shared fantasy as therapy: you need to regress in order to heal
victimology, babies, and gratuitous hamster pics
the parts that are formatted weirdly (poem-like) are adaptations of V. (Sam Vaknin) youtube videos and are meant to be informational. i did it like that because i wanted to understand the process, plus, i can’t help it, i gotta line break, y’know? i also don’t know what i’m doing, i took only one poetry class in my life because Columbia puts each genre in its own black box.
if you are scared of poetry like I am until I’m faced with it, then i’m like, why don’t i do this all the time, please skip to the heading, phantastic daddy.
You’d think I’d outgrown this by now. It’s been ten years since the last one. and my whole life since the OG, my father, who, incidentally, emailed me out of the blue with the title something like HAN KANG 2024 NOBEL PRIZE WINNER FOR LITERATURE.
He had always said I must be the first Korean to win the Nobel Prize.
I scoffed at him, dismissed his expectations as the delusional ones born out of war-torn Korea, when eldest sons were gods and there wasn’t enough rice to eat, so the eldest sons got the most, which, confusingly combined with heinous physical and verbal violence, created, perhaps, a generation of troubled narcissistic and borderline men. Korean Cluster Bs 🥮🥮🇰🇷
dual mother-ship
you feel like a baby again
you feel like you are being loved by a mother
the way you should have been, unconditionally
perfect amazing entity fascinating
intoxicating, addictive
you are given the chance to love yourself
finally like a mother you are given
the chance to Mother yourself
You’re re-parenting
through the narcissist’s gaze so you depend on the narcissist you
can't do this alone you look into the narcissist’s eyes when he's
idealizing you then you see your reflection sometimes physical reflection
in the eyes and that's it, you forget everything else you can withstand any abuse
Oblivion. That’s what Kelly said, questioningly of course, like a good therapist, when I wondered what could be my unconscious wish that led me to stay in a relationship with N, who was violent.
Sam Vaknin’s voice soothes me at night, he’s all-knowing, consumes me, deletes me, like he says narcissists do.
Last post I said I was studying victim-hood.
victimology
Victimhood is actually an ‘ology.
but first, let’s tell a story: how Cluster B comes to be….you can skip past the stuff that
“to become something, you have to become nothing.”
once upon a time,
you were a baby, a “thing-in-itself” (Kant, “noumenal” or not phenomenal)
an undifferentiated unitary mass. mother is you,
you are mother, there’s no border between you and the world.
when mother leaves, mother is dead
when she comes back she’s alive again
you’re alive again.
(like with peekaboo, no object constancy)
Then one day, around 18 months,
you realize the mother is something other
than you because she’s gazing at you looking at you
there’s a break,
a schism
this is upsetting you are not in control,
mother is out of the baby’s locus of control
baby must deny its nothingness
this is life-threatening
you are not the mother
the mother has abandoned the child
you come upon yourself in the world
as an absence in Mother when she gazes at you, you
return to yourself
you achieve “object constancy.” you trust she’ll return, like the moon and the tides.
by using the word,“I”
the child becomes an object
to others and unto itself.
Language begins around three years old.
The child becomes part of the world of phenomena
no longer noumena
The child has formed a dyad
with the first other the mother
no longer an undifferentiated unitary mass
the baby still idealizes the mother because the mother idealizes the child.
the baby assumes it’s perfect
because the mother loves it.
What if the baby wasn’t perfect?
Would mother still love the baby?
The mother splits into good and bad mother.
The child tests mother
The child tries to be imperfect—to be a “bad object.”
If mother still loves, she is a “good enough” mother
a “secure base”
and the baby identifies with the good-mother and incorporates her as an “introject”
the child, unconditionally loved, introjects itself as a “good object.”
They achieved “object constancy”
with themselves.
A feeling of continuity across time.
This becomes its dominant feeling
and the child contains within them the concept of themselves as good.
Now they can separate from mother and go out into the world.
The world provides more opportunities for “splitting,” where the child experiments with separating and individuating. As they relate to more objects and add to their sense of self as stable, they integrate or constellate.
BUT
if mother does not unconditionally love—absent, uncaring, threatening, instrumentalizing or parentifying—even overprotects, idolizes or pedestalizes the child
(these are types of abuse) then
there is no other, no separation. the baby is an extension of mother
there is no core identity
the baby is stuck in nothingness: half-potential, half-fantasy—
This is lonely and painful.
