes her unconscious. That's why the narcissist is able to activate introjects in the partner, to form coalitions with other introjects, to team up with other introjects because he is granted unmitigated access to the partner's unconscious where the first trauma of having been seen by a mother figure has been repressed. Of course being seen by the narcissist triggers this trauma but while the original mother was helpful, loving, compassionate and so the trauma was easily repressed with the narcissist there's no such thing so the trauma erupts full force. This is the core of trauma bonding.  So the narcissist is also traumatized or re-traumatized by his partner because he renders her, converts her into his original biological real mother, the only mother he is ever known. This is why the narcissist's hope attempt to separate an individual from this new mother, the intimate partner, these attempts are reasonable, the stupid because he doesn't convert her the intimate partner into a good enough mother, he converts her into a dead mother exactly as his mother has been and so the deadness of the intimate partner induced by the narcissist and her constant trauma because she is seen by the narcissist but not loved by the narcissist, these undermine the shared fantasy and the narcissist converts his intimate partner into a persecutory object. This is the core of my work and my work differs from the work of others such as Fonagi and Lacan and Winnicourt, many many others, it differs and I hope I succeeded to explain how it differs. Now I'm going to make a much I believe a longer video on these topics which would be a bit academic but I want to give you some glimpses and some access and some insights into the topics I'm going to discuss in this next video. I'm going to start with empathy. Empathy has been linked to mirror gazing, remember the concept of the mother as the mirror and later on the mirror in Lacan's work and the mirror in my work. So empathy has been linked to mirror gazing, I refer you to work by an article by Giovanni Caputo and I want to read to you the abstract, the the article is titled empathy and mirror gazing, the abstract says a relationship between empathy and self-directed behavior during mirror gazing has been hypothesized by some authors. Nevertheless how these concepts may how these concepts may be connected is still an argument or a debate. Previous research on mirror self-recognition may not completely account for the fascination produced by mirror gazing. In fact gazing at one's own face in the mirror for a few minutes at a low illumination level can produce the perception of bodily dysmorphic visual illusions of strange faces. Strange face illusions may be the projection of the subject's unconscious contents into mirror image of the basis of somatic motor mimicry and contagion. This is by the way the primal trauma that I've been discussing. Motor mimicry and emotional contagion can operate through the feedback produced by the mirror within the observing observed object. The projection of unconscious content, that's my primal trauma, the primal trauma that I mentioned, the projection of unconscious content can characterize empathy according to early ideas of Ein Fühelung, the German term for empathy. Empirical research shows correlations between susceptibility to strange face illusions and both the fantasy and empathy and pathic concern sub-scales of interpersonal reactivity index IRI. And this was published in Psychology and Neurobiology of Empathy edited by Douglas Watt and Panksepp, it was published by Nova Science Publishers in 2016. So Kaputo says actually what I've been saying for over 10 years.  It teaches the child that the mother is external to it and so the world breaks at least in two pieces and then in many more pieces. It becomes a kaleidoscope. It's very traumatic and what Kaputo says is that this trauma can be projected onto the mirror and result in self-perception as ominous, strange, terrifying, a horror figure and so that's why I mentioned it. Hegel had a concept known as negation of the negation and I'm using it in my work. The identity of the self and the determination of an object outside the self both require Hegel's negation of negation. So in my work there is the child as an undifferentiated mass.  It's one thing. It's not even symbiosis.  It's one thing. It's all one thing, oceanic. I mean many eastern traditions would appreciate this state of I mean it's nirvana in a way and so this is the first stage. Then there's negation. The child negates itself. When it sees itself in the mirror or in the mother's mirror, in the mother's gaze, it is traumatized and the child rejects the mother, rejects the gaze, rejects itself. It's a recoil. It's total reaction. It's like PTSD about child. It's terrified and this would be the negation in Hegel's model and then the child negates the negation because it has to survive. It needs to be seen by mommy. It realizes that if it were to reject mommy and reject the gaze and reject the world and everything, then it would die. So it negates the negation. It negates the previous phase and this negation of the negation is what is colloquially called the unconscious and later on object relations. So I'm using Hegel's negation of negation. I'm not going to do it in this video although I will go into it in my next video. I also claim that empathy is a form of healthy narcissism. Empathy is a self-contained internal set of processes triggered by the presence and by the self-reporting of another person. Empathy involves two confabulated self-deceptions. Self-deception number one, that the internal experience of empathy is actually external has to do with that other person. That that other person triggers the empathy. It's not totally internal. It's externally triggered. It's not true. It's a deception. And number two, that by the way this confusion between internal and external objects is formal psychosis actually. And the second self-deception involved in the classical perception of empathy or colloquial perception is that the experience of empathy is altruistic, that it is focused on the other person. But in reality empathy is solipsistic. It revolves exclusively around self-centered emotional regulation and cognitive processing. Empathy is all the hallmarks of healthy narcissism. Now I have two videos dedicated to this and I'll place the links in the description. Those of you who want to delve deeper into the issue of empathy. Now I'm mentioning empathy. I mentioned Hegel's negation of negation and all this because these emerge as the inevitable outcome of the interaction between the child's nascent ego or self or whatever and the mother's gaze. Now you know that I don't believe in a unitary self but it doesn't matter. The assemblage of self states is the same. The mother's gaze is an external boundary condition. It's a determinant. It gives rise to the unconscious. It shapes the self. It creates the child. It does not child without the mother's gaze. So this is why phenomena such as empathy are crucial. If you perceive of empathy as an externalizing emotion like aggression, you know aggression is externalized. Empathy is externalized. If you perceive empathy as externalized. This undermines almost everything we know about developmental psychology. So I need to tackle the issue of empathy and I will do so in this more academic video in the future. I received a fascinating email from William de Graf. William de Graf created an application and app with all the transcripts of all my videos up until the end of April. So there's this app. You can download it on Google Play and there's this website, vaknin-talks.com and William de Graf wrote to me having watched my video on behaviorism. He wrote to me, I read some interesting literature on behaviorism earlier in the week. He referred me to some Twitter link. I also wonder if this behaviorism approach is connected to phonagees, phonagees teleological form of non-mentalizing in his model, which also has interesting links to Kloninger's phylogenetic research on human personality. So I'm going to deal with all these issues in the next video. I'm going to explore automaticity, mentalization, phonagees, non-mentalization and so on and so forth. But I want to make a few initial comments. Automaticity is probably the wrong model for human behavior, but equally rationality is the wrong model for human behavior. Even bounded rationality is an optimistic approach and probably counterfactual. I'm going to deal with all that in my video. Phonagees teleological non-mentalizing feeds not only humans, but for example, animals. So in many ways it is tautological. It's the outcome of observations. So it's like we observe behavior and then we make deductions based on our observations of these behaviors when these behaviors actually are in themselves observations. So it is second order observations definitely leads to infinite regression. It's tautological in the best case and I'm going to analyze the non-mentalizing concept, phonagees, non-mentalizing concept, try to demonstrate how erroneous it is. The existence of a goal because one of phonage's non-mentalization concepts has to do with teleology. So there's an assumption of a goal, goal orientation, but the existence of a goal implies per force the existence of intentionality that's Franz Guentano and vice versa. So you cannot divorce. You cannot divorce behavior from a state of mind. You cannot say well there's mentalizing and then there's non-mentalizing. Non-mentalizing is simply the inability to conceive of the existence of states of minds in other people and goal orientation. So you can't divorce it too and I'm going to go much deeper into this criticism in the next video. What we cannot be sure of, I admit, is the existence of goals and this is why teleology is a bogeyman in science. But we equally cannot doubt the existence of state of mind and I'll try to explain why in that video. I want to finish by quoting extensively from the work of the biggest of them all, Winnicott. I disagree with him. I just explained the whole video to explain where I differ and diverge from Winnicott, but he is still the foundation upon which we all work. So I'm going to read to you what he had to say. In individual emotional development, the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face. What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother's face? I'm suggesting that ordinarily what the baby sees is himself or herself and this is of course where I differ, I beg to differ with Winnicott because I don't think the baby has a conception of himself or herself and therefore the baby cannot see himself or herself in the mother's eyes or mirror. That's completely wrong in my opinion. This is an anachronism. This is projecting backwards. Adults have selves, babies don't. Okay, but I'm going to continue reading. In other words, says Winnicott, the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. All this is too easily taken for granted. I'm asking that this which is naturally done well by mothers who are caring for their babies shall not be taken for granted. I can make my point by going straight over to the case of the baby whose mother reflects her own mood or worse still the rigidity of her own defenses. In such a case, what does the baby see? If the