Narcissism and Its Discontents

J. Walsh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137333438
• eBook ISBN: 9781137333445
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Narcissism and Its Discontents challenges the received wisdom that narcissism is only destructive of good social relations. By building on insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory it puts forward a theorisation of narcissistic sociability which redeems Narcissus from his position as the subject of negative critique.

1

On the Introduction of Narcissism to Psychoanalytic Theory: 1914 and Its Consequences

It is an historical coincidence that just as Freud proposed his theory of narcissism as a treatise on love, which is of course a treatise on self-love, the old aggressive impulse was finding a new level of cultural expression with the First World War. Freud’s paper, although we cannot say it is a direct response to this historical moment, nonetheless captures some of its cultural contradictions: When the idea of a military heroism was about to be mobilised and then obliterated once and for all, and the potency of the individual was to be radically undermined by the technological and bureaucratic decrees of war, Freud attended to the question of individual integrity without irony. The First World War is the plenary event of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century theories about the dissolution of social bonds, and it is also the event that shattered the myth of the coherent individual subject: ‘Since that time’, Peter Sloterdijk tells us, ‘broken modes of consciousness visibly reign: irony, cynicism, stoicism, melancholy, sarcasm, nostalgia [ . . . ]’ (122). Although we can perhaps see the argument for reading Freud’s paper as a kind of nostalgia before the event – nostalgia for an integrated self before the self-shattering of the war – I shall read it as a paper that foregrounds the difficulties of boundary crossings, the necessity of illusions of integrity and self-sufficiency, and the formative link between defining (and loving) the self and defining social relations. The material of this chapter will attest to the impossibility, in any discussion of narcissism, of separating out the question of individual development from that of the development of the social environment. My discussion of Freud’s 1914 conception of primary narcissism raises the inevitable question of relationality, and thereafter the prospect of a social or cultural narcissism more broadly.

In his editorial comments, James Strachey suggests that Freud was less than satisfied with the ‘over-compressed’ appearance of his 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (70). However, if ‘its framework [appears] bursting from the quantity of material it contains’, this only serves to alert the reader both to the paper’s significant position as a marker – or a ‘nodal point’ – within Freud’s larger metapsychological project, and to the many difficulties it has posed for subsequent psychoanalytic theorising (70).¹ The achievements and challenges of this relatively short paper, not all of which can be pursued with equal force across this work, are numerous: (1) In positioning the different functions of narcissism in the male and female negotiations of the Oedipus complex, the paper adds weight and detail to Freud’s theories of the development of sexuality and in particular to the ongoing problem of feminine psychology. (2) In providing an early exposition of the ego-ideal which foreshadows the development of the superego (1923), it carves out an important space for later theorising on the relationship between narcissism and a theory of culture. (3) In exploring the twin characteristics of ‘megalomania’ and ‘a withdrawal of interest from the external world’, it sharpens the distinction between the transference neuroses and the narcissistic neuroses, and establishes narcissism’s proximity to psychosis (and schizophrenia) which provides a major coordinate in late twentieth-century social thought. (4) It reflects an important alteration in Freud’s theory of the instincts, leading some to observe that it represents the first systematic shift from id-psychology to ego-psychology. (5) In outlining the availability of alternative object-choices and describing the developments of each, it opens up avenues for investigating the development of intersubjectivity under the rubric of (what would become) object relations theory. (6) In making frequent reference to terms such as self-regard, self-esteem and self-contentment, it suggests a particular understanding of the concept of the self which would come to have a bearing both on the development of neo-Freudian strands of psychoanalysis (e.g. the self psychology of Heinz Kohut), and, arguably, on the cultural and discursive reverence for ‘selfhood’ in late modernity. (7) Perhaps most problematically, by insisting on the universal state of primary narcissism, as the state to which the libido is driven to recover, Freud’s paper of 1914 makes important connections with both the incorporative features of mourning and melancholia (1917b [1915]), and the ‘return to stasis’ of the death drive (1920a).

