Robert Smith and The Cure for Madness, 'Songs of a Lost World'
The Cure Drops New Album in the Nick of Time | Prolonged Grief Disorder
First published in Brussels Morning Newspaper.
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After a 16-year hiatus, weathered, goth legend Robert Smith and the Cure know when to show up to hold us in our grief with a new aptly named album, Songs of a Lost World.
Just as Smith arced his thematic 1982 masterpiece album, Pornography, to a crescendo with the plaintive plea, “I must fight this sickness, find a cure…I must fight this sickness,” with the U.S. election on Tuesday, November 5th, America finds itself at a sickening decrescendo and in need of a burgundy velvet musical enveloping.
I once had a narcissist friend oft repeat the refrain, “Dunning–Kruger ruins everything.” While I don’t disagree, my version of this statement would be, “Narcissism ruins everything.” Narcissism is like mold on a ripened orange; in a fit of destrudo, it decays and decomposes all that was lush and full of life.
As the U.S. sits on the precipice of no return no matter who wins this 2024 epochal presidential race to the bottom, the Cure has your back and fathoms your pain, grief, and sorrow —“broken-voiced lament,” a lyric from the new breakout track “Alone.” As a U.S. citizen born and raised, I yearn to cross the pond back to the motherland that produced Robert Smith — a consistent fixture of solace.
We don’t know what we are doing here in America; we’ve lost the plot on what matters. We are a death cult, and Songs of a Lost World hits the mark. America’s loudness and brashness are no longer doing the trick; no amount of narcissistic bravado and bluster can dig us out of the ditch that we’ve dug for ourselves. When not overtly raging and fretting, we are successfully demoralized, apathetic, and numb from political narcissistic abuse.
No matter who wins this election, half of us are at the other half’s throats. American public intellectual, podcaster, and marketing professor from NYU who now resides in London, Scott Galloway, recently wrote in his newsletter, “I just returned from the U.S. and was struck by how tense things are.”
This inordinate tension and strain will not be easily resolved. There was a feeling that no longer exists when Biden triumphed over Trump in 2020 that the ugly genie of narcissism could be put back into the bottle sequestered like nuclear waste so that we could return to baseline “normal.”
Apropos of America’s falling apart, Robert Smith wails in the song “A Letter to Elise” from the 1992 album Wish:
And every time I try to pick it up like falling sand
As fast as I pick it up
It runs away through my clutching hands
But there’s nothing else I can really do
There’s nothing else I can really do
There’s nothing else I can really do at all
Narcissism has worked its “magic,” coursing through the veins of America, poison that it is, threatening the viability of the very body politic.
A perennial theme of the Cure is the anguish that comes from waking up from ‘make-believe’, a phrase reminiscent of sobering up from the intoxicating shared fantasy in narcissistic abuse.
From “A Letter to Elise” off the album, Wish:
Every way to smile, forget, and make-believe
We never needed any more than this
Any more than this
From “Pictures of You” off the album, Disintegration:
Remembering you running soft through the night
You were bigger and brighter and whiter than snow
And screamed at the make-believe, screamed at the sky
And you finally found all your courage to let it all go
From “More Than This” off the album The X-Files: The Album:
Make-believe in magic
Make-believe in dreams
Make-believe impossible,
Nothing as it seems
To see, touch, taste, smell, hear
But never know if it’s real
From “A Fragile Thing” off the album Songs of a Lost World:
“Every time you leave me is a lie” she said, “You make-believe you need me, but you try too hard and it feels so wrong
You promise me forever, and you say it won’t be long
But it’s too late now for me to just forget”
From “High” off the album, Wish:
And when I see you happy as a girl
That lives in a world of make-believe
It makes me pull my hair all out
To think I could’ve let you leave
Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) is the inability to move on and heal from narcissistic abuse after a year’s time.
