ABSTRACT
From the moment of birth and the departure from the protected space of the womb, the newborn is a separate mental entity from his mother, loaded with an inherited genetic makeup and physiological sensations rooted in his manifold intrauterine sensory experiences. Under the impact of constant resonances of negative memory traces, the entire emotional organisation may be constituted in false cohesiveness or in fragile shaping or incoherence, arousing a sense of fusion with the object and resulting in self-object familiarity. The individual's narcissism is thus programmed to process constantly, differentially supported, by ego functioning and the influences of object relations. Relationships may be conceptualised on a scale ranging from a jointness-separateness pattern of object relations to a symbiotic or traumatic pattern, with various configurations in between. The conceptualisation of innate immune narcissism and subsequent reverberations of the narcissistic schemata may clarify why familiarity is so tempting and strangeness so unbearable.