mother's face cannot reflect him, the infant does not look into the mirror anymore. Instead, he binds up looking at the mirror. Of course, nothing can be said, continues Winnicott. Nothing can be said about the single occasions on which a mother could not respond. Many babies however do have to have a long experience of not getting back what they are giving. What he says is that a single event is not going to damage the baby, just to be a long exposure to a dead mother. Okay, Winnicott continues. The babies look and they do not see themselves with the dead mother. There are consequences. The baby gets settled into the idea that when he or she looks, what is seen is the mother's face. The mother's face is not then a mirror. So, perception takes the place of our perception. Perception takes the place of that which might have been the beginning of a significant exchange with the world. A two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the world of seen things. This is the magnificent, magisterial book, mirror role of mother and family in child development article in one of his books. So, this is Winnicott and I will expand on Winnicott and Fonagy and others in a future video. At this stage, I wanted to explore my work and demonstrate to you how it differs from the older perceptions. Babies are born. They're not blank slaves. We know that. By the way, Winnicott was a pediatrician when he has written most of his work. He only much later acquired a degree in psychoanalysis. He's never had a degree in psychology, actually. So, those of you who are very much into credentials and academic degrees forget it. Most of the contributions to psychology were made by people with no degree in psychology. As simple as that. Fact. Check it out. Okay, let's continue. The baby is born. It's not a blank slate. To differentiate itself, to form boundaries, to constolate and integrate at first an ego which guides him with regards to reality and later a self, the baby needs feedback. And only the mother is there to reflect the baby at itself, to let the baby see itself in her gaze which is like a mirror. And this traumatizes the baby because the baby realizes, oh my God, I'm separate from mommy. She can leave me at any minute. I am not the world. It's terrifying. It is this trauma that causes the child to form the unconscious and to bury the trauma there. That's where the trauma is buried. And the trauma is attached to the mother's gaze because the mother's gaze created the trauma. So both the gaze and the trauma are buried in the unconscious. And then the baby continues to do the same with other people. Gradually the unconscious becomes very rich. It includes hundreds of introjects and voices. And so this is what Lacan said, that the unconscious is the other. Others in the mind, they form the unconscious. And so this is how I see things. The baby then learns to bury the trauma but benefit from the gaze. The mother's gaze is idealizing, aggrandizing, fantastic, and fosters in the baby primary narcissism. Grandios and Godlike as it has become, the child then takes on the world. As it takes on the world, reality pushes back and he learns his limitations, his boundaries, and the existence of external objects are the people with whom he later on goes to develop a relationship. Relationships, that's object relations. It's all predicated and dependent crucially on the mother.  And he would grow up to become a relatively functional and balanced adult. She would serve as a secure base. He would, this kind of child would have a secure attachment style. But a dead mother would not provide the mirroring necessary. So the child would never separate, would never become. And so this kind of child cannot mentalize other people. He cannot perceive other people, is external with their own states of mind and cannot develop object relations. So this kind of child becomes a narcissist in attempts, in repetition compulsion, to reenact this failed stage of mirroring separation and individuation with intimate partners as he goes along. Of course all these fails. It fails because the child turned adult has never had experience with a whole of mirrors, with mirroring, with separation, with individuation is unable to reenact something that he has never experienced before. And this is the shared fantasy and its dismal outcomes, both for the narcissist and for his partners or intimate partners. At the beginning of the relationship, the narcissist cannot perceive you as an n other, as the other, as an object external to him and separate from him. As he embeds you in the shared fantasy, the narcissist converts you into an internal object, a process that I nicknamed snapshotting. And then as the relationship progresses, the narcissist reenacts his original conflict with his biological mother or with a maternal figure in his life, then the narcissist begins to perceive you as the other, as an n other. So at the beginning, you are not an other, you are not the other, you are just a figment of the narcissist mind. At the end, during the devaluation and discard phases, you are the other. The mechanism and process of othering, perceiving someone else as not you is the foundation and the backbone of the narcissist's shared fantasy, idealization, devaluation, discard, and replacement or Hooverie. It can all be explained by the fluctuations in the narcissist's ability to perceive you as not him, to perceive you as external to him, to perceive you as an autonomous, agentic, independent, efficacious or self-efficacious entity. The narcissist finds it very difficult to assimilate the knowledge that you are not his extension, you are not an internal object. And when this knowledge penetrates somehow, the narcissist defences, this leads to his devaluation, this leads to devaluation, narcissist then needs to separate from you in order to become an individual and he converts you into a secretary object or an enemy. And today we're going to discuss the other, the concept of the other in psychology and the process, mysterious process and mechanism of othering. And who is better to guide you through this labyrinth than Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Chandler University and a member of the faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada, and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria. Othering, the other, not you. Think of it for a minute, consider this, it's a very bizarre concept. After all, we perceive reality exclusively through our senses, we process reality within mathematical models in our brains, we never get indirect contact with the world out there, with the environment, we reconstruct everything within our minds. It's a little like a movie or like a simulation that takes place within our minds. So in which sense, in which sense do we perceive other people as other, is not us. How can we be sure that other people are not just figments, imaginary, confabulations, hallucinations, illusions and delusions that we came up with. How can we tell that other people really exist independent of us, not connected and not related to our minds? How can we be sure that our minds are not taking over somehow and making us believe erroneously and counterfactually that other people exist? Now this sounds like a very crazy question, but it lies at the heart of convoluted concepts such as intersubjectivity, the agreement that all human beings share about what it is to be human, and also empathy. Empathy assumes similarity between external objects and you, the empathizer. So if we cast in doubt, if we're skeptical about the externality and separateness of other people, if we suspect even for a minute that other people don't really exist, that there are some kinds of projections or conjuring within our minds, then we're in trouble. We're in trouble because the whole social edifice and social contract collapse. We are therefore incentivized as social beings whose survival depends critically on collaboration and cooperation. We are a cooperative species. We are incentivized to believe that other people are external to us, that we are not other people and other people are not us, that there is some kind of boundary where we end and other people begin. But are these just maxims? Are these just hypotheses? Well, this is the philosophical side. It's important to understand where the problem lies. You know, you have emotions, you have effects, you have cognitions, thoughts, you act, you have behaviors, and you have unconscious primary processes. But all of these things are triggered by others. Our emotions are directed at other people. We love someone.  So there's always an external other which trigger, who triggers our emotions. Similarly, our cognitions, our thoughts are more frequently than not triggered by the presence or the actions of other people. When I say other people, they don't have to be present physically. They can be present only in your mind. The real other, the symbolic other, and the imaginary other to use Jacques Lacan's terminology. But it is always the other that engenders, fosters, triggers, and provokes your internal world. The other is the catalyst without which the chemical reactions of your mind would never take place. So your mind is an apparatus. It's a device, apparatus, a device that is responsive to others. Take away all others, and you are very unlikely to experience emotions, cognitions, you're very unlikely to act after a certain period of time, except survival, actions needed for survival, and many of your primary unconscious processes would shut down. The other is indispensable for having an internal world. But we could say the same about the self. The self triggers and actualizes the same potentials in a similar way. The other triggers and actualizes potentials interactively. Let me explain what I just said.  