The child dissociates
Out of necessity. The mother = survival
the child must see the mother as “good object”
The child sees themselves as a “bad object,”
the cause of mother’s negative affects.
To combat this,
the child develops a “false self.”
The best child, the most charming, cute, and intelligent.
The child develops, instead of a true self
a performance of one.
Although there is no single “true self,” people who internalize a “good object” have a sense of contiguity across time, which they get from their episodic memories. They hold values and beliefs, which the ability to imagine a future self based on their past.
The child with the False Self has never separated, never individuated
so they are not able to join in with the world.
The world is thus never external
the child does not develop object relations
the child deals with only internal
objects, other people are avatars actors
in the play that the child directs. The child seeks
the figure of a mother
to reenact the site of the original trauma.
The child sets up situations to separate and individuate from surrogate mothers.
The problem is, they can never separate from Others,
because the child only deals with internal objects.
They internalize others through a process of idealization,
of the image they’ve created of the other.
This is probably confusing by now, but this buzzy word might help: this process is called “snapshotting.”
Then they carry around snapshots of people wherever they go, till the end of time.
Static images are controllable, they do not disobey, they are lovable and safe.
phantastic daddy
In Kleinian theory unconscious phantasies . . . are the mental representation of those somatic events in the body that comprise the instincts, and are physical sensations interpreted as relationships with objects that cause those sensations. Phantasy is the mental expression of both libidinal and aggressive impulses and also of defence mechanisms against those impulses.
After weeks of watching Sam Vaknin, I noticed nuances of his laugh, gestures, self-aggrandizement (expressed as self-deprecation) I felt, with dread, the ghost of my father.
My new guide and soothsayer is a member in a club; a strange one where the members don’t know each other and constitutionally don’t realize they are members. They believe they’re in another club: elite-level members aligned with god, or Batman.
They’re special, so they deserve a constant stream of narcissistic supply (attention), and they’re justified in getting it by any means.
None of this is articulated; they just end up in control, one way or another, and it seems like the natural order of things.
My father was a preacher. If he didn’t become one after high school, if he didn’t live in war-torn Southern Korea (more country than, say, Seoul, where my mother came from), then he’d have gone to university.
He went back to school while I was in high school. Has to be the best, so it had to be Yale. Then Cambridge. When I went back to college at 26, he started talking to me again, now I was going to follow in his footsteps. Only the best, so like him I built up that student debt, to be somebody, a “first class citizen,” a phrase of his I chortled at, thinking he’s the manic Korean Father, forget about it, but of course you don’t forget these things, because of his unmerciful gaze.
the child tool
Yeah, so back to victimology.
Vaknin speaks highly of the ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) as a diagnostic tool for predicting impacts later in life, but he emphasizes that ACES’ concept of abuse is limited.
Abuse is anything that instrumentalizes the child. That includes idolizing, pampering, using the child to fulfill your dreams, demanding the child perform according to parental expectations, parentifying/not allowing the child to be a child, and not allowing the child to separate/individuate, that is, not allowing the child to become their own person, instead, seeing the child as an extension of themselves.
These stipulations shocked me, not only because I grew up in a Korean household wherein love is beating the shit out of your kids—I know, I know, Korea’s different now—but because of the still-collectivist Korean mindset that doesn’t prioritize privacy, or more broadly, individuality, although that too is changing. My mom never knocked on our door except to bang it when she was mad and about to knock it down. I kept the habit of leaving my door open even as a 30-year-old in my apartment in Brooklyn, where I felt rude in shutting out the constant stream of people, “guests” I thought of them, who came over to hang out. Sure, I demanded they wear slippers or smoke outside the window, I wasn’t a total pushover, but I had never thought about boundaries as a thing until, ironically, my Korean roommate asked why I didn’t close my door, or even lock it when I was gone.
“It’s not about people take things..it show you too open,” low self-esteem,” he said.…”maybe show you lack of pride,” he said.
“Also, kind of awkward, when you go around with no clothes.”
I had the habit of wearing no clothes and he’d come out of his room and yell and go back into his room. I’d laugh.
Déjà vu to the time on stage when I realized people saw me from their eyes, my brain-in-a-vat state where I forgot what people saw was a mostly nude human.
Infant as ideal victim
Without memories and without the emotions attendant on memories, you cannot form an identity. Instead you alternate between self-states based on triggers in the environment, like a “kaleidoscope gone bad here,” says Sam Vaknin.
