Evolving Lacanian Perspectives for Clinical Psychoanalysis

On Narcissism, Sexuation, and the Phases of Analysis in Contemporary Culture

Raul Moncayo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429913365
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book presents an evolving Lacanian reading of the psychoanalytic theory of narcissism, of the phases within Oedipus, transference, and within different types of analytic treatments. Sexual difference between psychical masculinity and femininity is formulated as a negative dialectic: both sexes are not without having and not having the phallus across levels of logical organization and the three registers of experience. Many clinical examples and vignettes are offered to illustrate Lacanian theory, the permutations within sexuation, as well as the various principles of Lacanian clinical practice. The Lacanian multiform criterion for the practice of psychoanalysis is presented as an alternative to the post-Freudian notions of a standard frame, or a holding environment. The criterion extends the use of psychoanalysis to a larger group of clinical, socio-economic, and multicultural populations. Finally, the book explores the criteria used for the authorization of the analyst, and how supervision differs from analysis, and from the teacher-student and lover-beloved relationships.

Part One
Lacanian Theory

Chapter One
Forms and Transformations of Narcissism: The Partial Object, the Ideal Ego, the Ego Ideal, and the Empty Subject

Introduction

Overall, Freud’s theory has a built-in tension and ambiguity between a developmental and a structural concept of narcissism. On the developmental side, Freud (1911) first conceived of narcissism as a phase of sexual development where the individual begins taking its own body as a love object. In line with this perspective, Freud defined primary narcissism as corresponding to the ego-representation involved in this sexual phase of development, where the ego loves the image of his/her own body.

Secondary narcissism was then defined as a regressive and pathological return to the primary narcissism of early childhood. Narcissism in this account is a primitive and temporary phase of development that, if unchecked, becomes ultimately pathological. The narcissistic or ego-centred phase of development in which an object relationship does not exist needs to be abandoned in favour of a more advanced object-oriented phase of development. However, the limitation of establishing an absolute developmental difference between a narcissistic and an object phase of development is that subject and object co-arise or mutually determine each other. Narcissistic and object love are interrelated.

On the other hand, in his paper on narcissism, Freud (1914) considers the ego as a reservoir of libidinal cathexis from whence the latter are issued towards objects. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) have pointed out that such an energetic definition presupposes a structural rather than a stadial or temporal conception of narcissism. These authors also note that Freud differentiated autoerotism from narcissism by emphasising a lack of an inborn unity to the ego. This distinction seems to allude to an implicit dialectic between the developmental and structural perspectives. In other words, the unity of the ego as a mental agency/representation is not inborn but is rather established by a particular psychical or mental action. But once the unity of the ego of narcissism is established, it remains as a more or less permanent and non-pathological structure of the subject.

With his concept of the mirror phase, Lacan (1951) purported to explain the precise nature of the particular mental action intuited by Freud regarding the formation of the ego in the so-called narcissistic phase of development. In Lacan’s theory, the ego, as a particular form of unity within the psyche or as a manifestation of psychical unity, appears correlated if not consequential to the formation of a body image or a bodily schema. Once the organism becomes a body image presented to the mind, the body as specular image not only becomes a precipitant of mental organisation but in turn the mental representation of the body also facilitates motor development and dexterity.

Lacanian theory converges with the prevailing intersubjective theory of narcissism and Lacan, in fact, may have been one of its precursors. Lacan has been credited with coining the term intersubjective. The image the child acquires of himself/herself is modelled after the other and the other’s object of desire. Narcissism does not in fact represent the absence of an “object relation” given that the self-object (the specular image) pre-exists as an object of the mother’s desire. Thus, as Laplanche and Pontalis also point out, Freud’s concept of narcissism represents identification with the other and the internalisation of a relationship with the other. Narcissism, whether primary or secondary, never precedes loving others because in loving himself/herself the ego loves the other. Self-love cannot be the originary form of love, because the existence of the object precedes that of the ego.

However, in his second topography of the mind, where Freud (1923) developed the concepts of id, ego and super-ego, Freud defined primary narcissism as a primordial state prior to the formation of the ego, the prototype of which would be intra-uterine life. It remains unclear what would be narcissistic about this state given that there is no rudiment of a differentiated ego-representation that could be cathected or loved. Thus, this conception of primary narcissism differs from the earlier view where primary narcissism represented the first form of ego representations and secondary narcissism was a regressive and pathological return to the primary narcissism of early childhood. In this second view of primary narcissism, the principal characteristic of primary narcissism is not a first form of ego representation or an absence of a relationship to an object but a lack of differentiation or the presence of a fusion between subject and object, self and other. Primary narcissism is only narcissistic in the sense that it is characterised by an absence of a differentiated and conscious relationship to the external environment. This could not be otherwise given that the primary objects in the infant’s world represent the environment and these have not yet been differentiated from the ego. Differentiation has to wait until identification of the primary objects takes place. The first perceptual identity with the object constitutes the first part-representation of the ego but where the latter has not yet differentiated from the former.