They're all in a potential state. And then the other comes along, someone else, and these potentials translate into reality. The potential emotion of love becomes the real emotion of love in the presence of a loved one. A thought that is potentially there crystallizes and is materialized in the presence of a stimulus emitted by another person. You act on other people, together with other people, in view of other people. So your potential actions become actual actions, actualized in the real world because of others, directed at others. This is known as intentionality. So the other triggers and actualizes your potentials by interacting with you, interactively. But the same goes for the self. The self triggers and actualizes the very same potentials by interacting with these potentials. You could think, you could conceive of the self as the set of all potentials and triggers that actualize these potentials. The self, you could say, provokes itself into being. The self is the engine of its own becoming. So the self and the other have the same epistemological status and the same functions. Functionally and epistemologically, the self and the other have the same standing, and in many ways are indistinguishable. We cannot come up with a rigorous philosophical test to tell apart the self and the other because they produce the same outcomes using the same mechanisms, employing the same processes. So if the self and the other accomplish the same things within your mind, if both of them trigger you identically, then you could say that the self is othered. You could say that you regard your self as an other. You other yourself. You perceive it as not you. Now this is not alienation and this is not estrangement. These are pathological processes where you act or you feel, you emote or you think and you can't identify yourself in these actions or thoughts or emotions. So these are the processes, for example, which lead ultimately to dissociation. We will not discuss them right now. When I say that the self is othered, that it is perceived as an other, I don't mean that you do not identify yourself in yourself. Of course you realize that yourself is, has something to do with you, but internally the self is kind of a coordinator, a host personality if you wish. It monitors, supervises, triggers, deactivates, activates, it's like a switchboard and so the self is distinguishable definitely from all the other constructs of the personality or the person and also distinguishable from the very processes that it creates and that it triggers and provokes and because it is distinguishable from these things it is the primal other, the number one other. The first experience of an other is an experience of the self. Now this sounds very very counter-intuitive and many of you would discard this idea out of him. They would say, how could you be yourself and regard yourself as not yourself? Let's go back to very very early childhood between the ages of zero and 36 months. Or more precisely zero and 18 months when the child does not perceive itself as separate from his mother. It used to be called the symbiotic phase. The child until around age 18 months regards himself and his mother in the world as a single unity, as a unitary universe. The child doesn't say there's me, there's mommy, and there's the world, no. The child is embedded in this oceanic feeling that he and mommy in the world are just one and the same. He doesn't even realize that there's a mommy or there's a world. He is reactive to mommy, he smiles at mommy, but these are cues intended to elicit care. They're not real in the mental or psychological sense. Up to a very advanced age, children, mothers in the universe are one and the same. So when you acquire as a baby, when you acquire a self, when suddenly the self begins to emerge from this in undifferentiated mass, suddenly there's you, there's a self. Initially, you perceive this self as not you.  When your self begins to form, when your self becomes, initially you don't identify that it is you. You regard it as a foreign body, a foreign entity, an invasion of some kind, a break in the world, a schism. Suddenly, there is a fourth entity, not you, not mommy, not the world. You're one. Suddenly, there's a second entity, not a fourth. There's a second entity there, and this second entity is not recognizable by you as you when you're a baby. And so the self is othered. It's the primal other. It is the outcome of othering the mother, the emergence, constellation and integration of the self are the direct outcomes, results of separation, individuation. Initially, you are one with mommy, then you begin to separate from mommy. As you separate from mother, your self emerges. Self is the outcome of this distancing, this distancing and grandiose exploration of the world. And when the self emerges, initially it is perceived as not you and not mommy, of course. You don't know what it is as a baby. It's terrifying. It's a traumatic experience. The self forces you to regard mommy as not you. Mother becomes the other.  You're separating from her. You're individuating.   So the separation individuation is actually three phases. The initial phase is the symbiotic phase where you are one with mommy and the world. It's a single unity. It has no parts. It has no parts. It has no distinctions. It has no boundaries.  It's one thing. Second phase, you become you. The self emerges and it's a great, great trauma. You feel totally alien, alien and estranged and you don't know what is this thing that is emerging. At first, you can't identify yourself in this emerging entity. This alien being, this self. So you other the self. You regard the self as not you in the second phase. In the third phase, you have learned to other by othering the self by regarding the emerging or nascent self as in other as the other. You have acquired the mechanism, the process and the skill of othering. Now you can other mother. The second othering. So the primal othering is the othering of the self regarding the self is not you. The secondary othering is the othering of mother realizing that mother is not you separating from her and becoming an individual. It's easy to prove that the self is other that initially we perceive the self as not us when we're very, very, very young. It's easy to prove this because when we look at pathologies such as for example dissociative identity disorder, when we look at other types of dissociative self states like non-sysistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, when we consider identity diffusion, identity disturbance, all these are forms of othering the self in all these conditions that I've just mentioned. There is no there is no recognition of the self as you. The person with dissociative identity disorder does not have a self it recognizes as herself. The same goes for borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder. There's always the sense that the self is not you and you are not the self. There's always a kind of diffuse disjointed identity or in the case of borderline personality disorder, identity disturbance. These outliers, these pathologies reveal to us the fact that if you remain stuck in an early phase of personal development and growth, if you remain in more and embedded and in mesh in early childhood and never progress and never evolve, never mature, if your separation individuation has failed in all these pathological conditions indeed you do not perceive, these kind of people do not perceive the self as themselves, they perceive the self as other, they other the self. So if you talk to someone with DID or narcissist or borderline, you will discover that they have a self when they think of the self, they don't have a self, but when they think of the concept of the self it is perceived as another and other, the other not they don't identify with it. Now when I say self of course I refer also to an assemblage of self-states like in Philip Bromber's work and in my work and so this assemblage troop of self-states is equivalent to the self and it's also othered. Now remember that the child goes through a unitary phase, oceanic feeling phase, then it others the self, it begins to regard the emerging new nascent self as another as the other and then it others mommy, it begins to regard mother as the other and this allows the child to separate and individuate. The primal othering, the initial, number one first process of othering is othering of the self and as I said it's very traumatic because it involves the breakdown of the unitary world where the infant perceives its separate existence through the mother's gaze. So let me explain, I did it in another video as well. The mother's gaze, the infant's ability to perceive itself through the mother's gaze, this creates the primal othering. When the baby sees itself through the mother's gaze, when the mother frustrates the baby, doesn't cater to all the baby's needs, when the mother rejects the baby by leaving the room, generating enormous abandonment anxiety and separation and security, in the initial phase of childhood until age four years old, there's no object constancy.  The mother triggers the primal othering, the mother conveys to the baby, you are not me, look at you, look at yourself through my gaze, see yourself in my eyes, you're not me, I'm leaving the room, you're not me, I'm frustrating you, you're not me, you're not me, the message constantly is you're not me and then the baby is forced to ask if I'm not mommy, if I'm not mother, who am I? And this question, who am I? Gives rise to the construct of self or self states, doesn't it? Gives rise to the self, who am I? I'm the self, but wait a minute, I've spent 18 months being selfless, without a self. In these 18 months, I, mommy and the world, we were one. Who is this self that mommy imposes on me? Mommy forces me to develop a self. I don't like that, I don't like the self, I'm terrified of being abandoned by my mother, by my mother, I don't have object constancy, I'm a baby, I'm 18 months old, the self is my enemy, the self is the other and it is very threatening and very traumatic and this is primal othering and the self is the primal othered. The primal other is the self and it takes the baby a while, another 18 or even longer months to actually accept the self, realize that he and the self are one. So these are two processes which go in completely opposite directions. The baby used to be one with mother and now he broke up with mother and he made her the other. The baby used to be, was to be broken up with the self, it didn't have a relationship with the self, there was a breakup between the baby and the self initially and then he learned to become one with the self, he learned to other the mother and he learned to become one with the self. So the only way to become one with yourself, with this new entity, the only way is to push mother away and to replace her with the self. It's very similar to the concept of self-object, co-houten so. Okay, this trauma, this perception of a separate existence through the mother's gaze by internalizing these gaze never goes away. This initial breakup with a love object is the template upon which we build all our future relationships and the only repetition compulsion that is common to all humanity, all of humanity. So it's not pathological, it's the norm.  The mother's gaze becomes an internal eye and this internal eye observes the baby, informs the baby that he is not mother, but then informs the baby that the self is the baby and allows the baby to create a new symbiotic phase with the self. Where things go awry in the case of narcissism is that the mother, mother's gaze does not allow the child to separate from them. And when the self emerges or tries to emerge, it fails. There's a failure of the formation of the self or the ego, if you wish.  