Narcissism expert, Prof. Sam Vaknin expounds on PGD in his video Mourning Yourself After Narcissistic Abuse (edited for length and clarity):
Grief is seductive. It’s enticing. Grief has the power of a religion. God, for example, as a single principle, explains everything you know. You don’t need science. You don’t need anything. All you need is God — same with grief. All you need to know is that you’re grieving.
Grief becomes a pivot, the axis around which your life revolves. And you revert to grief all the time when you’re trying to make sense of your life. It works because it has an answer to everything: Why am I sad? Well, because of my loss. Why am I not dating? Well, because of my loss. Why am I not pursuing my academic degree? Well, because of my loss.
Grief is an alibi, an excuse for inaction; you need to extricate yourself from your grief because it will devour you.
Grief is a form of complex trauma and could inadvertently legitimize behaviors that are essentially dysregulated, hurtful, abusive to others, antisocial, and asocial.
Narcissistic abuse engenders prolonged grief disorder in the victim. The narcissist induces prolonged grief disorder in a pernicious, subtle, and subterranean way. The narcissist fosters an addiction to your idealized image.
The narcissist offers you what your mother should have offered you —unconditional love. Only a mother loves her baby unconditionally. The narcissist becomes your mother.
At some point, the narcissist will withdraw the mother projection, take it away, and stop being a mother. This withdrawal is the major engine of prolonged grief disorder.
When you lose your mother as a child, the grief is infinite. The narcissist regresses you into an infantile state and pushes you to become a child again. He is your mother, so you should be a child. If he’s your mother, that means that you’re an infant.
The narcissist provides you with unconditional love, and you become a child again. It’s like a second chance at a childhood and, this time — getting it right. When the narcissist withdraws his love, you become an orphan. The unconditional love is gone. Mother is gone — absent. Now, you are the only mother on the scene. The grief is enormous because you have lost your idealized self-image, you have lost the unconditional love, and you have lost your mother in the shape or form of the narcissist. You’ve lost your mother yet again.
There’s this uncompleted, unfinished business. It’s like you got a chance — the narcissist gives you a chance at a second childhood with a new mother — who is the narcissist. Then you start a relationship with this new mother and then she walks away. And you’re left with this unresolved conflict, an unfinished business.
I call this the dual mothership system. “I will be your mother,” says the narcissist, “if you will be mine.” The narcissist says, “I will idealize you, but in order for me to feel ideal, I own you, you’re my property, I possess you, you’re mine, so that makes me ideal and perfect because I own and possess an ideal and perfect object.”
The narcissist says to you, “I’m going to love you as your mother should have loved you. I’m going to love you unconditionally. I’m going to love you this way because you’re amazing; you’re a genius; you’re incredible; you’re the most beautiful woman on Earth; you’re unprecedented; I’ve never seen anyone like you. I’m going to love you unconditionally. I’m going to love you as a mother because only a mother loves unconditionally.
But adult love is never unconditional. Adult love is conditional. Only a mother loves unconditionally. Love bombing and grooming pretend to provide unconditional love.
The narcissist conveys, “I will let you be seen through my eyes, which are the eyes of a mother. I will let you see yourself through my eyes, which are the eyes of a mother, so that you can finally love yourself and accept yourself through me, through my agency as your mother.”
By the way, there are religious equivalents.
God is supposed to love you infinitely and unconditionally. And that way you can love yourself infinitely and unconditionally because you can love yourself through God’s love.
The narcissist assumes the role of God.
But at some point, he withdraws access to your idealized image when he starts to devalue you. He withdraws his maternal love, his so-called unconditional love.
Then you grieve these losses. It’s prolonged grief because what child can overcome the loss of an infinitely unconditionally loving mother? There’s this sense of all-permeating loss. It’s like you were expelled from the Garden of Eden, from Paradise.
Narcissism is a post-traumatic condition coupled with prolonged grief.
The narcissist is in a constant state of prolonged grief and mourning because the narcissist, as a child, was denied unconditional love and acceptance. The ability to become an individual was never granted.
The narcissist mourns who he could have been. He grieves over who he would have been had he been given the chance.
