Ziying/Article When
watching the TV series "A Floating Phantom", I thought, if the protagonist Mildred's daughter Veda was my client, how would I proceed with this case?
Veda has a typical narcissistic personality disorder, which is likely to have antisocial personality characteristics. She was born in a middle-class family in the United States in the 1930s. It was during the Great Depression in the United States. His father had an affair with other women, and his mother Mildred divorced her in anger. In order to raise two daughters, Mildred, who was a housewife, had to work. Veda was only 11 years old at the time, and her narcissistic personality had already emerged.
The biggest feature of narcissistic personality disorder is self-esteem deficiency, so it constantly needs to be recognized from the outside. In severe cases, it can do whatever it takes. The main emotions of narcissists are shame and jealousy, and their subjective experience is the sense of shame and fear of being humiliated. Veda was considered by her mother to be gifted and noble, so she trained her to read poetry and play the piano. Therefore, she admired the life of the upper class at a very young age and felt humiliated by her mother's work as a waitress. In the play, Mildred dared not tell her daughters what she was doing outside. In the attic of the work clothes, Veda turned out the work clothes, put them on the employees at home, and asked the female worker to act as a servant to serve her. She did this not only to expose her mother's deceitful tricks and to humiliate her, but to defend against her inner fear. At this time, her self-esteem defect has been exposed: she cannot accept her middle-class origin. The only way for her to maintain her self-esteem is to pretend to be a lady of the upper class in her life.
Her mother Mildred is the booster of her personality. The dream of her daughter Veda is not her dream. This is an important reason why she cultivated her daughter to learn piano from an early age and developed her musical talent. And when she was desperate and forced to go to the restaurant to serve dishes, she refused to tell her daughter the truth, but continued to maintain her daughter's vanity and exaggerated material needs. In addition, when she quit her job as a waitress and started her own restaurant, she met two men who admired him, and she naturally became lovers with them. These are clearly seen by the daughter.
However, Mildred is essentially a kind and simple person. Her admiration for the upper class only stays at the level of envy. Her interactions with men are the result of the entanglement of emotions and desires, and there are not many situations in which they use each other. In the eyes of her daughter, all of these have changed. Veda received a distorted message: If she does not enter the upper-class society, she will be ashamed to death; men can use it, and women's beauty and body are the capital.
It can be said that Veda's self is seriously flawed, and she cannot gain her self-esteem from a middle-class family that is bankrupt in reality. The person who loves her the most and the person closest to her is her mother, but her mother’s "low" background is her eternal shadow. "Snack bar" about the country woman. Her mother is her source, her root, and she is internalized as a lowly part of herself, which humiliates her all the time. Therefore, she hates her mother most in her life.
And the instigator of Veda's self-deficiency is her mother Mildred herself. What if she confessed the actual situation of the family to her daughter when she was a waitress? If after being discovered by her daughter, when she and her daughter cried, she did not promise that "I am a waitress not to do this humble job, but to prepare for opening a restaurant and earn money to maintain your vanity in the future", but frankly confessed "Work is glorious, and it is shameful not to work", what will happen?
Another typical scenario is that Mildred promised to buy a piano as a Christmas gift for little Veda, but Mildred did not save enough money, so he bought a watch for her. Veda lost his temper. In order to cut expenses, Mildred broke up with his lover Monty. Since Monty's company went bankrupt in recent months, Monty has been relying on her to make ends meet.
Mildred's approach is like the typical practice of many parents: what I didn't get, I want my daughter and son to get it; I didn't become that kind of person, I want my son and daughter to be that kind of person. As everyone knows, this kind of parenting method is cultivating one's own enemies. You are not accepting the deficiencies in your personality, but project the highest and most ideal part on your daughter, then you will become the lowest and most humble part of your daughter’s personality, and the latter will definitely want to cut you off when he grows up. .
Another emotion of narcissistic personality disorder is jealousy. This is also evident in Veda. When she was eleven, her mother's lover Monty entered her life. Monty is a declining nobleman, representing the upper class. The relationship between her mother and Monty stimulated her jealousy, she invisibly regarded her mother as a rival in sexual competition. And a vulgar woman with a greasy muscle smell like her mother can actually win an upper-class man like Monty, and she also knows that women have the same unfavorable capital: beauty and body.
In addition, Monty's words and deeds have no intention to strengthen the opposition of Veda's own personality: the gifted and tasteful upper-class lady (represented by Monty) and the stupid low-taste non-high-class vulgar woman (represented by his mother Mildred). When Veda grew up, this opposition developed into a state of incompatibility between water and fire. At this time, Veda thought of a solution, which was to use everyone's feelings towards her to get to the top, that is, to make herself ruthless.
Veda's unscrupulous approach to gain selfish desire has the characteristics of anti-social personality. The important feature of anti-social personality is the lack of empathy for the situation of others, and the unscrupulous use of others. Narcissistic personality and antisocial personality do have many overlaps, but Veda has more obvious characteristics of narcissistic personality, because its driving force is shame and jealousy, and its defense method is idealization. The omnipotent control of anti-social personality comes from the fear of one's own incompetence.
