today we are going to discuss the black hole at the core of the narcissist and the borderline where an identity should have been where a person should have been there is a void there is an emptiness I've dealt with it with this issue in other videos please go to the description there are links and you can watch these videos but today a special twist to today I'll be asking the question is this black hole at the core of the narcissist at the very being and essence of the borderline is this black hole actually a sign
of autism autism spectrum disorder but before we go there I would like to comment on the connection between memory and identity it is well established it's actually part of the diagnostic criteria uh that dissociation is an integral part of borderline personality organization in other words both the narcissist and the borderline are dissociative they have memory gaps they forget things and then they cope with this dissociation they cope with these gaps in memory in different ways I will not go into it right now a common question that I'm getting is if the narcissist is dissoci itive
if he has memory gaps how does he succeed to function in society how does he be become a chief executive officer a top level politician a scientist a judge how do narcissist function in the absence of a working memory the question is the outcome of confusion between several types of memory we distinguish between episodic memory memory also known as autobiographical memory procedural memory which is unconscious when you ride a bike or when you drive a car you're using procedural memory when you recall events from your life you're using episodic memory and then there is semantic
memory semantic memory is the memory of facts of skills so you could have excellent semantic memory you could perform well you could do your job you could remember things excellent semantic memory and at the same time severe disturbances in episodic memory autobiographical memory is disrupted there's no continuity in memory and consequently there's no identity again Watch the video no identity without memory Link in the description so one could have excellent semantic memory excellent procedural memory but no or little or disrupted autobiographical memory episodic memory this is very common in certain types of Dementia in coov
syndrome and other mental health issues this is what happen what's happening with analysis and the Border line they have severe perturbances severe diffusion severe disturbances of episodic memory their autobiography is discontinuous disjointed and disrupted and so this leads to extreme problems in forming an identity what is also known as a self or an ego in psychoanalytic theory these do not coales do not constellate do not become integrated in the narcissistic and borderline personality uh disorders this is the black hole we are talking about its Inception is a lack of operating episodic continuous memory its continuation
is a problem in the formation of identity and then its manifestation is in specific behaviors and traits and we're going to discuss all this in today's video and Link it to autism spectrum disorders now if those of you who remember what I've just said May proceed you have good semantic memory bad memories no one likes bad memories but bad memories are the tuition fee that we pay in order to learn from our mistakes and to grow narcissist and borderlines are dissociative they have vast memory gaps and are therefore incapable of growth and learning and this
is the first Affinity with autism now stay tuned and let's review the history of the concept of black hole in the literature I have dedicated a few videos on this channel to The Emptiness the void at the very core of the narcissist in the borderline this void has been described by multiple Scholars most eminently and notably kber but also Seinfeld schizoid empty cor Etc what is this emptiness I recommend that you watch the videos that I've already made but one metaphor that is commonly used is that of a black hole this Emptiness is not passive
it's active it consumes everything and everyone around the narcissist and the borderline it has a life of its own as if it has a will and so today we're going to discuss the black hole metaphor in borderline and narcissistic personality disorders my name is sakne I'm the author of malignant self love narcissism Revisited I'm currently a professor of Clinical Psychology and business management in cups in Cambridge United Kingdom and prior to that I served as a visiting professor of psychology in Southern federal University in Russia where else it devastates me to admit that I'm not
the one who came up with the idea of the black hole as a metaphor for the the emptiness that pervades the borderlines in narcissist psyche no I am not the one the person who came up with it her name is Francis Tustin t t n in 1972 in 1988 she published an article in three associations where she expounded on this ID on this metaphor and at first she suggested that black holes are common in autistic children okay we'll get to all this in due time if you survive this video but before we go there many
metaphors are used when we discuss narcissism and borderline personality and character disorders some people compare them to a rot a kind of decomposition some people compare narcissist to vampires or to viruses or to a form of cancer but again one of the most common uh comparisons is to a black hole black hole is essentially a Quantum object it's an object that is closely related to uncertainty on the one hand and information on the other when two Quantum objects interact all the information that these objects carry becomes scrambled does it sound familiar that's exactly what happens
