Turns you into a zombie

 

In this sense, narcissism is a death cult, and it's predicated on what Freud used to call Thanatos or the death drive or the death force. For the narcissist to appropriate another person, for the narcissist to convert another person to a snapshot, convert another person into an internal object, the narcissist must imbue the other person with death. The narcissist must kill you metaphorically before and as a condition for converting you into an internal object.

An internal object that is full of life cannot exist in a mind that is full of death. As with the environment is a graveyard, you need to be dead if you want a tombstone in that graveyard in that cemetery. So the first thing the narcissist does, the narcissist kills you metaphorically.

The narcissistic mother kills her daughter in her mind and then takes the corpse, converts it into an internal object and continues to interact with the internal object in something that is very reminiscent of a seance more or less talking to ghosts.

These internal objects in the narcissist's mind are ghosts. People think that the internal objects are alive, full of energy, you know, Élan vital, they have a force of life. And that's not true at all. The internal objects in the narcissist's mind are ghosts. They are ephemeral. They are ectoplasm. They are spiritual apparitions. They're not, they're not real. They don't have contours. They don't have depth, dimensions, uh density. They're not, they don't. 

And to reach this death stage to allow the narcissist to convert you into internal object, the narcissist needs to take away from you all the attributes of life. So first and foremost, the narcissist needs to take away from you your joy. The joy is a sign of life. Your sexuality and later on your independence, your agency, your social circle, social network, your autonomy, personal autonomy, including financial independence.

The narcissist needs to take all these away from you so that ultimately, you're not alive. You may be alive physically, but you're a zombie. Only then the narcissist can convert you. And because a mother has access to you when you are defenseless, when you have no life experience, mother has access to you from the very early stages. The mother kills you when you are eighteen months old, when you are thirty-six months old. The mother kills you early on. And it's very difficult after that to come alive, to resurrect. It's a bit of a religious process, religious metaphor if you wish.