After the death of Veda's piano teacher, her mother took her to find another famous conductor. As a result, Veda's playing skills were completely denied. After returning home, Veda fell into a slump and fell into a strong self-denial. This is a typical characteristic of a person with a narcissistic personality disorder: idealization and derogation, I am either the best or the worst. But the clever Veda thought of another path into the upper class society. She went to the show business without telling her mother, got acquainted with the son of a famous director, had sex with him, and then accused the latter of being unscrupulous in order to blackmail a sum of money.
In Mildred's mind, his daughter Veda has always been an innocent little white rabbit. The director's wife came to the door to warn Mildred that she initially thought that her daughter had been bullied and wanted to call the director's son to the police. Until Veda admits: Don’t let the police catch him back. He is so obsessed with me that he will ask to marry me when he comes back, and I don’t want to marry him. All I want is money! At this point, Veda's character was completely exposed, Mildred was dizzy, but it was too late.
Mildred’s blind spot lies in the fact that no matter how many personality disorders are exposed in the childhood Veda and the adult Veda, she ignores it, or insists on the old school style of discipline: meeting all the material needs of her daughter, and even bowing to her daughter. Perhaps in the depths of her subconscious, her daughter is still the one who can replace her as a lady of the upper class.
It was Veda's later music teacher who said well: Veda is a viper in the desert. Can you bring it back as a pet? No, you can only let it go.
After successfully becoming a Huaqiang soprano and becoming famous on the local radio station, Veda began to use his mother and stepfather intentionally or unintentionally. Veda is not without feelings for her mother, but compared to gratitude for her mother's upbringing grace, her sense of shame for her mother's "lower birth" is several times stronger. Shame is the most painful emotion for her. Her defense against this kind of shame is to "kill the mother" in her heart, and externally, she "dehumanizes" her mother-she is just my object of use and has no emotional involvement. Naturally it will not cause pain.
Therefore, for the mother and daughter, the best solution is not to enter each other's lives, then Mildred will not touch Veda's inner pain or remind her of the source of her shame. Once the two "reconciled", they will return to the previous mode. Mildred will inevitably indulge her daughter, and Veda will inevitably start defense. When he was young, he constantly exposed the little tricks of his mother to conceal the truth. When he was old, he used his mother. Her mother customized expensive costumes for her, booked more than a dozen tickets for performances, held a celebration banquet, did not hesitate to lose the company, and even faced bankruptcy. These were not voluntarily requested by Veda, but Mildred's subconscious way of treating her daughter; for Veda Whether her mother has money or no money, whether her company is booming or bankrupt, or whether she is born or died, it is all her own choice and nothing to do with her. Only by grasping "it has nothing to do with herself" can she resist the inner pain.
So, blindly condemning Veda for being selfish, cold, and unscrupulous, and didn't make the point. For Veda's personality, this is her "best" way to face her mother. Even if she is already very famous at this time and has made a lot of money, she will never refuse her mother to take money to "support" her, nor will she actively pay for clothing and banquet fees, let alone whether the mother's company has lost money. What kind of. What she is thinking about is how to use the available resources. So she looked at her stepfather, her mother's old lover, and the nobleman Monty.
In her childhood, Monty had an incomparable sexual attraction to her: handsome, dashing, and most importantly, from the idle upper class society. When the TV series played the scene of 11-year-old Veda and 32-year-old Monty, my first feeling was that Veda would climb into Monty’s bed someday. Sure enough, ten years later, just because Monty had a relationship with another big company that could help her develop in New York, she decisively entered Monty's room while her mother was not at home.
The scene at this time is that Veda walks naked to the mirror. She unscrupulously shows her young and beautiful body in front of her mother. This is a kind of show off and declaration: Look, I am victorious.
The scary thing about Veda is that she not only has a narcissistic personality disorder, but is also very talented. Not only is she talented in music, but also good at using a woman’s natural capital. Therefore, it was originally a painful self-esteem defect that became her success. Power. If the TV series continue, then after arriving in New York, Veda is likely to be like a monkey breaking corn, throwing away Monty, and then looking for a new Monty.
It must be said that Mildred's love for her daughter has serious problems, blind and ignorant. It was she who personally cultivated a possible little devil into a big devil. From the perspective of the whole play, although Mildred's favorite person is her daughter Veda, she has never really touched Veda's heart. She doesn't know what her daughter really wants. In the film, there are many scenes of mother and daughter reconciliation after a dispute, and there always seems to be something wrong. The reason is that their hearts are never really connected.
The soul of Veda is the representative of the devil. Mildred chose Veda to be his child, much like God and the devil made a bet: Can Veda, the soul buried with the seeds of evil, be saved? It's a pity that Mildred's parenting method is wrong one step at a time. In the beginning, Veda’s personality disorder might just be rebelling against her mother and not seeing herself, but Mildred had only two ways to cope with it: a taste of morality and teaching; blindly indulging her daughter’s unrealistic vanity. Veda is like meeting a child in a quagmire, and this little girl is also an unredeemed child in Mildred. Mildred has never really seen her, let alone brought light and love to her. In the end, this bet was completely defeated by God and the devil was completely defeated.
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