He cannot become an individual, he cannot separate. But the mechanism and process of othering is at work. So the child invents an imaginary friend and merges with that friend. The narcissist remains in a symbiotic relationship with the mother interject and also with a substitute self that is essentially force. It's a concoction, it's a piece of fiction, it's a narrative and it's grandiose, it's cognitively distorted, but it's still better than nothing. It seems that the need to develop a self or again an assemblage of self-states, the need to develop a self is innate and probably genetic and in this sense, I'm very close to the views of Fairbairn and Guntrim. So we are born probably with the need, with a proto ego, proto self. We are born with a nucleus somehow and then it flowers later on because the mother's gaze pushes the child away. The mother's gaze defines the child as a separate entity and this triggers the ego nucleus and it becomes a self. So forming a self, developing a self is not a choice, it's not a choice, it's an inexorable genetic innate process and when it is suppressed, when it is frustrated, when it is prevented from occurring or unfolding naturally, the result is the false self, a poor counterfactual unrealistic fantasy-based defense, it's a fantasy defense. When the mother does not allow the child to separate, when she does not communicate to the child that he is a separate entity, an external object via her gaze, when she doesn't do that, the innate triggered process of developing a self is stunted and thwarted and to compensate for this lack, for this deficiency because the child wants to develop a self, is compelled to develop a self, it's not up to the child, it's not a choice, he has to. So to compensate for that somehow, because reality in the shape of mother is very frustrating and denying and repressing and oppressive, reality doesn't let him separate so he says the hell with reality, I'm gonna revert to fantasy, I'm gonna build a fantasy world in which I do separate and individuate and I do develop a self, but of course it is just in a fantasy and the self is a fantasy self also known as false self, the narcissist is a child who has not been allowed to other the self because the child has not been encouraged to separate from mother and individuate, the mother did not communicate to the child that she is separate from him via her gaze, she didn't distinguish herself, there was no distinction, no boundary, no differentiation, so the child withdrew internally into a fantasy space, a paracosm and within this paracosm, within this virtual reality, he proceeded with normal evolution, normal growth, he proceeded to separate, individuate, to become, to develop a self, but it's all a fantasy, it's all a dreamscape, it's all, it's not real and that's why in adulthood the narcissist feels compelled, this is unfinished business, the narcissist tries desperately to convert the fantastic space into reality via the shared fantasy, the narcissist says as an adult, the narcissist says let me take this fantasy that I've developed as a child, the fantasy in which I have separate, I have individuate and I have a self, let me take this fantasy and let me superimpose it on reality so that I convert the fantasy into reality and then I can really separate and really individuate and really acquire a self like Pinocchio, but to do this I need a partner, someone who would play mummy, someone who would act as the maternal figure in this fantasy, because how can I separate an individuate if I don't have a mother, I need a mother in this shared fantasy and this mother is my intimate partner, I'm going to convert her into a mother, she is real, my intimate partner is real, at least in my mind she is real, there is an internal object in my mind that is distinct from the mother intro, so I know that she is real, I'm going to convert her into a mother and then she is real and then the fantasy will become real and then I'm going to separate an individuate and become a real boy like Pinocchio, so this is the compassion, there is a compulsion to convert fantasy to reality and to convert the false self to a real self and to complete the separation and individuation from the mother via a new, the gaze of a new mother who would this time allow the narcissist to become a person, to acquire personhood, the trauma of the primal othering, in the case of the narcissist is a trauma of not completing the primal othering, so he needs to complete it, the whole process is by definition traumatic, it has to involve trauma, that's why narcissists engage in narcissistic abuse, they need to create a traumatic environment for themselves and for the mother, the whole environment should be traumatic because healthy, normal, primal othering, the situation where the baby perceives the new emergent self as the other and this is very traumatizing but it's healthy and it's normal because it leads to separation and individuation, the narcissist needs to do the same, he needs to experience this trauma, so he pushes via projective identification, he pushes his partner to traumatize him because there is no emergence of self, there is no constellated integrated self and there is no separation and individuation without trauma, that is also the insight in cult therapy by the way, so at that stage there has been primal othering, the self has been perceived as the other and this was followed by the othering of the mother, separation, individuation and a symbiotic merger and fusion between the child and the self, so the self is no longer perceived as the other, the self is perceived as the child, the child and the self created a new unit, a new unitary universe and it's a very oceanic feeling, it's a very good feeling, introspection and self reference depend on the primal othering, you need to other the self, you need to regard the self as not you, as the other, in order to observe the self, study the self, examine the self, analyze the self, introspect, develop self-awareness, what is self-awareness, you're aware of the self but who is doing the awareness, not the self, not the self, self-awareness is an excellent example of the continued operation of the primal othering, the othering of the self, considering the self as the other, regulation, self-regulation, agency, self-efficacy, they all depend on introspection, on the ability to perceive yourself from the outside, to observe yourself, to analytically examine yourself, study yourself, so health, mental health crucially depends on the othering process during separation, individuation, first othering yourself and then othering mother and becoming yourself, then you're capable of introspection, of self-reference, self-regulation, of agency, self-efficacy, independence, personal autonomy, etc., all the healthy things that we keep preaching you should have or you should develop, othering is crucial for this, now let's go back to narcissism, when the formation of an integrated constellated self is disrupted because of failure in separation and individuation, such a failure can also be abusive, it can also be the outcome of abuse and trauma, because abuse and trauma is disrespect for the child's boundaries, it's breaching the child's boundaries, abuse and trauma are forms of merger, fusion and enmeshment, the abuser and gulfs is victim, consumes, subsumes the victim, it's a unitary space where no separation is allowed, so the formation of the constellated integrated self is a very delicate and fine-tuned manner and absent mother, a dead mother could disrupt it, an abusive mother could disrupt it, the lack of trauma could disrupt it, trauma is critical to othering the self and then othering mother, trauma there's no separation individuation without trauma because it's very traumatic to realize that mother and the world are not you, suddenly you're all alone and much diminished, it's traumatic, but some mothers don't allow the child to be traumatized, they pamper the child, idolize the child, pedestalize the child, cause the child, spoil the child, these are all forms of denial of trauma, avoidance of trauma and so in the absence of trauma there's no separation individuation and the othering of the self leads nowhere because the self cannot emerge and then the child tries to compensate via fantasy defense and invents a false self, okay so when the formation of an integrated constellated self is disrupted, the result is no self, so the two types of people, people with a self or assemblage of self states and people with no self, no self is the coordinating core, I refer you to my work on IPAM, Intra-psychic activation model, so when this happens there is an empty schizoid core where a star should have been, the self, it's exactly like a black hole, a black hole used to be a star or a galaxy which collapsed upon itself, disappeared in a way, so it's the same here the self was not allowed to emerge, to constolate, to integrate and the self imploded under its own gravity if you wish and tuff vanished and what was left behind, a black hole, an empty schizoid core and the empty schizoid core is devoid of any other because the self did not emerge, there was no primal othering, because there was no primal othering, there was no secondary othering of the mother, so this kind of child doesn't know how to other people, he doesn't know how to perceive other people as the other, he has no training or skill or experience in othering people and this leads to an inability to other people, inability to relate to other people as external separate objects, if you have never experienced separation from your mother, how would you experience separation from other people, they're not separate, if you have never experienced yourself as an external object, the other, or your mother as an external object, the other, then you would experience no one in the future as an external object, because you've never had experience in this, there is an incapacity to actualize intentional emotions, affects, cognitions and behaviors, in other words all these emotions, cognitions, they're usually directed at the other, they're dependent on the existence of the other, they're triggered by the other, they're catalyzed by the other, they're provoked by the other, take away all the others and you don't have an internal world, so children who were not allowed to other the self and then they were not allowed to other the mother, these kind of children not only cannot perceive other people as other, as external and separate, they cannot also relate to other people, they cannot have emotions, because emotions are intentional and directional, you love someone, but if you don't recognize that there is someone out there, the other, you cannot love, you cannot love, you cannot even think properly, you cannot act, the narcissist world is depopulated, devoid of others, narcissists unable to recognize people is external, everything is inside his head, it's all a vast wasteland of quiescent deactivated and inert internal objects, kind of a cemetery, effigies and ancient Egyptian monies, that's how the internal world of narcissists looks, so of course in such an environment the level of activity, emotional activity, cognitive activity, affective activity is very reduced, much reduced, that's why I say that narcissists in many respects are zombies and symbols, they're not fully there, not only in the sense that they're not present or they're not alert or they're not open to possibilities and opportunities and other people, no, they're not there inside, not only outside, they are in absence because the level of activity is very close to zero, it's like the absolute zero in outer space where no molecule and no atom move anymore, because there's no energy to move, fantasy is an attempt to compensate for these deficiencies by othering constructs or by othering internal objects, when you cannot other people because you've never had the experience as a child of othering your mother, of separating from her, you cannot other people, you try to other something else, you try to regard for example yourself as the other and this is the false self when you try to perceive internal objects as the other which leads later to devaluation, so there is a desperate attempt to not be alone, this is existential, solipsistic, deep deep space loneliness and the only way to repopulate