Narcissist’s Affair with Death Drive (Thanatos, Destrudo, Mortido)
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2023-10-29

WATCH Hitchcock's Halloween Treat (or Trick?): Psycho, or Embodied Introject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-p_CyCTHuc

WATCH “Dead" Mothers and Their Offspring: Narcissistic, Borderline, Psychotic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csukYBQpyHE

In my work, the death drive is not a primal drive. It is internalized and inculcated – not innate. It is the dead mother’s gift to her child. 

Dead mother engenders death-seeking ego ideal (superego) to:

1. Emulate the mother’s deadness (fantasy or phanatsy defense);

2. Get rid of the bad object (fantasy or phantasy defense, Akhtar, 1991;Shengold, 1991);

3. Re-experience symbiosis (oceanic feeling, loss of boundaries) in self-extinguishing rather than in love (perceives love as dissolution, merger/fusion, disappearance=death) (Lacan, 1938; Lewin, 1950; Jacobson, 1964; Mahler, 1971; Kaplan, 1978; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984, 1991 “nostalgia for primary narcissism”);

4. Ensure immediate and automatic gratification of needs without agency, guilt, and shame/inferiority (Stone, 1971).

Lacan, 1946: death drive is the suicidal tendency of narcissism.

Find and Buy MOST of my BOOKS and eBOOKS in my Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/60F8EC8A-5812-4007-9F2C-DFA02EA713B3