Yet, beyond the technical, metapsychological, and cultural import of ‘On Narcissism’, we could put it another way and say that Freud’s paper is most informative on the subject of love as a fundamental human problematic. Notwithstanding the analyst’s inclination to syllogism and vulnerability to pastiche, Freud makes an important point when he says that ‘a strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration we are unable to love’ (1914a, 85).² The dance between love and illness – the requisite ‘fall’ in both – plays on throughout the 1914 paper and presents a challenge to those critics who suggest that Freud pays scant attention to the difference between healthy and pathological narcissism. In fact, I would argue that the distinction between pathological and non-pathological narcissism is implicit throughout Freud’s theory but that crucially, it is not overdrawn. As one critic notes, ‘It would have been much simpler for Freud to go along with [Alfred] Adler’s commonsence [sic] observation that narcissism implies a turning away from other people, so that it is inherently a pathological defense mechanism’ (Fine, 1986: 43). Indeed, it would have been much simpler, but had Freud pursued such a common-sense logic, where narcissism is at bottom pathological, he would have foreclosed narcissism’s productive ambiguities which rest on this necessary tension between the pathological and the non-pathological. On the one hand we see love’s proximity to many pathological conditions in which ‘the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly’ (1930, 66). On the other hand we see love’s promise to interrupt the seemingly monadic state of the infant, and affect his first transition into the world of culture. But, as is indicated by Freud’s breaking down the monolith ‘love’ into multiple categories, two hands may not be sufficient to hold the manifold possibilities presented here. Freud describes the templates under which a person may love:

1) According to the narcissistic type:

a) what he himself is (i.e. himself),

b) what he himself was,

c) what he himself would like to be,

d) someone who was once part of himself.

2) According to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

a) the woman who feeds him,

b) the man who protects him, and the succession or substitutes who take their place. (1914a, 90)

To put it most plainly, when an object-choice is made in accordance with the narcissistic type, the ‘otherness’ of the object is negated: the object is an object of narcissistic affirmation (hence the importance of the mirror motif in later re-workings of the theory of narcissism that we will come on to); whereas when an object-choice is made in accordance with the attachment type, it repeats the ‘leaning on’ another – a(m)other – that can be positioned as the prototypical experience of the infant in his early environment of care. It is important to note that the anaclitic and the narcissistic object-choices are presented as ideal types, and Freud explains that whilst an individual may express ‘a preference for one or the other’, the two types are not mutually exclusive (88). Nonetheless, it is the opinion of many that Freud’s fundamental distinction between the narcissistic and the anaclitic does not survive close scrutiny, and that this failure is indistinguishable from the problems of primary narcissism itself.

The problems of primary narcissism

From his earliest writings on sexuality, Freud posited a structure of repetition as integral to the experience of love.

At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that the instinct loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual instinct then becomes auto-erotic, and not until the period of latency has been passed through is the original relation restored. There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it. (1905, 222)

This enigmatic refinding of an object can help us to explore the problematic distinction between the anaclitic and narcissistic types which will then frame the debates over the concept of primary narcissism. In the above passage from his ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, Freud is describing the anaclitic object-choice (as he would come to term it) where the infant’s original attachment to the mother’s breast stands as the template for subsequent object-choice. This description stands in tension with the following statement of the 1914 paper: ‘We say that a human being has originally two sexual objects – himself and the woman who nurses him – and in doing so we are postulating a primary narcissism in everyone’ (1914a, 88). Here Freud distinguishes between a primary narcissism that is attributable to all by virtue of the coexistence of these two original sexual objects (himself and the woman who nurses him), and a (secondary) narcissistic object-choice where the ‘self-as-sexual-object’ persists or reoccurs in certain circumstances, most notably of the feminine type – women of a certain disposition, ‘homosexuals’ and ‘perverts’ (88). But we might ask whether this presentation of primary and secondary narcissism conceptually does away with the need for the anaclitic mode?

