Spot YOURS: Dysfunctional Family Types (Compilation)

There are three types of dysfunctional families. There's the indifferent family. The family where the children are abandoned, neglected, the parents are absent, self-p preoccupied, depressed, selfish, fearful, anxious, etc., etc. Andre Green called it the dead mother. By extension, we could say the dead parents. The parents who are not there, the children are left to fend for themselves on their own. Some of them get parentified. They become the parents of the family and some of them get disregulated. They develop borderline behaviors, anxiety, depression. They become reckless. They act out. The indifferent family is the topic of another video. Today I'm going going to discuss two other types of dysfunctional families. The pseudo mutual family and the pseudo hostile family. You heard it here for the first time. My name is Sam Bakin and I'm the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited. I'm the pseudo mutual and pseudo hostile or actually not pseudo the hostile blue professor of psychology and let's delve and dive right in. Sometimes you see in clinical practice or in reality families which constantly bicker and argue and fight with each other. They're very vocal. Nothing's wrong with that. Fighting indicates an emotional investment. People who stop fighting are no longer interested in each other. They no longer believe that change is possible. And so uh fighting in itself is not a bad sign, not a bad clinical sign, but sometimes the fighting is superficial about trivial and tangential and fringe issues. The fighting is actually a symptom of a power play or a mind game taking place in this kind of family. Can all collectives, families included, go insane? Of course. I actually um 20 something years ago suggested that entire collectives can become narcissistic. And so today we will be dealing with varants of narcissistic personalities. The first one of which is the artificially bickering family in clinical terms the pseudo hostile family. The other type of family is exactly the opposite. This is the picture perfect family. The family with no fault where everyone loves everyone else unconditionally totally and unreservedly where there's no word of argument. There's never a disagreement. the whole thing flows smoothly as if it were a cult. And this cult-like setting of this type of dysfunctional family is the pseudo mutual family. So pseudo hostility is involves frequent arguing and bickering in order to avoid deeper emotions, deeper feelings, in order to avoid going deep. Pseudo mutuality involves no disagreements and no conflict at least not overt conflict because there are no separate identities and there is no deeper intimacy. These these are not allowed. We will go a bit deeper in a minute but in a nutshell these families are very insidious. Their impact on the children is penicious and longlasting. In the pseudo mutual family, children learn to become cogs and wheels in a large machine. They can't separate. They're not allowed to individuate. They can't have a voice. They can't they are never authentic. They have to conform or else. And the punishment, the punitive aspect is passive aggressive, covert, hidden, surreptitious. In the other type of family, the pseudhostile family, the punishment is simply aggression. Aggression as a management uh technique. Win wy n and his colleagues are the foremost authorities on pseudomutual and pseudhostile families. They use these concepts which were coined before by others. I will discuss the history of these concepts a bit later in this video. But Wayne and his colleagues, they use this concept to describe miscarried maladjusted solutions to the eternal human problem of how do I retain my identity even as I relate to other people? How do I distinguish myself, separate myself even as I integrate and connect? How do I become part of a whole while still maintaining autonomy and agency and self-efficacy? How do I not get absorbed? How do I not disappear? The eternal conundrum between engulfment and abandonment. How do I not get abandoned while at the same time how do I not get enshed or engulfed or subsumed or consumed? The pseudo hostile and the pseudo mutual relationship aims to fit together to bind at the expense of the self at the expense of object differentiation of the identities individuation of the persons involved. Pseudo mutuality and pseudo hostility involve a family mythology, a narrative of the family sustained by patterns of behavior. And any deviation from this agreed upon legend of origin, any deviation from uh accepted habits which should never be confronted or challenged or undermined, any deviation, any divergence, any disagreement, any hint of rebelliousness, any form of defiance, all these are dangerous within these kind of families. There are fixed expectations and if you deviate from the from them however marginally you are punished exponentially there is a disproportion between offense and defense. The shared dread the shared anxiety the avoidance of interfamilial conflict or separation they generate a facade of harmony. This is pseudo mutuality. People within the family don't dare to discuss certain certain themes. These themes are taboo. They don't dare to confront each other. They don't dare to externalize and verbalize their needs because this is perceived as a challenge to the others. They don't dare to dwell upon the shortcomings and the failings of the family system and try to fix them. Everything is perfect. Everything is harmon harmonious. Nothing should ever be doubted or questioned or challenged. The fear of intimacy and closeness generate either persistent zombie-like state where everyone functioned as robots. Androids lacking in effect or overt effect. There is what we call reduced effect display and this is in the pseudo mutual family or constant fighting and bickering and argumentation without genuine separation. This is argumentation and bickering between units of the same multi-headed entity the family and this would be the pseudo hostility. The American Psychological Association dictionary, APA dictionary, defines pseudo mutuality as a family relationship that has a superficial appearance of mutual openness and understanding, although in fact the relationship