the devastation and the wasteland is by othering your insight, by othering your introjects, by othering the avatars in your mind, by othering internal objects, by othering pieces of yourself, by othering self-states, by othering something, so the narcissism while incapable of othering anyone in the outside constantly others himself, he others himself not as a unity because the narcissist is highly fragmented and so on, he others elements of himself, he others portions of himself, processes, constructs, he keeps othering them in order to not feel alone and this is the fantasy, when he comes across an intimate partner he immediately converts her to an internal object because he doesn't know how to other external objects but he has a lot of experience in othering internal objects, ironically the narcissist feels alone when he's confronted with a real flesh and blood external person, then he feels totally alone because he cannot perceive that person as separate external and the other, but the minute the narcissist had internalized and introjected that person, the minute there is an internal object in the narcissist mind that represents this external object, the narcissist doesn't feel alone anymore because he can other this internal object, he can regard this internal object as the other, now the narcissist mistakenly perceives internal objects as the other, he would insist that the internal object in his mind is actually separate and external, he would be very insulted if you were to imply that he doesn't see you, that he doesn't really notice you, that he doesn't pay attention, that he is not into you, he would be very insulted and he would deny it vehemently, in his mind he has othered you, he has othered the internal object that represents you, your introject and from that moment on that internal object acts as the other, it triggers the narcissist's emotions and cognitions and effects and behaviors and primary processes, the narcissist is triggered internally rather than like most healthy people externally and this is why I keep saying that narcissist is in effect a variant of psychosis, there is a failure of othering the world, failure at incorporation, narcissist is unable to other the world and then to incorporate this knowledge, instead the narcissist others elements in his mind and then behaves as if these elements in his mind are real and this is of course what we call fantasy defense, that's why the false self is an imaginary friend, now when we come to the phase of devaluation or discard, at that point the narcissist reverts from othering to something called alterity, alterity is othering people by considering them inferior to secretary, evil, somehow deficient, so even devaluation involves othering, it's just a redefinition of the internal object, a recharacterization of the internal object, looking at the internal object differently, this is, I differentiate it from othering, this othering is basically neutral, you just perceive the externality and separateness of another person and you make assumptions, you make assumptions about the other person's mind, this is known as theory of mind and you have an internal working model which coordinates all these insights but alterity is a value judgment, alterity is judgmental, it's harsh, it's sadistic, it's rejecting, it's humiliating, it's shaming, according to Spivak it is a form of othering that involves devaluation so but ironically it is at this stage that the narcissist begins to other you as an external object, in preparation for discarding you the narcissist preserves the integrity and the ideal internal object, because the idealized internal objects idealize the narcissist, the narcissist's co-idealization depends on the preservation of the idealized nature of his internal objects, if the narcissist were to contain bad objects, evil objects and wear the objects he wouldn't be able to idealize himself, the whole point of the exercise of idealizing other people is to idealize himself so that he can fight off the bad object, so he cannot devalue the internal object, what he does instead he suddenly notices you as an external object, he begins to regard you as the other and then he devalues you, so there are two phases in every shared fantasy, first phase involves snapshotting, converting you into an internal object, idealizing the internal object, othering the internal object, regarding the internal object as the other and allowing the internal object which is now the other to trigger emotions and thoughts and so on and so forth in the narcissist's mind, the same way external others do for healthy people, but then comes a point where the narcissist has a compelling need to separate from you and individually because you will have become a total maternal figure, a mother, so then the narcissist has to suddenly wake up and notice that you are an external object because he cannot devalue the internal object, if he were to devalue the internal object he would be devaluing himself, which is an impossibility of course, he has a grandiosity defense, so a grandiosity cognitive distortion, so instead of devaluing the internal object he devalues you as an external object and that means that you suddenly will have become an external object identifiable as such separate from the narcissist and the subject of othering, of course it's great because it allows the narcissist to separate from you and to individuate in his mind, of course he fails and while he fails I refer you to the videos in the shared fantasy playlist. Now othering is not a new concept, it's been it's been studied and examined for at least 150 years. Lawrence Cahoon wrote in 1996 what appears to be cultural units, human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations, they are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition and hierarchization. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or other through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is privileged and favored, the other is devalued in some way. Hegel almost 200 years ago observed that otherness is something that is crucial for the formation of human consciousness. Lacan took on this idea much much later, 150 years later. So the other in the work of Hegel and Hegelians, the other can be associated with the image outside oneself, perceived and identified within the mirror stage in Lacan's work. It's roughly when the baby sees itself in the mirror and gains an idea of itself as discontinuous from money and from the rest of the world. There's a major trauma, seeing yourself in the mirror according to Lacan is a break, a total attack on all the baby's conception of the universe. So, and Lacan went to an extreme. He said that even the unconscious is actually othered. Even the unconscious is the outcome of othering other people. He said that the unconscious is structured like a language and we acquire language from other people. So it is structured by other people. The unconscious, he said, is the discourse of the other. The unconscious is not interior. On the contrary, since speech and language are intersubjective phenomena, the unconscious is trans individual. The unconscious is so to speak outside according to Lacan. The exteriority of the symbolic in relation to men is the very notion of the unconscious explained Lacan inexplicably. All he was trying to say is that in order to form the unconscious, we need to other, we need to perceive that we are not one with everything, but we need to other people. The primal othering is an othering of the self and the secondary othering of the mother, but we learn how to other. And then we acquire language because language comes from outside, from the other, from others. We acquire language and then we use language to construct our unconscious. The unconscious is a language in Lacan's work. So the unconscious comes from the other, not internally, externally. If the unconscious seems interior, internal, this is an effect of the imaginary, which blocks the relationship between the subject and the other, and which inverts the message of the other. Lacan argued that ego formation occurs through mirror stage misrecognition. The child sees itself in the mirror and initially doesn't recognize itself. It's a great metaphor. In my work, the child kind of beholds the emerging self and feels very alien, feels the distinct that he's emerging is not me. He doesn't own it. He doesn't become one with it until he has rejected mother. To become one with the self, you need to separate from mother. You need to reject her. So, Althusser was a post-Marxist or neo-Marxist philosopher and psychologist. Althusser said the same. He applied it to politics and collectives. Anyhow, Lacan said the eye is always in the field of the other. Lacan designated actually two others. There was other with the lower case O, small O, A in French, and other with a capital O. The lower case O, is the mirror stage. It sets up an image of the ego as an ideal eye for the subject. The ideal eye becomes the other within the subject's experience of the eye. It's a component of the self that is internally divided. This is Lacan. My work goes much further. I don't make this distinction. I think initially there is a rejection, a feeling of alienation and estrangement from the totality of the self, not from one element of the self. There's no idealization of the self initially. The self is perceived as threatening because the self pushes the child away from mother. The child perceives the self as an enemy who is separating him from his mother. The child rejects the self, others the self, totality. Now, in Lacan's work, the other with a capital letter represents other people, other subjects who the individual encounters in social life. But it also stands for language, the conventions of social life, law, for example. Because language and the codes of human society free exist any individual human being. These systems are other to the individual. In short, you're born into an existing society, into an existing world, and that society or world, they are other to you. They're not you, by definition. And the fact that subjects themselves internally alienated by rejecting a part of the self or in my work, all the self. So the fact that subjects must employ the other people in order to acquire language at least, to understand the rules of the game. They're forced to interact with other subjects. And this gives rise in Lacan's work to the totality of the human psyche. The term other in his work and in other scholar's work is used in a variety of ways, but it depicts the manner and processes by which perceptions of others are attained. This is what I've been saying before.  