Narcissists are imbued, oozing grief. The narcissist tries to immerse you, drown you, baptize you with his grief.
There’s a sense of having failed the narcissist, having disappointed mother, because remember, the narcissist is your mother.
From “Pictures of You” off the album Disintegration:
There was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more
Than to feel you deep in my heart
There was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more
Than to never feel the breaking apart
My pictures of you
There’s always a kind of ambient emotional blackmail.
This grief is converted into leverage. The narcissist conveys, “I’m grieving; I’m sad; I’m broken; I’m damaged, so you owe me.” You owe me special consideration, obedience, obeisance — you owe me whatever it is — you owe me. You owe me support — including financial — you owe me because I’m grieving; I’m sad; I’m a tragedy in the making. I’m a victim. To be with the narcissist is to drown in his grief.
The narcissist is dead — dead inside. The narcissist is a zombie; it’s a dead entity; it’s the walking dead. It’s a corpse; it’s an animated corpse. There’s nobody there, only death. Death permeates and engulfs the narcissist, emanates from the narcissist as some kind of miasma, and enshrouds you as well. You’re both enveloped by death. It’s a dead relationship.
The narcissist exports his grief to you; he’s trying to lay it out on you. He’s trying to cleanse himself by infecting, polluting, and contaminating you — this is another source of prolonged grief.
On the one hand, you wanted to make the narcissist happy, joyful, and cheerful. You wanted to take away his grief. Having failed, you feel guilty, ashamed, and inadequate.
And the last thing is the narcissist becomes a symbiont.
A symbiont means that the narcissist creates with you a symbiotic (merger and fusion) relationship akin to a mother-child relationship. He becomes your mother, so he becomes a symbiont.
To disentangle symbiosis in a relationship is the exact equivalent of amputation. If you amputate one of your organs, there will be a grief reaction. There’s even a sense of a phantom organ; the narcissist is still there somehow, even if he’s physically away or absent. There’s a grief reaction over the amputation of the narcissist from your life. The symbiosis is broken, but the symbiosis was you. You were part of the symbiosis; the symbiosis was a part of you. There is a grief reaction that is prolonged and complicated — pathological — because cutting off the narcissist, pushing him away, and breaking up with him amounts to giving up on a part of yourself.
Separating from the narcissist, divorcing him, and disentangling the symbiosis — this is self-grief.
You’re grieving yourself. It’s not grieving only the other person, it’s grieving yourself. You’re grieving yourself in multiple ways:
First of all, you are denied access to the idealized image of yourself, so you can no longer love yourself. Then you lose the symbiont in the symbiosis; you lose the narcissist, so you’re losing a part of you, and you grieve that too. And then there’s the grief over the narcissist.
You convince yourself in your own grief that you’re letting the narcissist down, that you are hurting him. You perceive the breakup as betrayal, that you’ve betrayed the narcissist.
It all comes back to you all the time. It’s like you are losing your mother, you’re losing your child, you’re losing yourself. You’re losing yourself.
It’s about you. The prolonged grief is not about the narcissist. It’s more about the fantasy. The narcissist mourns and grieves the fantasy as well — not you.
Clinically, the narcissist has made you into another narcissist and infected you, exactly like a vampire or a zombie. The narcissist stops mothering you, but you want to continue to mother him. To you, he’s a child. There’s a feeling that you’re missing out on something or on someone, that you’re losing something or someone.
You’re just giving and not taking and not receiving because you continue to be a mother.
What the narcissist succeeds to do — he makes you mourn yourself. He makes you grieve over yourself.
The core issue is that in typical healthy grief, we mourn losses that are external to us. We mourn a loved one. We mourn the loss of a possession, an object, or a job. But in prolonged grief disorder, the grief is over yourself, not over something external, but over yourself.
It’s not possible to grieve anything external for longer than one year if you’re not at the same time grieving a part of yourself.
Grieving yourself, and this is the power of the narcissist over you.
The narcissist makes you mourn yourself because you are no longer.