in narcissistic narcissistically abusive relationships the information brought into the relationship into the Shar fantasy gets scrumbled and in physics one of the most striking examples of information scrambling happens in black holes when objects fall into these super dense remnants of stars these super dense bodies some of the information that these objects contain reemerges in the black holes emitted radiation but in a highly scrambled form so if you're an object and you get close to a black hole you're likely to be swallowed and digusted by by the black hole and all the information that you contain
is going to remain trapped within the black hole but then it's going to be scrumble and it's going to be emitted in radiation from the black hole I think this metaphor captures the very essence and the critical dynamics of narcissistically Abus abusive relationships in fact for a very long time physicists believed that black holes are the fastest possible scramblers of information but there's a new there new studies by galisi and and others which disproved this idea they found that even quick quicker information scram scramblers could exist in the quantum realm never mind all that those
of you who want to pursue this particular line of inquiry go to the literature in the description I just wanted to demonstrate to you that when we use the concept of black hole when we borrow it from physics and apply it to the psychology of cluster B personality disorders especially to interpersonal relationships in cluster B and with cluster B personality disorders the concept of black hole in physics provides us with amazing insights into the psychology so we can borrow from physics and learn about psychology in the journal um of anals of Psych of psycho of
psychology Journal of anals of psychology in 2013 there was an article published by Shan walren walren uh w a l d r o n article is titled black holes escaping the void and here is what the author has to say the black hole is a metaphor for a reality in the psyche of many individuals who have experienced complex trauma in infancy in early childhood the black hole has been created by an absence of the object the mother so there is no internalized object no mother in the psyche rather there is a black hole where the
object should be but the infant is drawn to this black hole trapped by it because of an intrinsic instinctive need for a real object an internalized mother without this the infant cannot develop it is only the presence of a real object that can generate the essential gravity necessary to draw the core of the self that is still in in undev veloped state from deep within the abyss it is the moving towards a real object a mother that revitalizes the absolute power of the black hole and begins a Reformation of its Essence within the psyche I'm
going to read this last paragraph again because it provides a few treatment directions few ideas which could develop into treatment it is only the presence of a real object that can generate the essential gravity necessary to draw the core of the self that is still in in an undeveloped state from deep within the abys it is the moving towards a real object a mother that relativizes the absolute power of the black hole and begins a Reformation of its Essence within the psyche this is precisely and now it's me this is precisely what the narcissist is
trying to do the narcissist lacks an internalized mother instead of a mother what the narcissist has is a bad object The Narcissist tries to replace the bad object the abyss tries to replace it with a maternal figure with a new object with a mother but he does it within a shared fantasy and he coerces his intimate Partners his friends even his colleagues he Coes them to become maternal Figures it's a repetition compulsion and it's doomed it's doomed because very few people are qualified and capable of acting motherly in a motherly way acting as a maternal
figure for example very few people are able to provide unconditional love which is one of the Hallmarks of a good enough mother and so the narcissist keeps failing time and again in this desperate attempt to separate from the new maternal figure he devalues her and then discards her as a symbolic representation of the separation individuation of Early Childhood if you want to learn more about this watch the videos in the shared fantasy playlist by far the most seminal and my favorite article about the black hole was written by ptic p o t i could be
ptits or ptit I have no idea how to pronoun this how to pronounce it p c o t i c the article was published in 2002 and it's titled the black hole in the inner Universe it was published in the Journal of child Psychotherapy volume 28 and here is what the author has to say the metaphor of the black hole has been borrowed from astronomy in order to describe a certain phenomenon occurring in work with autistic and psychotic children this metaphor is different from T tustin's concept of the black hole I shall attempt to describe
another phenomenon not that of the whole in the self resulting from premature separation but the hole in the object that the Autistic or psychotic child is relating to or rather turning away from this is very interesting um pecotic or ptic or whatever is trying a different tack taking a different path he says let's not focus on the black hole at the core of the affected child the child who's been neglected who's been abandoned has been mistreated the child who has been forced to separate from a mother prematurely because she was a dead mother let's put