is rigid and depersonalizing. Family theories of schizophrenia and other forms of major psychopathology have identified pseudo mutuality as a critical ideological factor. And this idea of pseudomutuality and sud pseudo hostility and so on is not very new actually. If we go back to Verheim for example in 1973 he postulated what he called the closed system pseudo integrative type of family in this type of closed system could be a family could be a nation state could be a football club could be a church any collective of human beings but usually this concept is applied to families. So in this type of closed system there is a high level of forced um convergence forced harmony morphosis is called everyone is frozen. People don't dare to change to evolve to develop and to grow because any change is a challenge to the status quo status quo. This is rooted in an infam interfamilial family uh power imbalance. There's a power asymmetry. For example, a family headed by a narcissist. The narcissist would attempt to create a power imbalance. He would attempt to create a cult where he is the leader. Everyone else is the follower, obedient, obscurious, and questioning. Power structures within the family. when they become asymmetrical they create pseudomutual pseudohhostile dynamics. And so the term pseudo mutuality was actually coined by win himself that I mentioned earlier in 1958 and it refers to an apparent stability of the family system when there is an absence of genuine and consensual validation by the members of the family of each other. There is a forced mostasis the force forced frozen forced oified structure and this contributes to interf family alienation individual alienation and a very disturbed functioning of the family laying and other lang l a iing laying and other um Scottish British uh psychiatrists in the 1960s especially they came up with a concept called mystification. Mystification is a transpersonal process by which the imposing party and the imposing party interacts with other members of a collective or a group and sort of convert them into extensions. So um Lang said that uh mystification is this process by which the imposing party actively endeavors to coersse the receptive party often children and they they tend to they attempt to induce a desired state of being under the guise of a parental or benevolent caretaker. So the parents for example would would pretend to be benign. They would pretend to be loving and caring and compassionate and affectionate and supportive providing sakur. But in reality the parents would be demanding and harshly critical passive aggressively and implicitly or overtly and and explicitly. and they would demand conformity to the tea dotting the eyes. They would not agree to any deviation from a very rigid script. The children would be the recipients of this. It is this discrepancy between appearances and substance that creates the pathology in the child. The child is unable to reconcile reality with what he perceives to be the psychonamic of the situation. The child is like a seismograph. He picks up on the parents, for example, displeasure. He realizes that abuse is forthcoming. He's terrified of being beaten or being chastised. The child is in a constant state of fear and anxiety. But he's unable to explain to himself. The child cannot explain to himself. Why is he being anxious? Why is he being depressed? Why is he so fearful all the time? Because the parents pose act as the best parents ever. A thespian endeavor. And this is what Lane call um mystification. The child is mystified. The receptive party is meant to feel as though the subjugating party has unilaterally defined his or her state of being, determined it as the sole and correct state, and removed any possibility for self assertion or individuation, says one of the encyclopedias I consulted. In the words of Lane, this results in a radical failure to recognize one's own self-perception and selfidentity. Put differently, this prevents separation individuation. This subtle messaging, this signaling that goes on, atmospheric ambient signaling in including efforts at gaslighting. All this create a hallucinatory delusional space where the child wanders in awe, in desperation, in terror and in misapprehension and miscomprehension and the child can't emerge from this space because there's no adult to extend a hand. The child actually is drowning in this space. These are the echological roots. These are the psych psychological roots of later life disregulation and liability. And so Lang was the first to kind of flesh out, shall we say, the concept of of um pseudomituality in his work on mystification. Barnard and Kales um expounded on the work of Lei. They said that mystification is a reciprocating system. In other words, it's both an act of mystification and a state of mystification which is the outcome of the act of mystification. What they were trying to say is that mystification is an active process. It is not necessarily premeditated. It's not necessarily malevolent, but it's an active process. active background process if you wish as I said it's messaging it's signaling and this creates a state of mystification and they distinguish three phases the first is attribution the role or the state of being is attributed to an individual which is functional and beneficial to the attributor child and parent says the parents is beneficial to me I need the parent I cannot survive without the parent therefore For the parent is all good and my state of being depend depends on the parent. And you know what the child is right until a certain age. If the parent were to ignore the child, not see the child, the child would die. The parent has an inordinate power over the life and the being of the child. So it's it's a fair and realistic assessment. The attribution phase. The second phase is invalidation. The self assertion, the identity or the state of being of the individual, for example, the child is rendered invalid, incorrect or moot in deference to the imposition from the attributor. Whenever the child tries to separate, whenever the child child tries to individuate, whenever the child expresses an opinion, disagrees with something, demands something, the attri the the the party that is the imposer, the imposing