We are relational creatures. I strongly and vehemently reject the concept of the individual. We're utterly relational creatures. And so they trigger this. And similarly, the self triggers these internal reactions. Now, child psychologists postulate that the perceptions of the other proceed from processes of contrast, comparison, analogy. The self sets itself apart from mother, father, siblings, and then strangers. We have the work of Klein, the work of Ericsson. They dealt with these issues. But I think that didn't go deep enough. They describe mechanical processes of recognizing I'm not mommy, I'm not father, I'm not my brother, and I'm not my friend or my teacher or so. Then they are the other. No, I think it's much more profound. I think othering is the core of self formation and then psychological activity and operation throughout life. We constantly other internally and externally. And when the othering fails, we have psychopathologies. The etiology of psychopathology is, or etiopatho etiology is othering. Failure in othering. Separation and individuation is a single, very important private case of othering. Emergence of the self is a single private case important of othering. Love is a case of othering. Everything is othering in effect. It's an underlying concept. Consciousness of the self depend upon processes that affect distinct characteristics of others. Okay. In philosophy, we have the likes of Hegel, Husserl, and so on and so forth. In continental philosophy in Europe, there are serious investigations of the question of otherness in conjunction with the tendency of the self to conceive all things after one's own likeness. So we tend to deceive ourselves. We tend to lie ourselves. When we perceive others, we tend to make them so similar to us that sometimes the otherness dissipates. The lines are blurred. This is precisely what the narcissist does. Narcissism is an extreme case of this. The narcissist converts everything to internal objects, which are essentially part of him and serve to idealize him. They are functional. It's a desire of the ego to feel at home externally and internally. That's why the ego mediates reality because he wants to prevent outcomes of punishment, self alienation, disintegration, psychosis and so on. The ego is focused on a comfortable coexistence between the other and the person. I'm not saying the self because the self is one of the others. The other emerged in the context of these philosophies. Some of them were talking about a transfigured or disfigured essence, no longer a reflection of itself, unaware of itself. This kind of other is a product of the self, or at least only knowable first, because of one's awareness of the self. Levinus, for example, according to Levinus, the other is the very condition of one's own existence. The other is not any particular person. It's an entire category that Levinus calls otherness, which makes being and self possible. There is a reversal of the presupposition of people like Husser, phenomenologists, like Husser and others, that the self is the beginning of all philosophical inquiry. In my work, which stands on the shoulders of giants like Levinus and Lacanus, in my work, the beginning of all philosophical inquiry is the otherness, the othering, the othering of the self, the othering of mother. This is where questions emerge. Who am I? What am I doing here? How am I distinct from others? Where are my boundaries? Where do I stop and others stop? If others are so influential in triggering my emotions and cognitions and so on, maybe they are not others. Maybe they are figments of my mind, and this is the narcissistic failure to tell apart the others from internal objects and so on and so forth. But only a philosophical inquiry starts with others, not with the self. The concept that the self requires the other to define itself is nothing new, but many philosophers didn't go the full nine yards. They said, yeah, the self requires others, but it is the self that does the othering, and therefore the self is the be all and end all the beginning, the alpha and the omega. And it was Hegel that introduced first, introduced the idea that the other is a constituent in self-consciousness. He wrote of each consciousness pursues the death of the other. What he meant to say is that in seeing the separateness between you and another person, there's a feeling of alienation. And you try to resolve this by synthesis, by somehow merging or fusing with the other person. There's a famous parable, it's known as the master-slave dialectic. I'm not going to it right now. Sartre was the same in being in nothingness. He describes how the world is changed, altered at the appearance of another person.  The world now appears to orient itself around this other person. Sartre presented it however without any life-threatening need for resolution like Hegel. He said it's just a phenomenon, it's just a feeling, it's not a threat, and you don't need to resolve it by merging with the other somehow to take over the other. Levinas is perhaps the most instrumental philosopher when we deal with the question of the other. Levinas said if it is the other, it's radically other.  To perceive someone as the other, he or she must be radically different to you. He connected it to all kinds of deliberations about God. He's an amazing, amazing thinker, but the other he said is superior or prior to the self, which is also in my work. In my work, the othering mechanism is innate, genetic, born, and precedes itself by many, many months. He said the other is superior to the self, it's prior to the self. The mere presence of the other makes demands before one can respond by helping them, by ignoring them in short, before one has a self. This idea of face-to-face encounter infiltrated thinkers like Derrida. Derrida said that there's impossibility of pure presence of the other. The other could be other when this, when this pure alterity is encountered. So issues of language and representation and so on and so forth. Levinas said that othering, the process of othering precedes the emergence of the self. And Derrida said that the other exists in distinction from, separate from othering it. So the other exists, even if you were not to other it, even if othering is not applied, the other exists there, a priori. And there's a question of language representation and so on and so forth. I recommend, those of you who are interested to delve even deeper, I recommend that you search online for this saying and this said in Levinas' work. Levinas gave the example of insomnia, insomnia and wakefulness. He said that it is an ecstasy or exteriority towards the other that forever remains beyond any attempt at full capture. This otherness is interminable or infinite. Even when we murder another person, the otherness remains. It has not been negated and has not been controlled. This infiniteness of the other allows Levinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science, a secondary to the other. Levinas wrote, the others that obsess me in the other, do not affect me as examples of the same genus, united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature, individuations of the human race or chips of the old block. The others concern me from the first. Here fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others. And that's what I've been saying in my work. Once you have acquired the skill to other by othering yourself and then othering mother, you will be able to other everyone. And once you have othered one person, you have othered everyone. You've othered all people. All you need to do is other one person. So essentially if you've succeeded to other mother by separating from her, you're healthy. You're set for life. You're ready. This is where the failure is that causes extreme pathologies such as narcissism. Okay. Otherness is being studied now in neuroscience and in psychology and so on and so forth. Many scientists are asking whether the brain and the mind can be made to transcend self consciousness and affect to relate differently to desire, interest. In short, many scientists are beginning to consider the option of self othering in effect. They don't call it self othering, but it is self othering in many systems in Eastern philosophy and meditation They are focused. They're centered around self othering. They call it by mistake the death of the ego. Western popularizes with very little profound understanding of Eastern philosophy, call it the death of the ego. It's nothing to do with the death of the ego. It's the othering of the ego. It's not becoming the ego. It's not being the ego. But in my work and to my mind, when you other the ego, when you begin to treat the ego as the other, you're actually regressing to an infantile state, which brings about the oceanic feeling known as nirvana. Nirvana is because you regressed back to the womb. You became an infant, which in Western psychology is a form of pathology. Moreover, if you alienate the ego, if you alienate the self, if you are not you in this sense, if you regard the self as alien to you as the other, then in many respects, you begin to develop narcissism. I think many of these techniques, including mindfulness and so on, are highly narcissistic and induce narcissism. It's temporary narcissism, it's situational narcissism, it's narcissism, all the same. But that's the topic for another video. You've been spared, it's been only an hour and something, and see you next time. You others. Today we are going to discuss homosexuality from a new angle. But before we do so, we need to agree on a common terminology, and then we need to get rid of a few persistent, stubborn myths, perpetuated, propagated, wealthed by self-styled experts online. Start with the terminology. Sex is determined by one's genitalia, reproductive organs, and other secondary sex signs in the body. Sex, therefore, is corporeal, it's bodily. Gender, however, is socially and culturally determined. It's a construct, it's performative, it's acquired mostly via imitation and education and acculturation and socialization. So when we talk about sex, there are males and females when we talk about genders, gender, there is men and women and they are not coterminous. You could have any set of genitalia and be a man or masculine.  So the correlation between your body and your gender, your sex and your gender, is very high because society and culture condition us to associate sexuality and gender role or gender functioning, but it doesn't have to be this way.  It therefore comprises lesbianism. Lesbianism is homosexuality in females.   Now, homosexuality is not the same as homoromanticism. Homoromanticism is the romantic attraction to the same sex. You could be homosexual, sexually attracted to the same sex, but heteroromantically attracted to the opposite sex. This absolutely can and does happen.  