The Narcissistic Pursuit of Perfection

Arnold Rothstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921537
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book views the role of narcissism in analytic theory beginning with the writings of Freud and examines the conceptual changes that occurred with the development of ego psychology and object relations theory. With this revised edition the author expands his discussion of patients considered to be narcissistic personality disordered in order to discuss the issue of clinical limits. This is illustrated by case material from two attempts at the analysis of patients with latent psychosis. Discussions of countertransference and humiliation have also been added.

Part I

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

1

Narcissism

Three-quarters of a century after psychoanalytic theory adopted the term narcissism from Greek mythology, analysts still differ as to its meaning. The term has been used within several theoretical frameworks for a variety of purposes. As a concept, it has been elaborated from libidinal and ego-psychological perspectives. It has been employed both descriptively and to connote developmental phenomena. It has been considered as a defensive function, and it has been characterized both as normal and ubiquitous and as one or another form of pathology.

Much of this confusion can be seen to derive from the transitional nature of Freud’s “war years” papers, in which he discussed structural development in terms inundated with metaphorical energic elaboration. The confusion between ego, self, and ego libido is still with us. In 1914, Freud defined narcissism as “the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation” (pp. 73–74).

Hartmann (1950b), attempting to distinguish between Freud’s two meanings of ego, defined narcissism as the libidinal cathexis of the self-representation, but his attempt to meld energic and structural perspectives resulted in continued unclarity with regard to the term narcissism. Kohut’s earlier writing defined narcissism as the libidinal cathexis of the self, but the term has disappeared from his more recent work to be replaced by the term self. Kernberg similarly equated ego development with the development of narcissism. For Kernberg pathologic narcissism is associated and seemingly synonymous with pathologic character development. For Sandler and Joffe, Pulver, and Stolorow narcissism is equated with self-esteem, the self, and the self-representation, respectively.

It is a premise of this book that narcissism is different from the ego, the self, and the self-representation. These terms refer to aspects of psychic structure—each with a characteristic development. I propose that the definition of the term narcissism be limited to a felt quality of perfection. This conscious or unconscious, affectively laden fantasy may be invested in a panoply of self- and/or object representations in a spectrum of integrations.

THE LITERATURE

It is characteristic of Freud’s seminal papers that central terms and concepts have a variety of meanings. Freud (1914) defined narcissism as a quality of “perfection” (p. 94). In addition, he employed narcissism as a component of libido theory and used it metaphorically to describe aspects of human development from the perspective of libido development. In his prestructural metapsychological papers, Freud organized data within the libidinal concept of narcissism that would, subsequent to the introduction of the structural hypothesis, be discussed in terms of oral incorporative, defensive, identificatory responses of the ego. Thus Freud used the term narcissism to describe a felt quality of perfection and as a prestructural concept to describe the development of psychic structure in response to ubiquitous narcissistic injuries. Confusion has resulted from these two very different developments of the meaning of the term and concept.

Most of Freud’s views on narcissism were propounded within the context of theory focused on libido and the self-preservative instinct, prior to the introduction of the structural hypothesis and theory on aggression. The term was defined as the cathexis of the self with narcissistic or ego libido, as contrasted with object libido. It was considered as “a stage in the development of the libido which it passes through on the way from auto-erotism to object-love” (191 la, p. 60). In 1923, Freud extended this developmental perspective by describing narcissistic libido as a normal intermediate stage in the neutralization of libidinal energy (p. 30). In 1914, elaborating its ubiquitous nature and its “place in the regular course of human sexual development” (p. 73), he characterized narcissism as “the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation” (pp. 73–74). In energic language, Freud alluded to the role of narcissism in all character integrations and, anticipating the structural hypothesis, described the child’s preservation of his primary narcissism within the ego ideal (p. 94). In describing parents’ defenses against integrating the perception of their own limits and finiteness, he introduced the normal developmental concepts of narcissistic object choice, narcissistic injury, and, implicitly, narcissistic identification (pp. 90–91).

In addition to discussing the normal developmental vicissitudes of narcissism, Freud described some of its pathological elaborations. A footnote to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) pointed to narcissistic fixations and object choice in the genesis of homosexuality:

… the future inverts, in the earliest years of their childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation to a woman (usually their mother), and, after leaving this behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them [p. 145n].

This ingenious note, written in 1910, clearly reflects a modern appreciation of the importance of preoedipal object relations in the genesis of this perversion. In structural terms, he (1915b) elaborated the genesis of melancholia as an alteration of the ego secondary to a narcissistic identification. In 1917, from a developmental perspective and in libidinal terms, he defined the genesis of the character trait defiance as “a narcissistic clinging to anal erotism” (p. 130). In 1918, he presented the Wolf Man’s predisposition to neurosis as related, in part, to the “excessive strength of his narcissism” which left him vulnerable to narcissistic injury: “The precipitating cause of his neurosis” was “a narcissistic ‘frustration’” (p. 118). He also commented on the limits of psychoanalytic treatment in such cases.¹

Although the role of aggression — of anger in response to frustration, limits, and loss, as well as in relation to narcissistic phenomena — seems absent² from his considerations, there is much that is current and modern in Freud with reference to the theory of narcissism and its clinical elaborations. Freud was keenly aware of the relationship of narcissistic phenomena to a subject’s experience of frustration, to his perception of limits of the self, and to real and imagined object loss. He employed the concept to describe oral incorporative identificatory processes of the ego in response to ubiquitous narcissistic injuries of development.