Following Lacan, the beginning of a differentiation between self and other, subject and object, needs to be considered according to the mirror phase whereby the ego or ideal ego is defined by the specular image (image in the mirror) that results from identification with the mother’s desire. The specular image would constitute a structural form of secondary narcissism. In contrast to this, the notion of secondary narcissism as regression to the narcissism of early childhood needs to be understood as a defence formation in response to Oedipal configurations that come to redefine and re-articulate structural and necessary narcissism. Such Oedipal configurations will be discussed further on.

This chapter will also postulate the existence of further structural differentiations within narcissism generated by the establishment of the ego-ideal and of the symbolic function of the father. In these instances, a third or fourth degree within narcissism does not refer to psychopathology but to structural permutations within subjectivity. Such a formulation attempts to combine the critical analysis of narcissistic identifications begun by Freud, with the realisation of the necessity and inevitability of subjective structure and the capacity for love, desire and enjoyment. Narcissism only becomes psychopathological when these further differentiations within subjectivity have not been established.

A differentiation between secondary and tertiary narcissism is postulated following a distinction between the ideal ego of the specular image associated with identification with the mother, and the ego-ideal linked to a symbolic identification with the father. Following Lacan, the ego-ideal constitutes a further or tertiary differentiation within narcissism in relationship to the symbolic recognition of the father. But here Lacan subjects the ego-ideal to a critical analysis not found in Freud, at least in a systematic fashion. Thus, this chapter will postulate a final, end state differentiation within narcissism. It remains an open question whether such a state should still be considered a form or degree of narcissism. The ego ideal refers to an imaginary identification with the father, whereas what I call the empty subject refers to the function of the symbolic father as an empty symbolic function without a name or image but still a function, nonetheless.

The task of the analyst is to serve as a support for this function by ultimately being empty of content that could define the identity of the analysand. The recognition of the lack in the Other leads to a fourth degree differentiation within narcissism that coincides with what Kohut (1966) called cosmic narcissism. Such end state form of subjectivity is differentiated from first-degree primary narcissism, because it is the result of the separations introduced by the paternal function.

The unborn and absolute primary narcissism

For Freud, the state of primary narcissism was narcissistic due to the absence of a relation with the environment similarly to that found in dreams. However, Green (1970) has observed that Freud distinguished between narcissism in sleep and the narcissism of dreaming. Sleeping is the example that Freud uses to describe what he called absolute primary narcissism as an analogous state to the conditions that prevailed in intra-uterine life. In both cases, as Green remarked, the subject is stripped and divested of outer garments, of social links, goods, and possessions. The subject is shielded and removed from external stimuli and investments and remains relaxed, reposed, and at rest. However, if there were no identifiable subject in relationship to an object, the distinction between an internal or external world would not apply. Moreover, intra-uterine life does not represent a state of solipsistic encapsulation and separation from the world but rather one of profound connection and interpenetration of life processes. In intra-uterine life the child is intrinsically related to the environment represented by the mother’s body. The body of the mother both relates to the external environment and shields the child from it. In this sense, intra-uterine life, as a prototype of primary narcissism, represents an inter-organismic and inter-psychic condition whereby subject and object, mother and child, have not been differentiated.

In primary narcissism there is a relationship to the environment but the subjective pole of the relationship has not been differentiated. Intra-uterine life represents a self-experience for the foetus but it would not be narcissistic to the extent that narcissism presupposes a distinction between subject and object. From this vantage point, absolute primary narcissism can be viewed as a principle of quiescence to be distinguished from the elation, expansion, and isolation more commonly associated with the ego or primal object of the narcissism of dreaming and wishing. In contrast to the peace and silence of sleep, dreaming is what refuses to be reduced to silence and which sleep is forced to incorporate and accept in order to avoid its own interruption. Rather than sleep it is dreaming that represents a state of solipsistic encapsulation and separation from the world. According to Freud and Lacan, all the characters that appear in dream are representations of the dreamer himself/herself.

