Object Constancy & Whole Object Relations — The Root of All Narcissistic Personality Disorders

How can it be?

How can a person with NPD treat you with such loving care for months, years, or even decades, then suddenly out of the blue treat you with such hatred and contempt? You have done absolutely nothing to invite the abrupt change. It is a humiliating, confusing, dehumanizing, extinction level experience.

You have been cast out of the garden without explanation. You are banished from the shared fantasy kingdom, and when you hit the ground with a thunderous crash, it is a disorienting surrealistic moment as you survey the ugly lack of color in this thing called reality. The dream is over as you soon begin to realize as you wake from the slumber that kept you away for so long.

How could they something so nonsensical? And why would they be so cruel?

It is the narcissistic cycle of idealize, devalue, discard. And it is the Holy Grail of pathological narcissism — so it is and so it will always be.

And the cycles come back to how the narcissist is hardwired, vacant inside, and physiologically developmentally impaired with brain disorders that can actually be seen on brain scans. They are not like a neurotypical person. They are alien, damaged, hollow, impaired, and incapable of being anything else. Ever. No matter how many times repetition compulsion demands that they repeat the cycle of abuse.

The just keep doing it because they don’t remember. A narcissist has discontinuous memory. The instant they walk out the door, they forget everything about you and about the two of you in your life together. They cannot attach because they have no continuous memory. And they fill in the gaps and holes with fantastical confabulations that never happened as they disremember the things that actually did occur.

And all this brings us to a couple of other significant features of malignant narcissism — object inconstancy and a lack of whole object relations.

“See those empty circles in the mesotemporal lobes? That’s where emotional memory is stored, and people who suffer from Cluster B personality disorders just can’t do it. They are impaired in their ability to remember what previous experiences felt…