Parents · Partners · Children — from self to objects
An invitation Ohrid · 2026
For four unhurried days on the shores of Lake Ohrid — Europe's oldest lake, a UNESCO mirror older than any of us — a small gathering will trace the arc of a single human story: how a child becomes a narcissist, how that narcissist becomes a partner, and how that partner, in turn, becomes a parent. The wheel completes. The wheel begins again.
“Here we go again.” Inter-generational transmission is not a metaphor. It is the architecture of the soul, handed down like an inheritance no one asked for.
This is a seminar in the old sense: a circle of attention. There are no panels, no plenaries, no parallel tracks. There is one teacher, one room, one lake outside the window — and a body of work forty years in the making, opened from the inside, page by page, gaze by gaze.
Movement I The Inverted Human
We begin where every honest investigation begins — by dismantling the question itself. Gender, heredity, DSM versus ICD, healthy adult narcissism, the cathexis of the self versus the object. The map before the territory.
Controversies that won't die: gender and masculine self-concept, the medicalization of the brain, the empty schizoid core, the False Self as Moloch and the True Self as human sacrifice. Narcissism, Sam will argue, is a missionary distributed religion.
A close reading of Mark Thomas Beare's emerging theories of narcissistic abuse — the Multi-Phase Identity Trauma model and the Abusive Symbolic Restructuring framework — alongside, and in dialogue with, Sam's own four-decade corpus.
The False Self is a cloak — a Harry Potter-like contraption — protecting the narcissist and rendering him invisible and omnipotent at the same time.Sam Vaknin · Malignant Self-Love
Movement II The Parents
A full day inside the narcissistic family of origin. Not the child of the narcissist — that comes later — but the narcissist's own parents: their styles, their inversions, the long shadow they cast on a self that never quite forms.
The two faces of the parental narcissist. The grandiose mother who devours; the vulnerable mother who weeps. The exhibitionist father who shines; the martyr father who collects. Each produces a different child — and each child carries a different wound.
Protective micromanaged inflation versus indifferent or abusive deflation. Co-idealization versus devaluation. The defining gaze and its absence — the "dead mother" whose absence is internalized, the "hall of mirrors" mother whose presence engulfs.
How separation-individuation fails. How the child gets stuck in apprehensive knowing, never reaching comprehensive knowing. How the False Self forms as a Harry Potter cloak — invisible and omnipotent at once — and how the True Self is sacrificed to make the child survive.
Movement III The Partners
The day belongs to those who loved a narcissist and lived to tell about it. The cycle of co-idealization, devaluation, discard, and hoovering. The strategies of survival. The grammar of healing.
Dual mothership as transference. The hall of mirrors, the kaleidoscopic hive mind. Lovebombing as gaze-restoration. Why the partner is converted into a "dead, frustrating, withholding, betraying mother" — and why this conversion is the engine of every breakup.
How to live next to envy, the hallmark of narcissism. How to recognize the narcissist's zero-sum game. How to remain a person while another is consuming you as an extension of his self. Practical, gentle, unsparing.
What it means to find the lost self after the False Self of another has occupied your interior. Object constancy versus introject inconstancy. Hegel's negation of the negation. Empathy as a form of healthy narcissism. A path home.
Who joins the circle the audiences of Ohrid
The Vaknin-Rangelovska seminars draw an unusual mix. There are practising psychologists and psychotherapists who arrived through Sam's lectures at CIAPS Cambridge, UK or his appointments at Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, Russia and South East European University in North Macedonia. There are survivors of narcissistic abuse who have read every book and want to sit, finally, in the room. There are academics, journalists, family-court professionals, and — quietly — adult children of narcissists who came alone and leave less alone. And there are those rare and welcome guests: NPD patients themselves, present, listening, examining the mirror.
Movement IV The Children
The narcissist becomes a parent — but cannot. He is still a child. The roles of his own children shift across his lifecycle. And the pattern hands itself, like a sealed envelope, to the generation that follows.
Why the narcissist cannot, structurally, be a parent — because parenthood requires object relations, and he has none. The child becomes a sibling, a competitor, a self-object, a supply. Second childhood is not a metaphor: it is the only childhood the narcissist has ever had.
Golden child, scapegoat, lost child, parentified child, surrogate spouse. How the roles rotate. How siblings are pitted. How a child learns, before language, that being seen is dangerous and not being seen is annihilation.
The closing session, and the most important one. How narcissism replicates itself — not through genetics but through gaze, through mirroring failure, through the False Self handed down as the only model of personhood the family has ever known. And how, sometimes, against all of it, a child wakes up and breaks the chain.
