The Development Psychology of Psychopathology | Page 9

world is a dangerous, unpredictable place. She becomes a negative, devaluing voice, which is duly incorporated in the Superego.
Our natural state is anxiety, the readiness - physiological and mental - to "fight or flight". Research indicates that the Primary Object (PO) is really the child, rather than its mother. The child identifies itself as an object almost at birth. It explores itself, reacts and interacts, it monitors its bodily reactions to internal and external inputs and stimuli. The flow of blood, the peristaltic movement, the swallowing reflex, the texture of saliva, the experience of excretion, being wet, thirsty, hungry or content - all these distinguish the selfless child from its self. The child assumes the position of observer and integrator early on. As Kohut said, it has both a self and the ability to relate to objects. This intimacy with a familiar and predictable object (oneself) is a primary source of security and the precursor to emerging narcissism. The mother is only a Secondary Object (SO). It is the second object that the child learns to relate to and it has the indispensable developmental advantage of being transcendental, external to the child. All meaningful others are Auxiliary Objects (AO).
A "good enough" SO serves to extend the lessons of the PO and apply them to the world at large. The child learns that the external environment can be as predictable and safe as the internal one. This titillating discovery leads to a modification of naive or primitive narcissism. It recedes to the background allowing more prominent and adaptive strategies to the fore. In due time - and subject to an accumulation of the right positively reinforcing experiences, a higher form of narcissism develops: self-love and self-esteem.
If, however, SO fails, the child reverts back to the PO and to its correlated narcissism. This is regression in the chronological sense. But it is an adaptive strategy. The emotional consequences of rejection and abuse are too difficult to contemplate. Narcissism ameliorates them by providing a substitute object. This is an adaptive, survival-oriented act. It provides the child with time to "come to grips with its thoughts and feelings" and perhaps to come back with a different strategy more suited to the new - unpleasant and threatening - data. So the interpretation of this regression as a failure of object love is wrong. The SO, the object chosen as the target of object love, was the wrong object. Object love continues with a different, familiar, object. The child changes objects (from his mother to his self), not his capacity for object-love or its implementation.
If this failure to establish a proper object-relation persists and is not alleviated, all future objects are perceived as extensions of the Primary Object (the self), or the objects of a merger with one's self, because they are perceived narcissistically.
There are, therefore, two modes of object perception:
The narcissistic (all objects are perceived as variations of the perceiving self) and the social (all objects are perceived as others or self-objects).
As we said earlier, the core (narcissistic) self - precedes language or interaction with others. As the core self matures it can develop either into a True Self OR into a False Self. The two are mutually exclusive (a person with False Self has no functioning True Self). The distinction of the False Self is that it perceives others narcissistically. As opposed to it, the True Self perceives others socially.
The child constantly compares his first experience with an object (his internalised PO) to his experience with his SO. The internalisations of both the PO and the SO are modified as a result of this process of comparison. The SO is idealised and internalised to form what I call the SEGO (loosely, the equivalent of Freud's Superego plus the internalised outcomes of social interactions throughout life). The internalised PO is constantly modified to be rendered compatible with input by the SO (for example: "You are loved", or "You are a bad boy"). This is the process by which the Ideal Ego is created.
The internalisations of the PO, of the SO and of the outcomes of their interactions (for instance, of the results of the aforementioned constant comparison between them) form what Bowlby calls "working models". These are constantly updated representations of both the self and of Meaningful Others (what I call Auxiliary Others). The narcissist's working models are defective. They pertain to his self and to ALL others. To the narcissist, ALL others are meaningful because NO ONE has BEEN meaningful hitherto. This forces him to resort to crude abstractions (imagine the sheer number of working models needed).
He is forced to dehumanise, objectify, generalise, idealise, devalue, or stereotypise in order to cope with the sheer volume of potential interactions with meaningful objects. In his defence against being overwhelmed, he feels so superior, so inflated -