party, the parent in this case, doesn't allow it, invalidates it, mocks the child, threatens the child, coerces the child into actions which defy the child's promulgations. So the parent manipulates the child in a variety of ways, coercive and non-coercive. Manipulates the child to renounce himself or herself. The child has to renounce itself. It reminds me of the show trials. The show trials in Soviet Russia when defendants had to get up and say, "Yes, I'm an enemy of the people. What I've done is horrible. I deserve to die." They had to renounce themselves. And the third phase according to Corales and and allies the third phase is induction by which the reality and prominence of the imposed state this imposed state of being has actively supplanted the will and the self-concept of the inductee of the individual. In other words, the induction phase is when the child succumbs. The child gives up depleted, fearful, um hopeless and helpless, learned helplessness. Child says, "Okay, enough. I accept your view of reality, my mother. I accept the way you believe the world is structured, my father. And more importantly, I accept the way you see me. I'm going now to mold myself to shape myself to conform to the way you see me. I'm not going to have a selfconcept. I'm going to have your concept for a self. I'm going to adopt your concept as myself. And I'm not going to dwell on what is real and what is not and what is will and what is not. I'm not going to have a will. I'm not going to have a vition. I'm going to become your instrument, your extension, your tool, a projection of your minds. I'm going to disappear. In other way, in other words, this is mental suicide. And in this way, mystification is very very similar to pseudo mutuality because it is a process by which individual identities or psychological states are denied in favor of a false imposed sense of oneness of harmony of togetherness of a cult like we against everyone else, we against the world. Sudomituality is seen in families with high emotional expression and cognitive binding. Uh and there there's a similar concept to mystification and and to pseudomituality and it's the double bind I think first suggested by Bateson if I'm not mistaken. The double bind is a forced situational or emotional contract by which the disempowered individual, for example, a child feels that no matter which option they take, they will lose. There's no good option, no good outcome. It's a lose-lose situation. Mystification and double binds share the control dynamic of a predetermined and constrained reality. Mystification however is distinct in in that it coerces the child to believe the imposed truth are for his or her benefit. This is the virulence and the insidiousness of the message. The parent is broadcasting. I am doing this for your own good. I love you. That's I that is why I will never allow you to become you. You are such a bad object. You're so inadequate. You're so helpless. You're so deficient that to allow you to become you is to hate you. And I love you. So I will never let you go. I will never let you separate and individually because you will never cope with life or with reality. You need me for the rest of your life on earth otherwise you will never survive. And so pseudo mutuality in family systems. Lyman win I mentioned him 1958 1963. They examined this. They examined the contribution of family relatedness and communication in the development of serious mental illness such as schizophrenia. They never come up with a single theory. I'm not saying that there's a theory that you know could somehow um supplant our current understanding of families and modeling and so on but still it's a very interesting concept. It concern because pseudo mutuality is about authenticity and it's about authenticity not only in human relationships. It poses the question, how much do we sacrifice just in order to be with others? How much do we deny ourselves? How much do we agree to disappear? How much do we modify ourselves? How much do we consent to not be us just in order not to be abandoned? W and his colleagues sought to understand the particular patterns of inauthenticity that seem to be present in many families. And during this investigation that they found that these families often deal with emotions within the family, positive emotions and negative emotions. But they do this in inauthentic ways. These are fake dynamics or let me put it differently. These are dynamics which are founded on fakery, founded on feigning, on pretending, on acting, on lying, on deceiving and on cheating. I refer you to work by Goldenberg and Goldenberg 2012. They discovered distinct patterns of communication with regard to how the family responds to changes and coalitions, relational realignments, splits in the family. How do these family how do these families react to disagreements? How do they react to as I said coalitions? Mother with son against the the against the father, father with daughter against the mother, children against the parents. And so how do these families cope? And in healthy families, in healthy families, there's communication, there's consensus building, there's negotiation and compromise. Above all, there's love and acceptance. In these families, pseudo mutual and especially pseudo hostile families, the families of the narcissist, the families established by narcissist and the families that narcissist grew up in. In these families, it's all about power. It's all about prevailing. It's all about winning. It's a form of competition, a mind game. In 1961, Wyn defined alignment as the perception or experience of two or more persons that they are joined together in a common endeavor, interest, attitude or set of values. Now, this of course this coherence, this cohesion of the unit, this collective is a positive thing and it also creates positive dynamics. When you're in a group with someone and you have a common goal or common common attitude, the same values or whatever, you feel good about yourself and you feel good about that other person and you feel good about your togetherness. These are positive things. And splits are the opposite. That's the experience of opposition, difference or estrangement associated with negative feelings. But both these dynamics occur autonomously