You were hijacked and transformed by the narcissist. You were made to love an image of yourself that is not you. You were mothered by an unreal mother.
Things have happened to you which were surrealistic and so you’re mourning this dream, this fantasy, a part of you that has never been true. And there’s no end to it because it’s never been true.
How can you put an end to self-grief? If you terminate the grief, you admit that you are no more.
When we grieve, we grieve the loss of something. When we stop grieving, it means that we have accepted the loss of this something. When grieving stops, acceptance sets in. When we accept the loss, we stop grieving.
If I lose a loved one, an external loved one, with whom I’ve had a healthy relationship, it hurts; I cry; I’m sad. But at some point I accept that he or she is no more, no longer in my life.
From “Just like Heaven” off the album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me:
“Why are you so far away?” she said, “Why won’t you ever know that I’m in love with you? That I’m in love with you?”
You, Soft and only
You, Lost and lonely
You, Strange as angels
Dancing in the deepest oceans
Twisting in the water
You’re just like a dream
Just like a dreamDaylight licked me into shape
I must have been asleep for days
And moving lips to breathe her name
I opened up my eyes
And found myself alone
Alone
Alone above a raging sea
That stole the only girl I loved
And drowned her deep inside of me
But what do you do if you’ve lost yourself? How can you stop the mourning? If you stop the mourning, it means that you have accepted the loss of yourself, that you have given up on yourself. It’s self-defeating. You can’t stop grieving, and you can’t stop mourning as long as you are grieving and mourning over yourself.
The minute you stop grieving and mourning, it means you have accepted the loss of you. You have accepted that you are lost, that you are gone, that you are no more. This is the power of narcissistic abuse. It doesn’t allow you to terminate the grief because you can’t accept the loss of you. You can never extricate yourself from this. And this is the missing link in the DSM’s definition. All prolonged grief includes a strong element, if not a dominant element, of grieving over oneself. So grief is interminable because the minute you stop grieving, you have accepted the loss of you. The minute you stop grieving, you have accepted that you are no more. Prolonged grief must include this element of self-grief. There’s no other explanation.
So, to end the grief, you accept a loss. You accept that something is gone, that something is no more.
But how can you accept the loss of you? How can you say, “I am no more”? The narcissist creates a shared fantasy where you fall in love with yourself through him. Through him, you see yourself as an idealized image. You fall in love with your idealized image.
When you talk to victims, they say, “I loved the way that he loved me. I just loved the way that he gazed at me.” They actually fall in love with a mirror. The narcissist is a mirror. If you look into his eyes, you’re going to see a reflection because there’s nothing behind his eyes — nothing, a vacuity, a black hole. His eyes reflect, but they don’t allow access.
You look into the narcissist’s eyes, and you fall in love with yourself through his eyes. And then he becomes your mother, and he gives you unconditional love. And it’s again about you. It’s not about him. It’s about you. The love bombing and grooming phases are about you.
The narcissist gives you unconditional love in these phases; he doesn’t take. He just gives. He gives a great simulation of a mother, and again, it’s about you.
Then, he becomes a symbiont. He creates a symbiosis, and again, it’s about you.
You get nourishment from the symbiosis.
Everything the narcissist creates — the shared fantasy, the dual mothership — is intended to get you addicted to him. He is your drug of choice.
So if the narcissist becomes your mother, if he gives you unconditional love, if he makes you fall in love with an idealized image of yourself, the way a mother does, he’s regressing you to childhood; he’s infantilizing you; he’s creating a dependence in you automatically, unwillingly and you’re becoming a narcissist because children are narcissistic. The minute you are dependent, your locus of control is externalized. That moment, you automatically become a narcissist. You can’t help it.
The narcissist does this to you. He pushes you back. He regresses you to infancy in nice ways, smoothly, with sweet talk; he makes you fall in love with yourself as a mother would. He becomes your mother for a while during love bombing and grooming and you allow yourself to become a child, because it’s an oceanic feeling. It’s a wonderful feeling.
