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 selfsatisfaction (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 autoeroticism 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 autoeroticism, 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 incongruity between types of object-choice we might suggest that he challenges the classical expression of love’s complementarity found in Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium. As we know, Aristophanes narrates the quest for romantic love as a quest to return to an originary completeness where each human being was ‘entirely round, with back and sides making a circle, and it had four arms, an equal number of legs, and two completely similar faces on a circular neck; a single head for both faces, which looked in opposite directions; four ears; two sets of genitals and so on […]’ (51). In this globular form humans were ‘terrifying in their strength and power’ and, emboldened by their self-sufficiency, had attempted to make an attack on the gods. Hence it was as a divine punishment that the gods alienated man from his former wholeness and condemned him to spend his life in search of that which would again complete him. Although this myth is kept alive by Freud in several of his writings, his insistence on the vicissitudes of the sexual instinct (i. e. that it can take any object) encourages us to account for it as an essentially humorous myth: as much as Aristophanes’ disquisition on love was served as a provocation to his fellow dinner guests, so we might imagine that his irony continues to rebound on mature adults today who speak of romantic love in terms of ‘the One’.3 Significantly, for the purposes of this book, Freudian narcissism is not, as we might expect it to be, on the side of romantic ‘oneness’; rather, it functions as a means to explain the stubborn incongruity of lovers’ object-choices. In fact, it is via his account of narcissistic love that we can view Freud as standing, alongside Aristophanes, in sceptical alliance and expressing grave doubt as to the primacy of a harmonious relation. Not all psychoanalytic voices are equally as sceptical, however, and it is worth pondering Freud’s divisive legacy in other accounts of ontogenesis.
I will turn first of all to the work of Michael Balint, whose theory of ‘primary love’ remains a seminal challenge to Freud’s ostensibly mon — adological account of ego development, before engaging both Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan specifically on the question of the ego as a primary illusion — a question, I suggest, foregrounded by Freud’s theory. In the last section of the chapter I turn to a fourth re-reading of primary narcissism — this time Herbert Marcuse’s radical attempt to connect the metapsychology of primary narcissism to social reality — paying particular attention to the triumvirate of self-love, self-knowledge and self-possession. I suspect that Marcuse’s preference for an expressive, polymorphously perverse Narcissus, over one with specific investments and defences, is attributable to an ambiguity within Freud’s 1914 paper regarding the ego-as-subject and the ego-as-object. Whereas for Marcuse the subject co-opts the object in order to exist in a state of pleasurable integration, for Freud the ego-as-object functions reflexively as that which chastises and tantalises the subject in equal measure. It is through his conception of the ego-ideal, further discussed in Chapter 2, that we can detect in Freud’s work a more circuitous route of connection between narcissism and sociability.