in families. It's inevitable. Put three people together and you have two political parties. So healthy parents raise healthy children and healthy parents and healthy children know how to cope with alignments and with splits. Pseudo mutual relationship within a family pseudo mutual family appears to be open, understanding, cohesive but it is none of the above. Pseudo mutuality is a superficial alignment. It defend defends against any conscious splits. It blurs the ability to experience differences. And the biggest difference of all is separation, individuation. That's why these families, pseudo mutual families, don't allow the child to separate and to become an individual because that is a split, God forbid. And splits are beyond the pale. Splits are taboo. Splits are horrible. We should all be one happy family forever. We should never launder the dirty laundry in public. We should never confide in outsiders. Is there a better definition of a cult? No, there isn't. This family is a cult. The dysfunctional relational patterns in such a family are maintained. They're fixed. And they are fixed even when the family experiences change and growth and dislocation and and I don't know conflict and divergence. Even when these families succeed mysteriously and miraculously to develop intimacy, even then these patterns persist and prevail because the members of such a family they don't know any better because one member or two a parent or parents retain all the power this power as symmetry and the children compete for the crumbs. of the drags of the power. And so the children feel unsafe. They can't experience their feelings authentically. They feel threatened. They become very defensive and they exclude the children exclude emotions, effects and taboo cognitions intracy psychically. That means they don't dare to experience these things even alone even in the solitude of their room and interpersonally as well with with other members of the family. The pseudo mutual family is about fitting together making it difficult for for members to cultivate any form of individualism. Members of such families, for example, are terrified to have relationships outside the family. This is perceived as betrayal. And when they have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, the parents will make sure that it fails. They will, I don't know, criticize the boyfriend, demean, and denigrate the girlfriend. They would they would cast the whole thing as a form of abandonment or betrayal. I have sacrificed my life for you. You are ungrateful. Growth within the person and the relationship is thwarted in such systems. Individuals who grow up in this pseudo emotional climate of the pseudo mutual family, they don't develop a strong sense of selfidentity and they can't differentiate even in terms of gender or sexuality. Everything, every difference, every individuality is perceived as a threat to the family unit. Win concluded that a focus on the family's alignments and splits provides illuminating diagnostic information about the health of a family and the health of individuals. Paying attention to how a family organizes around and responds to alignments and splits provides a therapist with many possible avenues of therapeutic intervention. And so um this is the the the psychological uh background. Of course, children in such families are enshed. There's a lot of emotional incest. Personal autonomy is is extinct. Um cohesion is just a facade. Um and so Sullivan was the first to describe a family dynamic perspective of mental illness. He stressed the importance of interpersonal relationships for mental illness. I subscribe to this school. I think mental illnesses are interpersonal and relational not individual. and and today this is fast becoming the the kind of the let's say the orthodoxy Alan who is a scholar aln he he says that possessive traits can be found in in mothers of children with mental illness baiton as I mentioned before developed the concept of a double bind leads liz said that the family is schismatic or skewed when the child is mentally ill. There's a constant hostility in the family and the parents don't constitute adequate sexual identification objects for the children. Children can't emulate these parents. They're terrified of them. They hate them. They resent them actually, but they can't allow themselves. The child cannot allow himself or herself to consciously experience hate towards the parent is very threatening. So she begins to hate herself. The egos of these children are underdeveloped. That's why they become narcissists. They easily broken down these egos by anything forbidden sexual sex aggression. Pseudomutuality and pseudo hostility are rigid interactional systems. They're not they're not flexible. They're not open to modification. They're not reactive to environmental cues and inputs or stimuli. Part of the feelings, the feelings are denied. They're isolated from consciousness. Children learn to deny their feelings and themselves. Stillin st i e r l i n. Stillin developed a family dynamic theory that encompasses many of these um mentioned things that I mentioned. according to still an individuation is a fundamental process in normal development but it is hindered by effective cognitive or moral binding in the family and the family tells you that's the only right way to emote. It's the only right way to think and it's the only right set of values and you are not at liberty to question them to doubt them to undermine them to challenge them. You're not at liberty to be you. You are just a recipient tabulasa. You're blank slate and you're a recipient. You're going to you're going to become what we tell you to become. If we want your opinion, we will give it to you. Um these families even when they delegate when they kind they when when members of a family tell the child we trust you. Okay. We trust you with a task. We trust you with an assignment. Even then the child is a servant. The child is expected to be subservient. He becomes a people pleaser. He becomes parentified even when there is delegation. In such families, the child performs services for other family members. And this creates in the child internal conflicts. And from generation to generation there are studies that show that this is