Victims describe the relationship with the narcissist as unique. It’s technicolor. It’s amazing. Everything else is black and white. It’s unprecedented. They’ve never had this before or after. Why? Because victims were allowed to revisit their childhood.
The narcissist’s intimate partners are permitted to become children again. When the victims become children at the beginning of their relationship, they become narcissistic, whether they like it or not, politically correct or not.
The minute they are pushed to become a child, they become a narcissist. The narcissist infects you. This is why I keep saying that narcissism is contagious.
If you did not receive unconditional love as a child or even adolescent, you’re effed for life.
Here comes the narcissist. He’s offering you a second chance, a second dose of unconditional love. He’s a drug dealer. He’s offering you the drug of unconditional love. To recover, you have to grow up again; you have to go through the whole process of separating an individuating from mother from zero.
When you are telling the victim, “Give up on him, forget him, delete him, lose him,” what you’re actually telling her is give up on yourself, kill yourself, delete yourself. If you couple grief with obsession compulsion, what you get is prolonged grief.
Prolonged grief is grief plus compulsion — compulsive grief. To stop the grief, to cease and desist, to stop the mourning, it’s suicide.
If you end the grief, you end yourself. Prolonged grief is an obsessive-compulsive ritual. It’s nightmarish. It’s dreamlike because it’s a shared fantasy. It’s a fantasy escape. It’s a fantasy defense. Getting rid of the narcissist is getting rid of a substantial part of yourself.
So whether you separate from the narcissist or merge with the narcissist, you will still end up feeling dead. There’s no winning strategy.
Separation is perceived as amputation. Both separation and merger are the exact emotional equivalence of death.
In the first case, separation, there’s a lot of guilt.
Victims ironically perceive themselves as abandoning the narcissist. Separation is perceived as betrayal and creates normal shame and guilt.
But the alternative merger and fusion/fusional symbiosis also creates negative emotions because it requires self-sacrifice, self-immolation, and self betrayal.
When we betray ourselves, we develop depression. We don’t feel good about it.
There’s always a lot of shame in having betrayed yourself, having degraded yourself, having disrespected yourself. It’s shameful. Either way, you end up with shame and guilt. What happens is when you separate, you’re left only with bad introjects. You’re left only with bad internal objects.
Either you had betrayed others, or you had betrayed yourself. In any case, you are Judas Iscariot. In any case, you are a traitor. One way or another, you can’t emerge from this smelling like a rose. This is the source of shame and guilt.
The narcissist goes through exactly the same process with his mother. Narcissism is grounded in shame. It’s a compensatory reaction to shame. There’s a pervasive reservoir of shame in narcissism. Narcissism compensates for the shame with a grandiose reaction.
The narcissist’s creed is emotional artifacts. Your shame is not real. It’s an artifact. Your guilt is not real because you’re ashamed, and you feel guilty for something that had never existed.
The Paracosm, the shared fantasy, is not real. Your idealized image was never real. The mother figure that a narcissist had enacted for you was not real. His unconditional love was not real. Your reaction to his unconditional love was not real. In short, nothing was real. Nothing was real.
The victim comes to realize that nothing, but I mean nothing was real. There’s not a single element in relationships with narcissists that is real. Not the cognitions, not the emotions, not the effects, not the behaviors, not the traits, not the perceptions, not the information. Nothing is real. The regression is catastrophic under the influence of the narcissist. The symbiosis is total. The immersion is complete.
Extricating the victim from this immersion requires a process of growing up: separate, individuate, mature, develop object relations again, trust again, and so on.
You cannot betray something that is not real. Narcissists never lie to you. They never gaslight you. They never do anything to you because it’s all a video game to them.
They’re not embedded in reality. Whatever they do is just a game. The shared fantasy is a game. The relationship is a game.
And the other person is a baby and also just an object — not real. Narcissists don't perceive their intimate partner as real. It’s not real in any sense.