In contrast to the narcissism which aims to promote the success of the ego, the other narcissism of sleep carries the subject towards a region of being/non-being wherein the ego vanishes. The narcissism of sleep can be considered as a form of self-experience that is also a no-ego or a psychical topographical space/place where self and no-self coincide rather than collide. Although these two forms of narcissism are reflections of two different modalities, Freud did not supply a theory that could combine these two orientations into a single theory. Thus, within psychoanalytic theory the notion of an absolute primary narcissism linked to a principle of quiescence and profound connection tends to get lost. On the other hand, this is the basis for the reality ego, although this formulation constitutes a reification of psychical processes that could just as well be described as being without self. In what Freud called “perfect ego functioning”, the sense of ego is lost to a wider or larger experience of reality better described by Freud’s descriptive unconscious, Lacan’s subject of the Unconscious or symbolic order and even a notion of a Big self that is not grandiose but reality-based. Coherent and articulate speech is a good example of a functioning wherein the subject, for the most part, has spontaneous and seemingly effortless access to an unconscious (in a descriptive sense) pool of vocabulary, logic, and eloquence.

Basically the question of narcissism within psychoanalysis has been an answer to the question of selfhood. Psychoanalysis has ostensibly described the self as a form of libidinal attachment or fixation to ego-representations of various kinds. Within absolute primary narcissism, what Lacan calls a pre-subject (explained further on) functions according to a pre-libidinal organismic energy akin to Lacan’s jouissance of the body or of being. No ego exists at this point. Jouissance means both pleasure and pain, and a good example of this would be the process of birth itself. During birth both the mother and child are subjected to the pulsating (contracting and expanding) pangs of the birth process that ultimately culminates in a quiescent holding of the child in the mother´s arms. Having newly arrived in the world, for a moment, the child is awake and at rest in his/her own being. The libido proper begins with what Freud called the experience of satisfaction, and the perceptual identity with the object (the breast/objet à). Now the jouissance of the body and of being will become the jouissance of the Other, in relationship to the breast and maternal desire.

Thus, it is also possible to formulate the question of self before and beyond the ego. In the pre-subject and in the self as object there is self-experience, even identity in the sense of sameness without difference, and in the sense of identity with the object, as well as energy and libido, but there is no ego. Thus, no-ego does not mean no-identity but a different form of identity.

At first the connections of no-self are founded on the biological homeostasis of the body. For example, breathing as an image or function of the body that is connected to different organisms and to the earth through the vehicle of the air and oxygen that we all depend on. Dolto (1997) has identified breathing as the most archaic unconscious image of the body and as an example of what she calls fundamental narcissism. Dolto’s fundamental narcissism can also be linked with Green’s other narcissism of sleep or Freud’s absolute primary narcissism. The other narcissism of sleep and of breathing represents the unconscious homeostasis and function of the organism. Thus, following Dolto, and Lacan, I formulate the notion of a pre-subject and a subject (both pre and post the ego of narcissism) beyond the isolation and illusion represented by narcissism as usually understood.

Both the organism and the Lacanian subject can be regarded as forms of subjectivity beyond the ego. Strictly speaking, the ego is Imaginary and is organised by a body image framed by the specular image. The subject is organised within language and contains a necessary tear into the fabric of the ego of narcissism. It is the successive losses within privation, frustration, and castration that constitute the subject and the parameters of phallic jouissance under the signifier. Within language as a social body the subject is represented and articulated by the (phallic) signifier. Just like a signifier acquires its meaning by its relational differences with other signifiers, so the name of a human subject, for example, identifies a subject as a particular signifier in relationship to other signifiers and names within the culture.

The no-self of the post-ego ideal subject shares a structural connection to the no-self or pre-self of the body prior to the ego and to what Freud called absolute primary narcissism, Dolto called fundamental narcissism, and Kohut called cosmic narcissism. Although the absolute primary narcissism of the pre-subject is first experienced in relationship to the mother, the fourth-degree absolute primary narcissism of the subject is a return to the origins as a result of the paternal function. Such degree or level of narcissism could also be called a primary narcissism degree zero to distinguish it from a relative object-based primary narcissism. On the other hand, it could also be argued that for this category the concept of narcissism could be dispensed with altogether. The end state narcissism can be regarded as either a differentiation within narcissism or as a differentiation within subjectivity beyond narcissism. In the end, as I will later argue, the early absolute primary narcissism and the organi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction
• Part One: Lacanian Theory
• Part Two: Lacanian Practice
• INDEX