multi-generational binding, delegating, double bind, negative family relationships are hypothesized as active agents for u many mental illnesses. This is especially true in narcissistic families. Narcissistic families are founded on these imbalances on these discrepancies on these unspoken unthought knowns on these unspoken truths. The narcissist holds all the power and the control and there are everyone else is a kind of enabler. Everyone else relegates responsibility to the narcissist. Everyone else becomes brain dead, zombified. Mother and father um often interchange roles depending on the situation, but they both subscribe to a narcissistic creed. And so these kind of families, narcissistic families give the children, allocate to the children roles. I mentioned them in my previous videos. And the children gradually begin to perceive themselves as in a way survivors. There's a lack of boundaries. There's emotional manipulation. There's harmful harmful conflict. There's rigid and meshment. And it's very very effective. It's very effective because of this cult mentality, because of the generalized idea that the world is dangerous and hostile and we need to stick together in order to survive. This is a general introduction to pseudo humility and pseudo hostility. I'll have a lot more to say in the future applying these concepts to families that generate uh narcissistic children, borderline children, psychopathic children. I can't hope that you have enjoyed this because it's not enjoyable. But um if you have any questions or if you want to describe your case with your own family, feel free to comment uh I promise not to delete more than nine out of 10 comments. That was me talking to you, Sam Baknin, professor of psychology and author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and a survivor of a pseudo mutual and a pseudo hostile family. the worst ever. Today I have adopted the disheveled med scientist look. I hope you like it. My hairdresser is in a hospital, not because of me. For a change. Okay, Shashanim. Today we are going to discuss desire and violence in narcissistic families. But first we have to define of course what are narcissistic families or households because the family is a dying thing or at least marriages. A narcissistic household has parents, children or a narcissistic household can be deprived or devoid of children. But within a narcissistic household, there's at least one narcissist. It could be in a typical nuclear traditional family. It could be mother or father. It could be siblings. It could be um a lover. So within the household, there is at least one narcissist and other non-narcissist. This is what I would call throughout this video a narcissistic household. A narcissistic household trigger dynamics which were described by Rene Jard. We'll talk about him in a minute. And these are known as mimemetic desire and mimemetic violence. Stay with me for a truly wild ride in the outer recesses of the French intellectual mind. My name is San Vagn. I'm the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and I'm a professor of psychology disheveled or not. In narcissistic households authentic desire is suppressed. You're not allowed to express emotions, motivations, attitudes that are authentic, that are true to yourself, that reflect who you truly are. You're not allowed, you're not permitted to establish boundaries. Consequently, when the members of the household are children, they fail to develop a functioning self or a functioning ego. Rather than authentic desire, the narcissistic household or the narcissists in the household encourage uh mimemetic desire. So authentic desire is sacrificed in favor of mimemetic desire and it's correlate mimemetic violence. What on earth am I talking about? Can I transition to English? Yes, I can. Stay with me and you will understand every single word I've just said. I hope I do too. Reesar created a theory called mimetic theory. He suggested that human desire is not autonomous. Human desire is imitated. We look at other people and we imitate them. We appropriate their desires, their dreams, their fantasies, their wishes. Jira was that close to the concept of shared fantasy, but he never crossed the line. That attainment belongs to Sander in 1989. Still jer describes described all the mechanisms of shared fantasy. He suggested that the conveyance the conduit the conveyor belt of desire was mimesis mimicry imitation emulation and he said that because people end up desiring the same objects this creates competition for these objects. He introduced the concept, the economic concept of scarcity. And so objects are scarce, physical objects, but also human objects. If you are competing for the same woman or for the same man, you would know what J was talking about. This scarcity of objects creates a competitive environment. And since we imitate each other, we have this herd mentality of imitating each other in our desires. This inevitably ineluctibly gives rise to competition which easily deteriorates and devolves into violence. Think about the cues when a new iPhone is released and how people often end up fighting within these cues. This rivalry inevitably creates conflict and this is what he called mimemetic violence. And he said the way societies resolved, amilarated and mitigated mimemetic violence is by uniting against an arbitrary victim. And he called it the scapegoat mechanism. And here is the sequence. When we ask ourselves what is it that we want? What is it that we truly desire? What is our fantasy, our dream? We look at other people and we look to other people. They say, "They desire an iPhone. I'm going to desire an iPhone, too." This creates competition because the number of iPhones is limited. The scarcity and this competition gives rise to conflict and possibly in extreme cases to violence. To prevent this pervasive violence, to fend off against this aggression, society sacrifices some of its members. These sacrificial members are known as scapegoats. So mimetic desire people don't know what to desire. They look to others models. They determine what is worthy of desiring. Desire is therefore a triangle. subject, model, object and desire can be internally mediated or externally mediated. If the model is out of reach, for example, if a