this black hole aside for a minute let's study the black hole in the mother the black hole in the mother gave birth to the black hole in the child so we might as well study the origin which is the primary object the mother thetic continues to say I describe an autistic boy's need to protect himself against the catastrophic experience of relating to an object with such a hole in its mind there is a particular kind of a depressed object object which emits deadness instead of the Lively responsive effect that the child should get in communication
with an object object in this case is a mother yes the author continues to say it is not an intrusive object but it sucks in and drowns energy vampire light yeah if the experience of relating to the black hole in the object happens early and in such a powerful way that the child's energy feels insufficient to defend against it in any way then the fear of annihilation become so strong that it may lead to the wiping out of the whole internal Universe in order to escape its deadly gravitational pool that's an amazing paragraph it says
that the mother's black hole is so threatening so menacing that the child annihilates itself destroys itself kills itself in effect in order to not experience the mother's black hole and this is exactly the initial phase in the development of pathological narcissism when the child sacrifices the true self kills it literally assassinates it to allow the emergence of the false self unhindered the author continues only when a different kind of relationship gets internalized through therapy for example with an object that contains and returns life and energy can the Mind grow enough to be able to communicate
the other darker side of the relationship from which it has closed itself away the metaphor of the black hole in the universe has been borrowed from astronomy in order to describe a certain phenomenon occurring in work with autistic and Psychopathic children that much is true but I shall try to show how these phenomena relate to an early and profound damaging psychic experience which may be linked to but is in my opinion different from those experiences that Tustin in 1972 described when she introduced the concept of black hole what Tustin called the black hole was a
devastating experience in the child as well as the mother resulting from premature separation she described the experience of a mutilating loss of part of the body either in a child when separated prematurely from its mother or in in a depressed mother when giving birth to her baby tastin Al also mentioned a mutual black hole type of depression when mother and baby have not been able to enliven each other and each becomes stuck with this kind of experience inside themselves they both freeze they're both dead equally separation from the therapist during holiday breaks is not felt
by such children as rejection as with neurotic children but as a mutilation as an injury at first says the author I thought that some of the phenomena I encountered in long-term work with an autistic boy as well as with a psychotic adolescent girl were of a similar nature later on I came to see them as different so I borrowed a metaphor from astronomy the black hole in the universe in order to describe a different phenomenon not the whole in the self but the whole in the mind of the object that the autistic child is relating
to the mother in most cases this hole is perceived as malignantly active sucking in the child's psyche and thus making the child turn away and obliterate the awareness of its own existence beautiful poetic article and then he goes on to describe two case studies one with an autistic boy one with a psychotic girl highly recommended find it online and read it these are several ways to look at a black hole at the core of the narcissist and the borderline possibly the autistic and The Psychotic child whether this black hole is a reaction to the black
hole in a mother whether this blackhole is a reaction to constant frustration neglect abandonment and emotional abs whether this black hole is the outcome of external externality some Trauma from the outside environmental an environment a dysfunctional family for example PTSD induced by witnessing events which are traumatic that's another question altogether what is certain is that once abl Hall has taken Residence at the very core of the child where an identity should have been where a self should have been where a representation of a loving compassionate holding mother should have been when all these are vacated
and negated and eliminated and obliterated and What's Left Behind is deep space its darkness and its near absolute zero temperatures what emerges is a narcissist or a borderline or perhaps a psychopath focusing on The Emptiness is a crucial step clinically theoretically as many adherence of the object School uh object relation school in the United Kingdom and later in the United States have observed if we were to focus on this substitute identity in effect we might be able we may be able to come up with some psycho Dynamic and psychological Solutions some processes by which we