This does not imply homosexuality does not imply automatically any specific gender role, nor does it mean that there is also homoromanticism. It's a very fluid area as you can see. Now, to the myths. Myth number one. Refrigerator mothers cause autism. Dead mothers in the metaphorical sense, absent, depressed, selfish, etc. That is nonsense. Autism is a neurological condition. I'm not sure if it's neurodegenerative in any sense or neurodivergent, but it definitely has to do with the neurological system and the brain, especially the brain. So if you want to use value laden terms or judgmental terms, you could say that this is an abnormality of the brain. If not, you can say that the autistic person is not neurotypical. By which another case may be, autism has nothing to do with bed parenting, upbringing, or any of these 1950s nonsense. Similarly, homosexuality has nothing to do with strong mothers and weak, absent fathers. This has been debunked decisively, even in the psychoanalytic literature where these nonsense has started, pernicious nonsense. There's a guy called Issaay, read his work. This is totally debunked. Homosexuality has nothing to do with family background, parental performance, gender roles of the parents, none of this. Homosexuality is biologically determined. It doesn't mean that homosexuality doesn't have a psychological side. Everything has a psychological side. Even diabetes, even cancer, even tuberculosis, even COVID-19, they all have a psychological side because we are composite organisms. We have our biology and we have our psychology, which is the way we perceive some biological processes inside ourselves, the way we introspect. But the cause, the etiology of homosexuality is almost 100% biological. So forget all the nonsense about weak mothers, absent fathers, strong mothers, hateful fathers. I mean forget all these nonsense. This is 100 years old. These are 100 years old myths that have been long thrown into the garbage can of history. Next, there is no such thing, at least we couldn't prove that there is such a thing, as contagion. Homosexuality is not contagious. Transgenderism is not contagious, not socially and not in any other way. The few studies that have kind of peered into this topic, the few studies that try to ascertain the existence or non-existence of contagion found that there's no such thing.  Used to be used to be defined as a mental illness. In the early editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, removed in 1973 and 4 from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, never to make an appearance again.  Autism spectrum disorder is not a mental illness. These are biological, biological kind of causes or biological antecedents, dissidents of a state of mind. We'll come to it a bit later. Freud himself stated, recognition of the organic factor in homosexuality does not relieve us of the obligation of studying the psychic processes connected with its origin. I beg to disagree with Freud and psychoanalysis on this. Now, I've been repeatedly accused of overhyping psychoanalysis, psychodynamic theories and object relations theories, which are, according to self-styled armchair experts, passe. There's no such thing as passe in psychology. Some things are valid, some things are not valid, regardless of when they've been described. Sadism has been described in 1869. It's still very much valid. And it is also not true that I'm exclusively focused on these schools of thought in psychology. You can find on my channel videos about internal family system, social learning, neuroscience and the latest cutting edge, the bleeding edge. So in this particular case of homosexuality, I am completely at odds with all the psychoanalytic literature bar none. I think they got it wrong. I think they're prejudiced. I think they were under the influence, not of alcohol maybe, but for example social mores and conventions. I think they didn't do their homework. All their observations are speculations. They're not based on any studies. They're not based on any database of objective information. And so psychoanalysis is a really, really bad source for understanding homosexuality. It's a theology and its development. And I'm most definitely not going to refer to any writing of Freud's or others on psychoanalysis well into the 1970s and 1980s casting homosexuality as a deviance or a perversion or what have you. Now, we all start life as pansexual.  We are undifferentiated.  We could become heterosexual. We could become homosexual. No one knows well into the third year of life. We are pansexual.   We create a single nucleus, a single core, which is at the same time feminine and masculine sexually, but also erotically, which is the psychological dimension of sexual attraction. And then what happens? We differentiate.  They prevail. They're manifested. And the rest remain repressed, latent. So we all start off as homosexual and heterosexual. And then by age three or four, we become predominantly heterosexual or predominantly homosexual. And the other propensity, the other half, the other potential, the other possibility is repressed, becomes latent. So when you ask, is he a latent homosexual? Of course he is. Everyone is. Is he a latent heterosexual? Of course he is. Everyone is. And then that includes gays. So everyone is everything at the same time. It's just that one mode is dominant and the other is recessive. One mode is occult, hidden. And one mode prevails and is manifested. And this is not a nosological effect. This is not only about classification or taxonomy. This is real. I read to you something from Freud, which I do agree with. I told you that I mostly disagree with psychoanalysis when it comes to homosexuality. But Freud has written something very advanced from the age in his unfortunately named essay, The Sexual Aberrations. Freud wrote that many homosexuals find homosexuality to be natural to them, while other homosexuals rebel against it and consider it pathological. Homosexuality may persist throughout life. It may go into temporary remission, be covert or overt. It may be a detour in the path of normal development. It may appear late in life after a long period of apparently heterosexual activity. And there may be oscillations between its overtness and covertness. Freud also mentioned that a distressing or traumatic experience may lead one, especially women, into homosexual activity. He noted that many homosexuals assert that they could never remember any attachment to the opposite sex from their earliest years. But Freud mentioned that perhaps these individuals had only repressed their positive heterosexual feelings, that is, Freud's prejudice in the turn of a century in Vienna.  So Freud covered the entire spectrum of the manifestations of the battle between homosexuality and heterosexuality in every human being. In all of us, male or female, these orientations duke it out until one of them takes over and the other one is put to sleep. This is known as latency.  Apropos my previous much contested video. Okay, just kidding. Next. In my new work, I am putting an emphasis on the concept of othering, concept which was central to Lacan's work. Remember, one of my previous videos, you can find links in the description to my previous videos about othering. In one of my previous videos, I made clear that the other, the presence of the other, another person, object, it's known as object in psychology, which tells you a lot about psychology. Anyhow, the presence of the other triggers you and then actualizes your potentials interactively. You see, you have a potential to emote. You have a potential to feel an emotion. You have a potential to think something, cognitions. You have a potential to express your emotions in a highly specific way, effects. You have a potential to behave in a variety of ways, behaviors. Even your unconscious primary processes are triggered somehow. So, when you're confronted with another human being, with another person, when another person enters your territory, your turf, your ambit, your remit, when you're in the presence of someone else, this triggers you. It triggers you to actualize some of your potentials, triggers you to actualize specific potential emotions. It triggers you to experience them, then to express them effectively, to think in a highly specific manner, which is responsive to the presence of the other, to behave in ways which are reactive to the other's behaviors, etc., etc. So, you could conceive of other people as catalysts. They catalyze in you reactions. They generate them in you. Actually, Lacan went as far as saying that the unconscious is an internalization of other people. Other people are your unconscious and in object relations theory, everything is relational. Definitely, some of the mental health disorders defined in the ICD and the DSM are relational. Psychopathy, for example, antisocial personality disorder, but its very name antisocial demonstrates that it is a relational, socially determined behavior. So other people are critical. They control your internal space. They make it happen in many ways. Now, when this triggering by other people becomes overwhelming, we get autism. Autism is the avoidance of others and the avoidance of the process of other ring. Other ring is the recognition of the existence of other people as external and separate entities, autonomous, agentic, self-efficacious, independent. This is other ring. The autistic person is incapable of other ring because he or she is overwhelmed with stimuli coming from other people. They avoid autistic people, avoid other ring. Same, by the way, applies to borderline personality disorder people. Okay, but today's focus is homosexuality.  And as such, it has a lot to do with what is known as sexual identity. Sexual identity emerges in early childhood and it undergoes two processes. Process number one is integration. Process number two is differentiation, not necessarily in this order.  In short, to develop an integrated and differentiated sexual identity, you need to be exposed to objects. You need to be exposed to other people.  Sexual identity is a complex construct, is a hyper construct. It includes emotions, cognitions, behaviors, and so on and so forth. So you need other people to trigger this potential in you. Freud went as, Freud and others, many others, went as far, the psychoanalytic school and the object relation school, went as far as saying that other people determine your sexual identity out of the field of all potential sexual identities.  So if you're exposed to one group of people, you're likely to develop sexual identity A. If you're exposed to another setup, another combination, another dynamic between people, you're likely to develop sexual identity B. So they went, they took it to extremes. I disagree. I think sexual identity is a potential, of course, because you remember, in early childhood, we are all pansexual. In early childhood, we possess all possible sexual identities as potentials. And yes, other people, the presence of other people, the behaviors of other people, the emotions of other people, interactions with other people, especially important other people like mother and father and role models and teachers and peers, they to some extent determine your sexual identity, but not which sexual identity rather than how sexual identity. In other words, the presence of other people in your life, something known as object choice.  That is biologically determined. But how would you act as homosexual? How would you act as heterosexual? Social scripts in some societies and cultures, homosexuality is frowned upon or even criminalized. So obviously, the presence of other people has a massive impact on the latency of homosexuality, the expression of homosexuality, or the expression of heterosexuality. So I agree that sexual identity, the processes of selection of sexual identity out of the sea, the sea of possible potentials, the process of integrating various elements into a single heterosexual identity or homosexual identity, and then the process of differentiating, choosing that identity and becoming that identity. So I agree that all these processes are largely triggered from the outside by other people. The process of othering is at work here as well. It is by othering or through othering or via othering that we become the sexual beings that we are. Similar to other fields of life, how we emote, how we think cognition, cognitive functioning, all these are determined by outsiders, by the outside, by other people. This sexual identity is not an exception. It is the outcome of othering. If there is a problem with othering, then there would be a problem in a monopoly of functionalities. There would be a problem in emoting, there would be a problem with empathy, there would be a problem with cognition, and there would be, with attention, and there would be a problem with sexual identity. Othering is the defining crucial process for the emergence of a self, maybe not a self, maybe an assemblage of self-states, the model doesn't matter. For the emergence of you, for you to become, you need to interact with other people. In the absence of other people, you never become, you're never finalized, you are work in progress.  