role model is a celebrity, what results is external mediation. This comes very close to the work of Bandura. But by the way, so the result is external mediation. If the model, the role model is close, for example, a sibling, a friend, a colleague, a teacher, a peer, classmate. So if the model is closed and we tend to emulate or imitate or mimic a closed model's desire, this is known as internal mediation and this leads to intense direct rivalry. Mimemetic rivalry, mimetic violence is when two people who are close together in physical proximity, in daily friction in a relationship, in a diet, in a family, in a in a community, two people who share the same physical and mental space want the same object. They become rivals. They imitate not only each other's desire. They adopt each other's tactics, but they also imitate and emulate each other's hostility. The focus shifts from the object to the rivalry. The rival becomes the object in a way. The rivalry intensifies and spreads throughout the family or throughout the community. And this is what Jiao called the crisis of distinctions. I am sure that as I speak many of you can apply everything I'm describing to the narcissistic family. Everything I've just said applies in you. It applies powerfully in the narcissistic family more so than in normal healthy families. In the narcissistic family, mimemetic desire is everything because authentic expressions are forbidden. And because in most cases, the self, the formation of the self is disrupted. There's no authentic desire because there's no authentic self. So everyone imitates everyone in a narcissistic family. Matic desire is the bon the name of the game and the plat. So mimetic desire re leads to rivalry. For example, one of the objects could be the narcissistic parents admiration and approbation and approval and conditional love. So the siblings would compete for this scarce object and as they compete they would develop rivalry, conflict and very often this will culminate in violence. Ultimately the whole family in order to prevent a disintegration of the unit in order to secure a smooth functioning the whole family will settle on a scapegoat a scapegoat mechanism to prevent total destruction from mutual emerging violence within the family unit. The family unites against an arbitrary marginalized scapegoat, a member of the family that can be safely sacrificed. The shared vi violence against this victim restores peace, creates a founding myth for the family social order. It is the ethos of the family. Ranes was born in a very interesting place in Aignon in France and he died in Stanford in the United States. Obviously he was he was many things. He was a literary critic, a scholar, a philosopher and he made numerous and very often controversial contributions in in fields too many to enumerate. His theory of mimemetic desire was focused on trying to understand what makes people tick. So it was a kind of extension of Faji's work of men of on mentalizing. It was an attempt to generate a universal theory of the mind a theory of everything in the field of mind studies. And he he sought to to un to he sought to comprehend the transition from desire to conflict. H believed that uh un human desire begets conflicts and he asked himself why is that? And then he came up with the idea of sacrifice and the theory of the scapegoat and that concluded the defense so to speak. Those of you who have been attuned to America's political scene have heard people like Peter Phil and JD Vance quoting profusely from the work of Rene de developed the concept of mimetic desire in his first book deceit desire and the novel self and other in literary structure. The book was published aptly in the year that I was born 1961 momentous year for many reasons. Mimemetic imitative desire postulates that humans objects of desire are determined not by individual psychological factors but instead by interpersonal dynamics. In this sense, mimemetic desire is an object relations theory exactly like the British proponents of object relations in the 1960s, the same period. It suggested that we are defined relationally. Nothing or little emanates from the inside. Little is innate. It all emerges and erupts owing to and within interactions with other people which is one of the main claims of object relation British object relation theories. According to Giral's theory of mimetic desire, humans desire the things that other people possess or that other people desire for precisely the same reasons that other others possess or desire them. Everything therefore is a whole of mirrors and it's a concept that many of you would be acquainted with from my own work. Desire is not a relationship between a subject, an individual human being and an object, the desirable thing. It's not this. Until Girat's work, we believe that desire was directional. There's a human agent and the human agent desires something, a laptop, a smartphone, another human being, whatever, whatever strikes your fancy. But starting with Ja, we realize the social dimension of desire. Desire is a relationship between two or more subjects, people mediated via the object. One could even generalize and say that the desired object is an excuse to have a relationship between two people. What type of relationship? Competitive conflict, rivalry, ultimately possibly culminating in mimetic violence and the inevitable attempt to reconcile to pacify by sacrificing someone. The scapegoat. Jira, as you have understood by now, was exactly like me, highly critical of individualistic notions in psychology. For example, the existence of a self or an individual or a personality. He didn't believe in any of this. Neither do I. And similarly, he criticized the concept of the unconscious. and in this sense is very reminiscent of Lan. Lakan suggested that the unconscious is a sum total of the narratives of other minds of other people their voices. Similarly, Gir criticize the unconscious. He did not believe in it. He said that mimemetic desire provides an occasion to uh revise psychoanalytic theory. Although he was a great admirer of Zigman Freud, he recast many of Freud's ideas in terms of mimemetic desire. Take for example the Erdupus complex. Freud's conception of the rivalry between sons and their fathers. His