That’s why these objects out there, also known as insignificant others or intimate partners, they’re interchangeable. They’re fungible. They’re not real. They’re like coins. Narcissists internally perceive all this as a video game. They have this perception that it’s a movie, a kind of movie. They walk away unscathed and unperturbed because game over, you know? The victim experienced it as real. What they’ve come through was a simulation, a simulated scenario. It’s a game. And that they were merely characters in a video game.
A political rally is a simulated zone. It’s a dream. It’s a fantasy, but people become one. There are studies of crowd psychology and mob psychology, e.g., a good rock concert.
There are many situations where you lose yourself into a simulation and you begin to perceive the fantasy. And everything that’s happening is real. When you watch a movie, there’s a lot of dissociation going on.
We inhabit imaginary spaces. We’re made of dreams. We are the only type of organism that sacrifices its life for fiction.
Here you are, the one and only chosen. You’re chosen. It’s an irresistible temptation to be selected for a perfect simulated environment replete with cognitions, emotions, behaviors, traits, expectations, narratives, laws, and so on.
And we have a name for that. It’s called a cult.
Many people fall prey to cults. The individuation of a victim of narcissistic abuse involves deprogramming cult messaging. A cult is a simulated space where there’s a narrative that has extremely little to do with reality.
Cults engender in their members’ emotional and cognitive artifacts. The members of cults resonate with each other and, above all, with the leader.
The only thing the narcissist offers you — the only kind of simulation that you won’t be able to resist — is unconditional self-love the way a mother does.
That’s it. You’re not to blame. No one would be able to say no to such an offer.
—Narcissism expert, Prof. Sam Vaknin on PGD in his video Mourning Yourself After Narcissistic Abuse
Two weeks ago, Robert Smith was interviewed on The Cure - Robert Smith Interview - Songs of A Lost World where he imparted, “…It’s madness; it really is. That’s the reason the world is falling apart is greed, inequality, and monetization--it’s insane.”
From “And Nothing is Forever” off the album Songs of a Lost World:
And slide down close beside me in the silence of a heartbeat
And wrap your arms around me with a murmured lullaby
As a memory of the first time, in the stillness of a teardrop
As you hold me for the last time in the dying of the light
I know, I know that my world is grown old
And nothing is forever
I know, I know that my world is grown old
But it really doesn’t matter
If you say we’ll be together
If you promise you’ll be with me in the end /[as an introject]
Smith reminds us how fragile connections are. Prolonged grief involves romanticizing anguish. The Cure has always reminded me of the essence that is mine and mine alone, complementary to though unencumbered by the impacts of narcissistic abuse.
Circa 1997, I stood on line at Tower Records on Broadway in Soho, Manhattan to meet Robert Smith and get his autograph well before the advent of the selfie. When I approached the modest slim table he was sitting behind, I asked him how he was doing and he replied to my delight that he was “pretty placid.” Placid happened to be my favorite word at the time. If Smith, grief rocker that he is, can achieve a placid state of mind then we, too, can find inspiration to not be too easily excited or upset.
Bonus Content:
Nine Inch Nails: The Ultimate Soundtrack for Narcissistic Abuse Recovery by Ginger Coy for Concerning Narcissism
Iconic Britpop band, Blur returns after eight years with 'The Narcissist' by Ginger Coy for Concerning Narcissism
Narcissist as Grieving Infant by Sam Vaknin
Civilization, Democracy, America, and the Future by Umair Haque for The Issue
New album from the Cure is the band’s best since ‘Disintegration’ by Chris Kelly for The Washington Post
How Robert Smith of the Cure Became Rock’s Most Dogged Activist by Ben Sisario for the New York Times
The Cure: Ten Imaginary Years Paperback – 1988 by Barbarian, Steve Sutherland, Robert Smith
THE CURE LIVE :: SONGS OF A LOST WORLD ALBUM SHOW -3 hour live streamed show from London, Nov. 1. 2024
I love The Cure. And i find narcissism fascinating. Thanks! 😀
'The Cure' for the narcissist use to be jail, hospital or army. I bet in jail!