There’s no out there or in here. No internal and no external.
The baby’s natural state is narcissistic, it’s a “hall of mirrors,” where the world is simply a reflection of self. People are not other.
So we have infantilism, in the case of the narcissist.
They idealize you, the mother.
Their child-likeness baits you, you think you must save this infant, vulnerable to a cruel world.
He cries the second time we hang out. He proposes marriage.
He’s 25, I’m 44.
perfect victim
I have this tendency to idealize.
i couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that Kelly told me that time, that I was “the perfect vessel.”
“Do you think that’s a good thing,” my therapist said, in 2017.
Yes, why not? I liked being perfect at something.
a real victim—ictims have grievances where people have been mistreated
but victimhood shouldn’t become an identity
with the narcissist, victimhood is an identity
They describe their life as having been abducted by abusers. They say that they have been mistreated or maltreated, that they have been discriminated against, victims of injustice and so on and so forth.
There’s no core, no contiguous memory. A narcissist is a shimmering slight of hand, a set of impressions put together.
When they complain about being victimized, they complain about what they used to have. They complain about externalities, not anything internal.
A real victim’s grievances have to do with essence, with psychology.
The narcissist is public-facing, outward.
A real victim will complain about hurt, negative affects, shattered inner peace, an absent sense of safety in a world that looks suddenly hostile or random, a loss of personal identity. As if the victim’s identity was hijacked….this sacred ground of being who you are.
Simon said 😉”You hijacked my life,” when we broke up.
Hm.
V. mentions Roy Baumeister, who said, “No victim is innocent.”
Many victims behave in ways and make choices that facilitate the crime, bring on the abuse.
Now that does not detract an inch from the culpability of the abuser and the criminal. They should be punished as severely as the law allows.
But it would be counterproductive for the victim to ignore her own misbehavior, her own contributions, her own bad choices, her own wrong decisions in the process.
Thank you. I had been thinking about that, but didn’t know how to go about it. That one therapist who made me question whether I liked being a vessel or not, would have known how, but he left the clinic and I am loathe to find anyone else.
One of my bad choices was to assume the status quo had the ‘in’ on what ought to be thought, at least when it came to victimhood. And privately keep my suspicion that there was something in me that attracted “perpetrators,” in a quagmire of half-formed questions rather than assertive analysis.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not entirely a drama queen. The sweet and good ones, the non-perps, were the majority.
…growing up, personal development and growth depend crucially on learning. And there's no learning by denying responsibility. There's no learning by not owning up to your wrong choices, bad decisions, stupidity, misbehavior. You need to face your contribution to what had happened to you
And it pissed me off that I hear this only this year: Dr. Gabor Mate said that people tend to date people with the same level of trauma.
If I knew that before, I would have read Freud, Melanie Klein, all the greats, a long time ago. Although V. says psychology is better represented by literature (Dosteovsky writes the most accurate portraits of narcissists) and that psychology is a pseudoscience. Because he has a PhD in physics, and in relation, psychology is still in the stone ages.
In our so-called age of narcissism, the appellation is dead from overuse. This post was really hard to write.
But I’ve noticed that people tend to date people who are like them. Like Kelly with her infamous blue “killer eyes” (said in a positive way by Ethan)—I called them Disney eyes—was into the blue eyes of the person she was dating, although they were a different shade of blue).
I said that’s weird, don’t you feel like, incestuous?
Then I realized this was strange of me, because Korea is a racially homogenous country, and “everyone looks the same.” More or less.
Just kidding.
That’s to say, I used to look for difference. I like to be curious. Perhaps I used to not like myself, also.
“Familiarity breeds contempt,” is a saying I learned during high school, at a time when my family was falling apart. I take proverbs very literally, which is “wrong,” as one psychiatrist told me when I gave her my answer to, “What does ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ mean to you?”
And maybe I started to come around to myself at 36 I finally dated a native Korean, that 21-year-old roommate ‘fresh off the boat,’ who had informed me that I should close my door because people with pride (I think he meant respect, but pride is a word that Koreans know more?) had boundaries.
But that’s another story. Let’s finish this one first.
to be continued….let’s look at these guys:
P.S. as you can tell, I might post every two weeks instead of one. Because I’m working on finding a job and cleaning my room ❤️🩹💞