In On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914), Freud defined the development of the ego ideal as a response of the toddler to the perception of the limits of his differentiating self-representation, noting that the toddler “is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood” (p. 94). In normal development, in response to the perception of these limits of the self-representation, the ego, via processes of internalization, creates its ego ideal: “… disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (p. 94).

In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud alluded to the metamorphosis of the libidinal concept, secondary narcissism, into the structural concept, identification. He described the development of the ego in the broadest sense — the development of “character” (p. 28) — as a response of the ego to the experience of narcissistic injury through perceptions of the inevitable limits of the object. These limits are experienced by the subject as equivalent to object losses, the pain of which motivates defensive internalizations that become the fabric of the ego. Freud noted: “We succeeded in explaining the painful disorder of melancholia by supposing that … an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego — that is, that an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification” (p. 28). In 1923, Freud deleted the qualification of that identification as “narcissistic.” In 1915, the exposition of the identification in melancholia as a “narcissistic identification” had been a central premise and distinction of his explanation of the pathogenesis of that condition. In The Ego and the Id, he commented on this earlier hypothesis.

At that time, however, we did not appreciate the full significance of this process and did not know how common and how typical it is. Since then we have come to understand that this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character.’

At the very beginning … object-cathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable…. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects . … it [is] possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices [pp. 28–29].

Freud’s (1911a, 1914) libidinal delineation of the ubiquitous nature of secondary narcissism was a metaphorical precursor of his later object-representation formulation of the genesis of the “character of the ego” (1923, p. 28). Freud (1911a) had defined primary narcissism as “a stage in the development of the libido which it passes through on the way from auto-erotism to object-love” (p. 60). In 1914 he stated:

The libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego and thus gives rise to an attitude which may be called narcissism. … This leads us to look upon the narcissism which arises through the drawing in of object-cathexes as a secondary one, superimposed upon a primary narcissism that is obscured by a number of different influences [p. 75].

The withdrawal of libido from an object representation to the “self,” associated with a transformation of object libido to ego or narcissistic libido, is another way of describing the process of identification with the disappointing or lost object. Prior to 1923, during the gestation of the structural hypothesis, the term narcissism was employed to refer to processes of internalization that contribute to ego, ego-ideal, and superego development. It seems clarifying to employ Freud’s 1923 representational description of identificatory processes and to dispense with the libidinal concept of secondary narcissism as a tool for organizing these developmental events.

In 1921 Andreas-Salomé contributed an important paper, “The Dual Orientation of Narcissism.” In libidinal terms, she made two points with current significance. Like Freud, she emphasized the ubiquitous place of narcissism as a component quality of human development: “Narcissism is not limited to a single phase of the libido, but is a part of our self-love which accompanies all phases. It is not merely a primitive point of departure of development but remains as a kind of fundamental continuity in all the subsequent object-cathexes of the libido” (p. 3). She also recognized the primal object’s role in the development of narcissism. She described its genesis from internalizations of preindividuated self-object experiences. “It seems to me therefore to be dangerous not to emphasize the essential duality of the concept of narcissism, and to leave the problem unresolved by allowing narcissism to stand only for self-love. I should like to bring to the fore its other less obvious aspect; the persistent feeling of identification with the totality” (pp. 4–5; emphasis added).

With the introduction of the dual instinct theory and the structural hypothesis, the self-preservative instinct was subsumed under the ego organization and elaborated as part of “character.” In 1933, Wilhelm Reich defined normal narcissism in structural terms and stated explicitly what Freud (1914, 1923) and Andreas-Salomé had implied: “that the character is essentially a narcissistic protection mechanism … against dangers … of the threatening outer world and the instinctual impulses which urged for expression” (p. 158).

In 1936, Waelder similarly defined character as the sum total of the ego’s problem-solving modes in the service of “assimilation” (p. 48). Freud’s (1923) descriptions of defensive internalization in response to frustration (in 1914 designated as secondary narcissism) define the ego’s ubiquitous problem-solving mode in the service of assimilating the narcissistic injuries of development. When the subject’s characteristic modes of problem solving work well, an illusion of narcissistic perfection may be transiently restored to the self-representation and contribute to the sense of well-being that is often associated with effective adaptation.

Hartmann (1950b) cast Freud’s energic conception of narcissism in structural terms. In elaborating Freud’s concept of the neutralization of drive energy, Hartmann noted that Freud used the term self to refer both to the subjectively felt self and to the system ego and its functions. To help clarify this confusion, he defined narcissism as the libidinal cathexis of the self-representation and suggested that the system ego was fueled by various forms of energy (both libidinal and aggressive drive energies) in various stages of neutralization (delibidinization, or sublimation, and deaggressivization).