The famous refinding passage was written in 1905 before Freud had set apart the anaclitic from the narcissistic. However, when Freud revisits his ‘Three Essays’ in 1915 he adds the following footnote:

Psycho-analysis informs us that there are two methods of finding an object. The first described in the text, is the ‘anaclitic’ or ‘attachment’ one, based on attachment to early infantile prototypes. The second is the narcissistic one, which seeks for the subject’s own ego and finds it again in other people. (1905, 222n [added 1915])

Although Freud is clear that an object-choice that enacts the refinding of the mother’s breast is anaclitic, my preliminary suggestion is that it also looks to be narcissistic. This first sexual object may be ‘outside the infant’s own body’, as Freud tells us, but we cannot be so sure that it is outside the infant’s own ‘mind’; in which case the refinding of the prototype would be a refinding of mother’s-breast-as-self (i.e. narcissistic), as opposed to a refinding of mother’s-breast-as-object/other (i.e. anaclitic). Indeed, this thought concurs with Strachey’s editorial comment to the ‘Three Essays’ in which he reminds us that when Freud is ‘speaking of the libido concentrating on “objects”, withdrawing from “objects” etc, [he] has in mind the mental presentations (Vorstellungen) of objects and not, of course, objects in the external world’ (1905, 217).

Once Freud has posited primary narcissism as a universal structure, there is a sense in which the anaclitic can always be folded back into the narcissistic mode given that the formative attachment (the anaclitic object-choice) evolved out of a (seemingly) more monadic self-satisfaction (primary narcissism). In temporal terms, we could say that because both models centre on the question of refinding, the anaclitic can always refind the narcissistic state given narcissism’s earlier chronological or developmental position in the history of the formation of the subject. However, and herein lies the problem, it is equally conceivable to put the argument the other way round. In which case, the primacy of the narcissistic is undermined by its dependence on the mother-as-object: as Freud expressly states, primary narcissism entails two originary sexual objects, the self and the woman who nurses him (1914a, 88). Even in his 1905 text Freud points to this problem when he explains that the mother’s breast is the object-choice for the infant prior to the first stirrings of the ego’s autonomy: ‘It is only later that the instinct loses that object [mother’s breast], just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs’ (222). Here, then, Freud is underlining the fact that the neonate takes the mother’s breast as object-choice when he is not yet making a distinction between the Me and the Not-Me; but this state of affairs applies both to the anaclitic model as per the passage quoted above, and to primary narcissism as a state with ‘two original sexual objects’ (1914a, 88).

We can now see the extent to which the problem of primary narcissism is the problem of the origin. The tireless revisiting of this subject in subsequent psychoanalytic theory attests to the particular difficulties of setting apart the categories in which Freud sets store – narcissistic/anaclitic; primary/secondary narcissism – via an analysis of the neonate. An illustration of these difficulties which does not take the neonate as its focus may clarify some of the issues raised so far. In their consideration of the possible conflation of the anaclitic and narcissistic motivations behind object-choice, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1988 [1973]) direct us to the following description of ‘narcissistic women’ in Freud’s 1914 paper:

Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object. Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to a man’s love for them. Nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and the man who fulfils this condition is the one who finds favour with them. (1914a, 88–89)

Freud describes such women as narcissistic: The onset of puberty reactivates the subject’s original narcissism following which a libidinal interest in any external object-choice is withdrawn in order that the ego can be re-cathected. The man who finds favour with the narcissistic woman does so because he too affirms her (predominant) ego-libido. However, Laplanche and Pontalis question ‘whether a case such as this, described here as narcissistic, does not display a subject seeking to reproduce the child’s relationship to the mother who feeds it – an aim which according to Freud is a defining characteristic of the anaclitic object-choice’ (259). What we have, then, is a dual possibility that suggests the limitations of Freud’s nomenclature: the narcissistic woman in pursuit of an object-love that reflects her self-love can be reframed anaclitically as attempting to reproduce the act of ‘leaning on’ the maternal landscape; and, conversely, the object of the mother’s breast to which the infant attaches can be read as an extension of the infant’s self and hence not indicative of an object attachment as such. All of which is to say that if anaclitic object-choice can collapse into narcissistic object-choice, and narcissistic object-choice into anaclitic, then we may have a problem.