can reanimate or reactivate something coopt maybe the black hole use its energy use its radiation use the scrumbled information that emanates from it to decode and decipher the suffering patient Hope Springs Eternal apology as I said the idea of a black hole at the core of mentally ill people is first been proposed by Francis Francis Tustin t n in 1972 when she discussed autistic children um she gave a speech and the title was the black the black hole a significant element in autism and there was a group of professional workers which sort of collaborated among
themselves working with autistic children and here is some of what she said first of all she said I would like to clear away certain misunderstandings for example I have found that in certain circles to talk about the possible psychogenic origin of some type y of autism and to suggest that some autistic children can be helped by appropriate Psychotherapy is like showing a red rag to a bull I understand why this should be so in the early days after Leo Cana differentiated the rare syndrome he called early infantile autism from congenital subnormality she is referring to
studies in 1943 the psychoanalytic child therapists made unduly optimistic claims for alleviating this sad condition by the type of psychotherapy that they employed this was usually a modification of a classical Freudian technique Tustin continued to say the they these people psychoanalysts raised hopes in parents which were unfulfilled in addition they blame the mothers for their children for their children's distressed condition in a simplistic and unsympathetic way the autistic children were often depicted as innocent victims of an overly intellectual mothers cold uncaring respon unresponsiveness this was known at the time as refrigerator mothers Dustin says in
my writings I've have tried to redress the balance by seeing the mother's point of view as did Dr tishler in 1979 I have also tried to show that child's unwitting contribution to the autistic state after all we are all flawed creatures and apportioning blame is a sterile Pastime understanding is what Psychotherapy is about a syndrome as rare as early infantile autism is likely to be the result of an unusual occurrence or concurrence of both the genetic and environmental factors the balance of which may be different in each case so this was the first time that
the idea of black hole made its appearance and at the time it was limited to the study of autism it is very telling that the very same metaphor or simile has now been powerfully and insightfully applied to borderline and to narcissistic conditions it seems there is an affinity between borderline narcissism and autism I'm going to review some of the literature right now eel o um wrote an article black holes deadness and existing um analytically it was published in the international Journal of psychoanalysis 1998 here the abstruct in this paper the author makes metaphorical use of
the astrophysical term black hole to describe the impact of the physically dead mother you remember the dead mother is a concept invented by Andre green described in 1978 and the dead mother is a mother who is absent neglectful U depressive selfish Etc mother who is unable to cater to the emotional needs of the child or to see the child so Asel continues in his heart in his article the dead mother constitutes a black hole experience in the interpersonal inter subjective space of her child because of the intense grip and compelling pull of her world of
inner deadness individuals under her influence are either trapped in her dead deadening world or if they succeed in detaching themselves are petrified in their interpersonal space because of the imminent threat of being drawn back again in in again into the dead mother consequently these people are unable to form object relations of closeness love and intimate bonding can analysis provide the enormous counter forces needed for freeing these people from the grip of these powerful devouring forces the author describes the analysis of a man who grew up with a dead mother analysis began with a patient who
was emotionally disconnected developed into patient and analyst being drawn into a black hole of deadness and dying and eventually progressed to his extrication the emphasis here is on the analytic experience and analytic experiencing the author relates experientially and theoretically to the pivotal role of the patient analy survival of the deadening destructive processes in this analysis and the analy capacity and struggle to both hold and contain the patient and remain alive while experiencing and going through Annihilation and death along with the patient so as you see Tustin proposed the concept of black hole to actually negate
the belief that mothers are responsible for the mental illness of their children she confronted vehemently the idea of a refrigerator mother a dead mother in effect as the cause of autism while ashel has embraced and adopted this perception and is suggesting that a dead mother is responsible for the formation and the functioning of a black hole in her child Clark G Clark wrote an article titled a black hole in psyche published in the magazine harvest in 1983 Clark's paper attempts to make some sense of patients who present an anti-life present an anti-life attitude and are