The vocabulary of the seminar a working glossary
A short field guide to the concepts Sam will return to across the four days. Each is the doorway into a deeper room.
A hive, a colony, relational. A decoy that attracts the fire, tough as nails, a proxy for the True Self the child could not afford to be.
A black hole at the center where a self should be. Like a supernova: the pathologies and addictions that circle it substitute for identity. Behaviour is determined by the void, not by the halo.
Not a physical fact — a caregiving attitude. Lacan: the unconscious is a compendium of other people's gazes. The mother's gaze is the primal trauma of being seen, and the only salve for it.
The mother actively reflects the child to itself, idealized and aggrandized. This affords the child the grandiose energy to take on the world. When the mother is "dead", the mirror reflects only her — never him.
A dual-mothership transference. The partner is recruited as mother and mirror at once. The fantasy is its own object — sustaining itself until reality intrudes and the partner becomes a persecutory object.
The hallmark of narcissism and the prime source of narcissistic rage. The narcissist would rather destroy himself than endure another's wholeness. He claims to be the only good object in the universe — to be immune to his own annihilating envy.
Kohut's term for people who function as extensions of the self. Their role is to regulate the narcissist's self-esteem and absorb his dysregulation — the way a parent provides internal regulation to a child.
Freud, 1938. The shock of facing the discrepancy between the endorsed view of self and a drastically contrasting realization. The moment the False Self fails — and the wheel begins to turn again.
He inhabits an eternal present. The future is hazy abstraction or magical certainty. Time itself is one of his cognitive deficits — and one of the reasons love does not develop in him.
Grotstein and Kernberg, refined. BPD as failed NPD; NPD as defence against BPD. External objects become internal; the False Self begins as internal and ends as external. Decompensation reverses the sequence.
Self as one's own sex object. Partner as masturbatory prop. Intimate partners develop aversion. Cleckley described this in 1942: sexual self-trashing preferred to mainstream intimacy.
The wheel completes. The wheel begins again. Mirroring failures, gaze deficits, and False Selves are handed down — not by DNA but by relationship. Here we go again.
In dialogue with the scholars Sam quotes
Sam's seminar is a four-day conversation with the dead and the living — Freud and Lacan, Kohut and Kernberg, Winnicott and Fonagy, Bollas and Cleckley, Helene Deutsch and Heinz Hartmann, Stolorow and Fiscalini and Green and Meissner — and his contemporaries: Mark Thomas Beare, Elsa Ronningstam, the new generation reading the old.
Sigmund Freud
Mortification, ego ideal
Jacques Lacan
The gaze, apperception
Heinz Kohut
Selfobjects, transferences
Otto Kernberg
NPD as defence against BPD
D. W. Winnicott
False Self, True Self
Peter Fonagy
Mentalization, IWM
Christopher Bollas
The unthought known
Helene Deutsch
The “as if” personality
Hervey Cleckley
Mask of Sanity, 1942
André Green
The dead mother
Elsa Ronningstam
Contemporary nosology
Mark Thomas Beare
MPIT & ASR theories
Lacan suggested that the unconscious — the seat of repressed traumas — is a compendium of other people's gazes. The mother's gaze is the cause of the formation of the unconscious; its nucleus is this primal trauma of being seen.From the Ohrid notes · Mother's Gaze
Watch the seminar and the work that led to it
For those who could not make it to Ohrid in May, Sam's YouTube playlists trace exactly the journey this seminar took — including the full recordings of the Ohrid sessions themselves, in his own voice, over many hours.
From the four days the room, the lake, the faces
Photos and videos from each day of the seminar. Click a day below to open its folder, where you can view and download the media files.
Going deeper beyond the four days
For those who want to keep going after the lake is behind them — a curated path through Sam's existing writing and lectures on the themes Ohrid covered.
A journey toward shared understanding
Knowledge alone does not heal — but knowledge shared, in a room, beside a lake, with a teacher who has spent a lifetime mapping this terrain, has a way of becoming something more than information. It becomes recognition. And recognition, for those of us who were never quite seen, is the beginning of being.
Four days. One subject. Ten sessions. One circle. Whether you arrived as clinician, researcher, survivor, or seeker — you leave with a working understanding of what a narcissist is, where the narcissist comes from, what the narcissist does to those who love him, and what — if anything — can be done about it.
The Vaknin-Rangelovska Foundation thanks you for attending our free Ohrid seminar. We thank CIAPS, Cambridge, UK for making it possible. See you in Bitola in May 2027!
— With gratitude · Ohrid · May 2026