jer suggested that the fatherson rivalry is driven not by the competition for the object which is the mother but it is driven by the fact that the son models himself on the father. The father becomes the role model for the son. Obviously, if the son mimics the father, if the son emulates and imitates the father, the son is also going to appropriate and annex and absorb and digest the father's desire for the mother. Their relationship is transformed into one of violent rivalry when the son imitates the father's desire for the mother. And all this culminates or leads to the epitome of Jaw's work which is the sacrifice and the scapegoat. These are very common dynamics in narcissistic families. The golden child and the scapegoat and all this. Now you are beginning to um I hope uh see the deeper layers of the mechanisms behind this. Gira expanded the idea of mimemetic desire in another book a decade later in 1972 la the violence and the sacred this book offered an analysis of sacrifice in ancient religions it's amazing reading by the way this man was encyclopedic it's it's it's it's mindshattering to read his work especially in the original in French he said that when desire is intrinsically mimetic. Human experience is suffused with competition, envy, rivalry, and this often leads to violence. Indeed, within narcissistic families, where authentic desire is frowned upon, castigated, chastised, criticized, and ultimately eradicated, what's left is mimemetic desire. And the dynamics in narcissistic families consequently involve envy, rivalry, competition and a lot of aggression, passive aggression and externalized aggression very often violence. And Jar suggested that such violence terrified terrifies everyone involved. Even violent people sometimes sometimes are shocked by their own violence. Violence has a very unsettling effect. And he said that the risk of violence, the peril of such violence creates a challenge. How does the family unit, the community, society, the nation state, you name it, how do human collectives, small and big, narcissistic families included, pathological human collectives and healthy human collectives, how do all of them manage the incipient emergent eruptive violence that is involved in mimetic desire? the way that the human impulse towards retribution could lead to a cycle of murders or other types of violence and aggression between individuals and families and communities and nation states. Just have a look at Israel and Palestine. So if you don't harness mimemetic desire, if you don't sublimate it and channel it, if you don't maybe procribe it, make it illegal, you are at risk of encouraging all the participants to continuously engage in aggression and counter aggression, perpetration and retribution, uh crime and punishment. And there's no end to this cycle. And this potential for unending violence presents a problem for people living together in a family, in society and so on. Even in narcissistic families, aggression has to be somehow controlled or the family will implode. Violence can even be externalized as one of the main forces affecting human experience. And so there's a lot of aggression in violence in organizational systems such as religion, the n nationalism, nation state. Aggression and violence are inter interwoven into the narratives that govern our lives. As you wrote, violence is the heart and sacred soul of the sacred. In order to avoid internal violence, maintain stability and guarantee the survival of the human collective, humans, societies, human families, human communities developed a mechanism. The mechanism is like a steam valve. You know, in uh when we when you cook, there's a steam valve. The mechanism is like a steam valve. It is intended to dissipate the energy, the psychic energy, the perfected aggression, the tension caused by mimemetic desire. And this mechanism is the sacrifice of a scapegoat. The sacrifice could be ritualistic involving you know in ancient times human sacrifice nowadays cancelling someone or incarcerating imprisoning someone. These are various ways of ritually sacrificing someone or the sacrifice could be in the air as part of a role an allocated or emergent role. Someone assumes the role of a scapegoat and is constantly sacrificed time and again. their interests, their wishes, their dreams, their hopes, everything is sacrificed, trampled upon, suppressed, repressed, mocked, ridiculed, shamed, humiliated. So the sacrifice becomes the role of the the scapegoat. The role of a scapegoat is to be sacrificed. And this I call it ambient sacrificing. So sacrificing could be acute, ritualistic or ambient. The invi the inevitable violent impulses that humans experience as a result of the structure of mimetic desire are channeled redirected at someone or something outside the confines or structure of society outside the pale beyond the pale. Someone who will not be avenged. Someone who is deemed sacrificeable. Someone who is characterized as a monster. someone whose punishment is cathartic and considered moral and ethical. Xiao said that the development of such a mechanism is integral to the stability of any given human collective, any given society. And of course, one could conceive of this kind of sacrifice as a part of the implicit contract in narcissistic families, in healthy families, in societies, in nation states. We have a social contract and there's a whole theory known as social contract theory and it's based around fully transparent and mutual agreements in the old in the 18th century theories but today we know that a lot of the social contract is submerged a lot of it is implicit a lot of it is unspoken bolas as Bolas coined the phrase the um unknown thought uh so uh the unthought known. So we have a situation here where the mimemetic desire and the sacrificial mechanism are integral parts cogs and wheels in the social contract and Giral said that scapegoating is central to the functioning of any social contract and vice versa. those participating in it do not recognize what they're doing as scapegoating as a sacrifice of the innocent. They convince themselves that what they're doing doing is persecuting criminals or for the greater good or protecting the innocent or guarding the vulnerable or they tell themselves they invent all