Narcissist Jealous of Your Past Relationships (Retroactive Jealousy)
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2024-01-12

Retroactive jealousy is the outcome of the narcissist's inability to control or own your past. This interferes with his ability to idealize and infantilize you and, therefore, threatens the formation and longevity of the shared fantasy.

Idealization is unlike a scientific theory: inconsistent, not falsifiable and therefore always dissonant (gorgeous but virgin). 

Narcissist infantilizes partner to allow for dual mothership and so devalues and demonizes past lovers who abused and took advantage of the partner.

Past versions of yourself interfere with idealization (your life starts and ends with the narcissist in an eternal, fantastic present).

Past lovers and past versions of partner cannot be snapshotted (controlled, possessed) - creates insecurity, abandonment anxiety.

Proof: past lovers but not current lovers provoke jealousy (open relationships, group sex, betrayal fantasies). Current lovers are snapshotted and integrated into the shared fantasy (instrumentalized). 

The narcissist inhabits an eternal present.

To the narcissist – and more so, to the psychopath – the future is either of two: a hazy, abstract, merely hypothesized concept, or an anticipated certainty, the preordained outcome of his magical thinking (he believes that he determines future events merely by thinking about them.) These two misperceptions of time – diffuse time and teleological time-inversion - are cognitive deficits and are owing to a confluence of several narcissistic traits.

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