Moreover, this is not the only formative problem that Freud’s postulation of primary narcissism raises. Just as pressingly, the relation of narcissism to autoeroticism has to be defined (1914a, 76). For Freud autoeroticism is ‘an early state of the libido’ which exists from ‘the very first’ and presupposes no bodily unity, nor embryonic ego-formation (76–77). As he puts it, ‘there must be something added to auto-erotism – a new psychical action – in order to bring about narcissism’ (77). This ‘something added’ is a crucial and enigmatic formulation in Freud’s 1914 paper to which we shall be returning throughout. For now, however, the first thing to note is that the ‘primary’ in primary narcissism is revealed to be somewhat of a misnomer: for primary narcissism in relation to autoeroticism is already secondary. It is also clear that narcissism is being defined as a liminal state, to be passed through from auto-eroticism on the way to object-love (see, for example, Freud’s Schreber case, 61). We can develop this as follows: A primary narcissism which is responsible for drawing lines of differentiation which did not obtain in the state of autoeroticism, and for integrating a coherent self, infers an act of construction (‘a new psychical action’); as Freud puts it, ‘the ego has to be developed’ (77). Yet secondary narcissism, which entails ‘a turning round upon the ego of libido withdrawn from [ . . . ] objects’, suggests that the ego has failed to achieve its ideal maturity which would enable it to relate to objects in the world (see Laplanche and Pontalis, 337). Thus narcissism – primary and secondary together – appears to embody the process of ego development, but not the developed ego of mature object-love. According to the logic of narcissism, then, the enduring question of psychic development, ‘how and when does the ego meet the world?’, becomes ‘how and when does the ego meet itself?’

We can put aside for the moment such difficulties as fathoming out the primacy of the narcissistic and anaclitic modes, and establishing the tenability of the concept of primary narcissism as distinct from auto-eroticism, in the sure knowledge that they will re-present themselves as points of contention among the psychoanalytic theorists who have followed Freud (considered below). Instead we can begin to unpick a further knot of critical interest concerning the relation between the feminine and masculine typologies of object-choice.

Freud has, repeatedly and rightly, been taken to task for his alignment of narcissism and the feminine within what is taken to be a pathological framework. That woman is less likely to achieve complete object-love without the catalyst of her own self-love (and in particular her own body) is integral to the Freudian account of feminine psychology which is bound up with the uncomfortable tale of the difficulties the little girl has in resolving her Oedipus complex. Vanity, jealousy and a limited sense of social justice are just some of the penalties of this particular transition that must be negotiated by the woman through the state of narcissism, via the Oedipus complex, and on to the establishment of the superego. Moreover, as we’ve seen, Freud implies that the difficulties of this transition to successful ‘object-love’ are not always surmountable: ‘strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to a man’s love for them’ (1914a, 89). Freud’s general point here seems to be that a basic ‘incongruity between the types of object-choice’ goes a long way in accounting for the persistent difficulties and possibilities of human love (89). The narcissism of the ‘feminine type’ which will ‘keep away from their ego anything that will diminish it’ is not offered up as the perfect complement to the ‘complete object-love’ of the ‘masculine type’. The masculine type (where narcissism has been translated into a ‘marked sexual overvaluation’ of the sexual object) will suffer various ‘dissatisfaction[s]’ and ‘doubts’ about the love he receives from the narcissist (88–89). He can never trust that as he is being loved, he is also being ‘known’; like Echo, he can never hear his identity independently affirmed from the lips of the one he loves. For the narcissistic woman, on the other hand, the man’s motivations for loving her are not really of interest so long as her object-choice holds up a mirror to her own intense self-love.

When Freud underlines this basic incongr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. On the Introduction of Narcissism to Psychoanalytic Theory: 1914 and Its Consequences
• 2. Socialising Narcissus via the Case of ‘Little Hans’
• 3. Sociology 1: On the Narcissism of Nostalgia
• 4. Sociology 2: Cultural Narcissism – Some Examples from Anglo-American Sociology
• 5. ‘Exceptional’ Woman and Exemplary Sociability: The Figure of the Narquette
• 6. From Narcissism to Melancholia, and Back Again . . .
• Notes
• References
• Index