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 com — monsence [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.