Kohut (1966, 1971) similarly defined narcissism as the libidinal cathexis of the self, but he went on to describe a normal course of narcissistic libido development, independent from object libidinal investment and development. Kohut’s concept of narcissistic libido represents more, however, than the development of a particular form of energy. In the course of development, narcissistic libido cathects various self- and object representations and becomes “idealizing libido” (1966, p. 247). Thus, the idealizing libido includes precipitates of the subject’s representational world.

Kohut chose to elaborate the prestructural concept of secondary narcissism which Freud had relinquished in The Ego and the Id in deference to the egopsychological concepts of identification, internalization, synthesis, and integration. In doing so Kohut blurred heuristic, meaningful distinctions that are possible when narcissism is employed within the structural hypothesis as a felt quality integrated by the ego in a variety of structures. As Kohut developed the concept of idealizing libido, he discussed aspects of ego, superego, and ego-ideal development within the prestructural rubric of libido theory. Thus the ego’s development of such mature and sophisticated attributes as humor, creativity, empathy, wisdom, and the acceptance of one’s finiteness were conceptualized by Kohut as mature transformations of narcissistic libido.

Kohut proposed a theory of the development of narcissistic libido that is strikingly similar to Freud’s (1923) description of the genesis of the ego and “character” (pp. 28–29) in its focus on the response of the subject to inevitable developmental frustrations: “The balance of primary narcissism is disturbed by maturational pressures and painful psychic tensions which occur because the mother’s ministrations are of necessity imperfect and traumatic delays cannot be prevented. The baby’s psychic organization, however, attempts to deal with the disturbances by the building up of new systems of perfection” (Kohut, 1966, p. 246). Kohut noted that the toddler’s maturing ego apparatus forces him to perceive the inevitable limits of the maternal object. As Freud had proposed the genesis of the ego ideal, so Kohut proposed that in response to the loss of felt perfection the toddler attempts to preserve the original perfection in two representational forms: “the grandiose self” (1968, p. 86) and the “idealized parent imago” (1966, p. 246). Kohut conceived of these new systems of perfection as representing “a maturational step … in the development of narcissistic libido” (p. 247).

Kohut’s (1977) recent work was a departure from an ego-psychological framework to a psychology of the self “in the broader sense” (p. xv). In his new paradigm, the terms narcissism and narcissistic are rarely used, but are replaced by the term self or self-object. It is a premise of this book that aspects of Kohut’s earlier, pre-1977, contributions are of considerable heuristic value and do not require elaboration within the rubric of narcissistic or idealizing libido. His descriptions of narcissistic transferences and common transference responses to these phenomena are particularly helpful. His concept of an independent line of development of narcissistic libido may be a conceptual precursor of his later nonenergic formulations of a developing self, but it seems unnecessary and inconsistent with clinical data. His elaborations of narcissistic libido into more complex transformed states would be more clearly discussed in terms of structural development. His formulations of the grandiose self and the idealized parent imago, once divested of their earlier (1966, 1968) association with the concept of an independent line of narcissistic libido and their later (1977) association with the “bipolar self” concept (p. 171), can be viewed as representational precursors in the development of the ego ideal.

Kernberg (1975) placed significant emphasis on the distinction between normal and pathologic narcissism — a distinction which derives from Freud’s prestructural, libidinal treatment of secondary narcissism as both ubiquitous and involved in a variety of pathological states. From the perspective of the structural hypothesis, Kernberg’s descriptions of normal and pathologic narcissism can be more clearly explicated as normal and pathological integrations of psychic structure. Kernberg (1975) defined normal narcissism as “the libidinal investment of the self” (p. 315). However, for Kernberg, normal narcissism implies differentiation and integration of energies (libido and aggression) and of structure (ego, superego, and ego ideal), as well as the attainment of some significant degree of individuation and object constancy (pp. 315–322), while pathologic narcissism is implicitly related to disordered differentiation and integration of these factors.

Like Freud (1923) and Kohut (1966), Kernberg (1970a) emphasized the importance of the maternal object in the genesis of particular aberrations of personality development. Stressing the importance of “extremely severe frustrations in relationships with significant early objects” (p. 55), he described a process of disturbed ego development that he considered a “pure culture of pathological development of narcissism” (p. 51), producing what he labeled “narcissistic personalities.”

As Hartmann (1950b) noted, Freud did not redefine narcissism in his later structural psychology. In the past ten years a number of authors have attempted a redefinition in more limited ego-psychological terms. Sandler and Joffe (1967) deleted energic considerations in their proposed definition of narcissism. They suggested limiting narcissism to positive states of self-esteem: “an ideal state … which is fundamentally affective and which normally accompanies the harmonious and integrated functioning of all the biological and mental structures” (p. 63).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to First Edition
• Part I Theoretical Considerations
• Part II Examples Within the Classification
• Part III Narcissism and the Life Cycle
• References
• Index