kinds of narratives to explain what they're doing. performing the killing or the eradication of an outsider of the other erh is perceived or misperceived as justly punishing someone who deserves punishment when in fact the victim unjustly bears blame for the community's social dysfunction. Outliers, outcasts, iconoclass, controversial figures, they are the natural scapegoat. You can pin everything on them. They're defenseless because they have excluded themselves themselves from the social firewall from social protection. They have made themselves available as monsters and they are inevit they inevitably end up being sacrificed or scapegoed. Marcel Mouse and Uber wrote the book sacrifice sacrifice its nature and function in 1898. We're having a French video in the in their work which is an amazing piece of work. Musuber suggested that sacrifice is not performed because these are the because there are gods. It's not like there's a god and the god demands sacrifice. But instead the gods were created in order to justify sacrifice in order to explain it. You see according to jir mimemetic desire leads to rivalry to competition to violence. To avoid to prevent this violence, the energy, the aggression is redirected at scapegoats. But how do we justify scapegoating? We invent gods. We say we need to sacrifice this person because there's a god. The god could be a classical god, you know, with a beard and and the god could be, for example, the rule of law. The rule of law, that's a kind of god. It's not religion that creates the ritual. is the ritual that generates the religion. According to Jir and Mus fail to fully understand the origins and functions of sacrificial ritual, but their insight, their basic insight is essentially correct. J said that the killing of the scapegoat shifts the focus from the community's internal disagreements and discord and strife to something external. It's a distraction in today's world. It's also became it also became form of entertainment. Through the sacrifice, political stability is restored. There's a sense of cathosis and purification. The sacrifice of the scapegoat provides a peaceful respit. And that's why we ascribe to the scapegoating process transcendental meanings. religious, national, legal within the narcissistic family. Scapegoating is very crucial because it allows the narcissistic parent, for example, or the narcissistic sibling to project onto the scapegoat the parts of themselves that they find unacceptable, that they reject. The pacifying effects of the sacrifice do not last, however, and so the sacrifice must be repeated regularly. And that's what I call ambient sacrificing in narcissistic families. When you look around you today in postmodern societies, you see victimhood movements, you see cancel culture, and you see moral panics, Satanism, child sexual abuse, sexual assault. These are all moral panics. We are in need of scapegoats more than ever. We are in need of human sacrifice more than ever because the world is terrifying more than ever. We need to plate, pacify, reduce our anxieties. And the only way to do this is to sacrifice human beings. We used to sacrifice them physically, cut out their hearts in the Aztec cultures, but today we sacrifice them symbolically. We incarcerate them in prisons. We cancel them so that they disappear effectively. We dredge up recovered memories of false memories and put hundreds of people in prison. We attribute to every single male who has ever engaged in sexual assault. That's the way we sacrifice people nowadays initially. Uh and and so there's a congruence between victimhood, the notion of victimhood and and scapegoating because scapegoats are often cast or described as perpetrators and they victimize all everyone else and so everyone else has a right to to this human sacrifice. Initially society is dominated by the violence that is entailed by mimetic desire. Society develops the scapegoat mechanism to redirect violence in ways that are less harmful to itself which in turn inspires the invention of religion to justify sacrifice is how the encyclopedia Britannica describes the situation. Ultimately I'm continuing to quote from the Britannica. Ultimately with the rise of the state as a political formation, the function of sacrifice is largely absorbed by the judicial systems that's a Britannica capacity to discipline and punish members of the populace. I as an aside I will mention here that's not the Britannica that's me that Fuko Michelle Fuko working more or less at the same period attributed the same function to inpatient psychiatry. He said that psychiatry, menlo, all this apparatus of suppression, oppression, all this oppressive apparatus was intended to isolate, identify, isolate uh scapegoats and sacrifice as a as a tool of social control. Simultaneously, we had gauore. It was an amazing time, the 1960s. I was born then. We had Gibbor who was talking about the society of the spectacle. Scapegoating is a form of spectacle, a spectacle of collective purification and kafazi's spectacle spectacle of mass projection. And so Jir paid homage homage to this tradition of grand historical narratives of human development. And that's why he did admire Ziggman Freud especially his work totem unaboo totem and taboo 1913 because it was Freud who suggested that primordial sacrifice sacrificial murder lies at the foundation of society. He said that Freud suggested that we came together and created communities and then societies and then nation states and then super national bodies. All this intended to regularize and ritualize the sacrifice of scapegoats through the legal system, through the judicial system. and Giral agreed with it. But he took Freud's notion in a different direction because he insisted that the foundational murder was not fundamentally eripal or sexual but a sacrifice of a scapegoat that channeled and released pent-up tensions and aggression and potential violence in the community. And when I say community, society, nation state, just substitute narcissistic family or narcissistic household and you get the full picture. I gave you an insight via work and others into the scapegoating mechanism in narcissistic families. I hope you enjoyed the tour and which is in French. See you soon whether you want to or not.