unwilling to envisage themselves as viable human beings with a capacity for living the dead center created in these patients by a sense of being an abortion intrinsically [Music] unwant produces a defensive structure against life against becoming against being Clark asks whether this fear of annihilation can be dealt with reductively within the transference in terms of negative self objects and to what extent a viable self can be therapeutically engaged Clark distinguishes the threatening nothingness that cannot be integrated from Death anxiety or or phobia a nothingness that vaporizes the meaning of life Clark investigates carefully and with
a sense of compassion puzzlement and despair patients whose defensiveness appeared more than as a flight from Psychic reality or internal bed objects Clark views the patients Maneuvers as essential to their provisional survival because they bring a temporary evasion of the real feelings of pointlessness any mention of wholeness simply brings these patients closer to their own inner emptiness Clark talks boldly of the importance he feels as an analyst when the UN alive cannot receive the Breath of Life when holding and not healing is all that can be attempted the massive depressive anxiety against which the patients
are defending themselves seems linked with narcissistic character disorders and connects with catastrophic damage to the self and to its Unity this article was written in 1983 and it predes envisions later development later developments in Psychology we came to understand that the dead core of the narcissist has to do with a bad object The Narcissist believes that that he or she is unwanted unloved unlovable unworthy inadequate has no right to live so the narcissist kills his true self and replaces it with a concoction with a piece of fiction with a false self where the true self
used to be there's a black hole and this people people are un alive they are zombies because of this dysfunctional attempt to repace the bad object by destroying it and at the same time exactly like in a nuclear explosion destroying every other structure inside so the bad object may be destroyed and replaced with a false self but at the same time the self itself is destroyed it's non-unitary it's fragmented it's UNC constellated and non-integrated Clark um mentions that these patients are anti-life this is reminiscent of cley's rejection of Life they're unwilling to envisage themselves as
viable human beings with a capacity for living the dead center created in them by a sense of being an abortion intrinsically unwant and this produces a defensive structure against life against becoming against being wonderful article poetic incisive insightful a few years later in 1990 in the Journal of America the American Academy of psychoanalysis volume 18 an article was published by one of my favorites James Rin rotstein was the one who uh explained that narcissism a borderline personality disorder is failed narcissism when the child attempts to become a narcissist and fails this child remains stuck at
the borderline stage where emotions are disregulated moods are labile and the entire internal environment is vacated vacated because it cannot be controlled anyhow Stein wrote wrote an article is much neglected and much ignored and the article is titled the black hole is the basic psychotic experience some newer psychoanalytic and Neuroscience perspectives on psychosis so here's what gr says about the connection between the black hole the void The Emptiness and psychosis he says the psychoanalytic treatment of psycho disorders has had a long and complicated history because of the historic preference of psychoanalysis for neurotics rather than
psychotics nevertheless it has survived the Prejudice of psychoanalyst and empirical psychiatrist and now enters an interdisciplinary phase in which psychotic Psychopathology is understood as primarily an emotional disorder but one that must also be considered from the point of view of neurobiology ology and neuropsychology as well as sociology in this contribution says grr I offer the idea that perhaps the most important subtext in the psyche of The Psychotic is what has been called the black hole this massive deficit is ultimately attributable to a precautious abruption of the mother's physical and psychical presence from the infant a
phenomenon that has hereditary congenital perinatal and continuing developmental reinterpreting elaborations the psychoanalytic treatment of The Psychotic says grin consists of reversing the direction of his or her cataclysmic descent into the black hole and at the same time emphatically loosening the control that a protective psychotic Alter Ego has on the surviving self further the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia in particular as well as many of the other primitive mental disorders now frequently involves both an interdisciplinary orientation and perspective and choices of interdisciplinary modalities extending across the whole bioc psychosocial Spectrum this contribution seeks to integrate the latest
offerings from Neuroscience with classical Clan object relations and self- psychological contributions to the theory of psychosis I differentiate Psychopathology which has primary psychological meaning from that which neurobiologically originates without psychological meaning I reinvoke Freud's notion of the actual Neurosis versus the psychon Neurosis in order to emphasize this distinction further says grin I describe the black hole of internal mental space as an invariant phenomenon in psychosis and I trace its connection with meaninglessness which I hold to I hold to be the single most important factor in psychotic illness reminiscent of Franco and Logo therapy by the
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