They do not determine whether you'll be homosexual. That is determined by your biology. That is, by the way, proven absolutely beyond any doubt. Forget all the rest of the nonsense. Homosexuality is biological. So that is determined by your biology, but what kind of homosexual you're going to be? How are you going to function as a homosexual?  So, your homosexuality is a biological template, but the way it manifests and is expressed is determined by the environment, the human environment, similar to genetics. Genes are templates and they are expressed by being exposed to the environment. This is the science of epigenetics. Okay, what happens when there is a disruption or failure in the formation of sexual identity? When there is what you could call sexual identity diffusion or sexual identity disturbance? What are these things, first of all? They're forms of narcissistic, othering failures. When the child is not allowed to other, when the child is not allowed to interact with other people, when the child, for example, is not allowed to separate from mother and become an individual, separation, individuation, the process of othering is disrupted. The child never transitions from narcissistic investment in the self, also known as narcissistic libido. The child never emerges from narcissistic object choice in the sexual sense to other object choice, to object libido. So, if the child is not allowed to practice othering, if the child is not allowed to regard other people as external and separate and potentially threatening, by the way, it's a very traumatic experience. If the child is not allowed to go through this, he's not encouraged by a mother who is a safe base, good enough mother and later on in life father. If they discourage the child from taking on the world, exploring it, confronting reality, however bruising and painful it may be, then the child fails to develop othering skills and capacities. He is incapable to other people. He's incapable of regarding other people as other people. He converts them into internal objects as a defensive mechanism. I go into that in my shared fantasy videos. Have a look at the shared fantasy playlist.  So, this kind of child will fail to develop an integrated and differentiated sexual identity. He will develop a kaleidoscope of sexual identities and will keep oscillating between them, rotating, experimenting, but never really settling into a single or inclusive, mutually exclusive sexual identity.  And in this case, there's no integrated or differentiated sexual identity. This is a point where I strongly differ from classic psychoanalytic theories. Frommer, for example, suggested that object choice, the object we choose to have sex with, the other person, is not about who we love, but about how we love the object. So he said narcissistic object choice is not about who we love ourselves, but about how we love. I completely disagree. It is about both. It's about both who we love and how we love. The narcissist is incapable of loving another person. He is incapable of having object relations because he's incapable of othering the object. He cannot perceive an external object as either external or separate. He cannot other the object, therefore, can definitely never have an object choice which is external to himself. The narcissist chooses himself as the exclusive object choice. And this, of course, is a major determinant of narcissistic object libido.  Similarly, I disagree with Freud, 1905, when he wrote, it seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance, the independent of its subject. Sorry, allow me to repeat. Freud wrote, it seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object, nor is its origin likely to be due to the object's attraction. Not true. I disagree. The sexual instinct is shaped into a sexual orientation via object exposure and object choice, a process of othering. It is totally relational. It's raw material. So in this sense, I disagree that there is some sexual instinct which is well defined and clear and so on, but it is independent of any object out there. It's totally self-contained. No, I don't think so. Even when the child, the infant, is its own sexual object, there is a process of othering. The process of othering in very, very early childhood leads to the formation of the self. The self is perceived as the other. The early child in a symbiotic bond with his mother. When the self emerges, the child perceives the self as a third party, not me, not mommy. Who is this thing? What is this thing? The child others the self. At the very beginning, the child has a traumatic relationship with the nascent self because he doesn't perceive the self as him, his self. He doesn't understand or realize that the self that is emerging is himself. So even when the child is sexually affected, emotionally and sexually invested in himself as the sole sexual object, there is still a process of othering, even I would say alienation and estrangement to the initial face. Homosexuality is about object choice. It's a failure of othering. It is not only a narcissistically bitinal investment. One could even argue that it is not at all a narcissistically bitinal investment. It's a failure to other, other people. When the child fails to perceive other people as others, as external, as separate, as unique, as distinguishable, as out there, the child then reverts to himself. The child says, there are no others. Everyone is just clones, a clone of me. There are eight billion clones of me or four billion clones of me. So from that moment on, the homosexual relation, homosexuality, the investment, the catechism, it's all with one's self via the mediation of someone who looks like you. So it is true that there is narcissistic bitinal investment, but that's not the core problem because all humanity, all human beings go through a narcissistically bitinal investment phase. Not everyone is homosexual. Homosexuality is not only a problem of narcissistically bitinal investment. It's a failure of othering.   Who are you?  And you can't other people. You can't perceive them as others. And so you would be having sex with yourself via the agency of another body. The object in homosexuality is not loved only on account of its similarity to what the subject is, once was, or hopes sometime to become. It's not only the similarity that's the problem here. It's not that the homosexual says, oh great, here's an external separate object that looks like me. I would like to have sex with him or with her. It's not the case here.  There is a process of identification, internalization, and incorporation of the sexual object. Now, this is not the same as narcissistic, libidinal catechesis or narcissistic, libidinal investment. No, it's not the same. In narcissistic, libidinal catechesis or narcissistic, libidinal investment, the child is erotically and sexually attracted to his self, to himself. He doesn't make a distinction.    So it's not that there is a confusion here, which creates narcissistically libidinal catechesis. I'm in love with myself. I'm sexually attracted to myself. No, it's not the case here. It's not really about similarity too.  He also cannot perceive the sex object as other, as someone else. It's kind of a twilight zone. Here's someone that looks exactly like me, reminds me of myself in some ways, but I know he's not me, but I also can perceive him or her as external to me, as separate from me. It's a kind of merger and fusion, automatic, instant sexual merger and fusion. Like heterosexuality, homosexuality is unaclytic. It's dependent on an external object to provide what the subject cannot himself be. It's only that in homosexuality, the external object is not perceived as external. It's perceived as an extension, as an instrument, as an internal object. It's in this sense it is narcissistic, in this limited sense of inability to other, the failure of othering homosexuality is narcissistic, but it's not libidinally narcissistic. It's not the misperception of the other, of the sex partner, of the sex object as myself. There's no such mistake here. It is unaclytic, homosexuality is unaclytic. It's like looking for someone who can make me happy, looking for someone who can please me sexually, looking for someone who can give me something I don't have.  There is a realization of dependency upon an agent, however not othered, however not external and not separate. And so there is a dependence on the object for providing what the subject cannot provide. In the case of heterosexuality, the object, the sex object provides otherness. One of the main reasons for sexual arousal is the otherness of the partner. When you perceive the partner, the sexual partner, as not you, it's very sexually arousing. Otherness, otherness is a critical stimulant, a aphrodisiac, if you wish, in proper, healthy sexual relations. So in the case of heterosexuality, the external separate sexual object provides otherness, which of course you can never provide. You cannot be other, you cannot be other. Someone else needs to be other to you. In the case of homosexuality, the external object is not perceived as external. The separate object is not perceived as separate, but it is perceived as sexual. So it provides an integrated and differentiated sexual identity. The homosexuality is an othering failure. Consequently, homosexuals fail to generate an integrated and differentiated sexual identity which is triggered by other people.   It's as if in homosexuality you need two.   It does not depend at all on the presence of another person, although it is activated by the presence of another person. In a homosexual, the very existence of a sexual identity is engendered, created by the presence of another person and activated by the presence of another person. You could say simply that in homosexuality, the sexual identity is dormant, latent, which would explain perhaps why homosexuals have been found in studies to be a lot more promiscuous and a lot more sexually active than heterosexual.  It's the only way they could feel alive if you want sexually. The other person is not othered. The homosexual cannot perceive the sexual partner as separate or distinct or unique.  It would also explain why homosexuality is identity politics while heterosexuality is not.  Many homosexuals self-define via their homosexuality, and it has nothing to do with being oppressed or because this happens in Scandinavia and the East Coast in the United States, or California, where there's no longer oppression of homosexuals, mostly. So it's not a reacti