A Child's History of Mankind: From Psychosis to Narcissism and Beyond
Channel: Sam Vaknin's Musings
Date: 2020-08-30

Bryn Edwards at WA Real (on YouTube):

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYar1DgXB3v6VQkoaqbCdPQ

Double rejection, double trauma model:

1st rejection   BIRTH

Mother rejects and ejects child

1st trauma   POV SHIFT 

2nd rejection   SEPARATION-INDIVIDUATION

Child rejects mother

2nd trauma    SELFHOOD

During 1st phase external and internal objects are unitary

Frustration (bad breast) leads to withdrawal: narcissistic investment in introversion (Jung)

Constellated Self

Non-unitary universe with privileged object and all other objects: a schism 

(Kierkegaard, Buber’s encounter I-thou: eternal thou is God PSYCHOTIC hence religion, including secular; and experience I-it, objectifying others NARCISSISTIC, hence materialism)

Selfhood is traumatic, loss of control, alienation from the world, estrangement from oneself, persecutory object

Eros and Thanatos: 

Libidinal and destrudo investment, cathexis

Reflects:

Two types of mother: fully dead (Green) and partly dead (Winnicott: good enough=safe base+dead)

The dead only rejects (death only) 

The good enough also accepts (death and life)

We apply these schemas to objects (both self and others) and to collectives:

Dead objects (inertial, materialistic) generate confusion, disordered, disorganized personalities

Good enough objects result in mentally sound personalities

The key difference: relationship between external and internal objects.

Still, even if objects are good enough, we cannot tell the distinction between external and internal objects

Meaning=safety

What renders reality intolerable? Fuzziness of boundaries between external and internal.

Three successive phases, attempting to create meaningful narrative via organizing and hermeneutic principles:

Psychotic hyperreflexivity (Borderline, Codependency)

expansive identity diffusion (we are the world)
+dissipated self (diminished self-affection or self-presence)
+conflation of internal and external

Narcissistic grandiosity   (Existentialists, Descartes, Frankl)

deflationary identity diffusion (l’etat ce moi)
+inflated (false) self
+conflation of internal and external

Nothingness    

suspended identity
+calibrated self
+boundaries (this is where I cease to be and the world/you begin)

Human history unfolds like individual psychohistory:

Evolutionary embryology and vestigial structures

Collective unconscious and archetypes

Psychotic phase (religions both divine and secular)

Narcissistic phase (the Self usurps God: Descartes's cogito observer usurped God's role and this culminated in fusing Creator with observer in QM Copenhagen interpretation) 

Nothingness

Find and Buy MOST of my BOOKS and eBOOKS in my Amazon Store: 

https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/60F8EC8A-5812-4007-9F2C-DFA02EA713B3