What can we say with certainty about the scene of Narcissus’ fate, except that Narcissus is perched by the edge of a pond staring at an image of himself? Certainly Echo knows this, and perhaps the psychoanalyst knows it too, but does Narcissus? The idea that Narcissus is unaware that the image he is staring at is his own poses a problem, not least for those who would deploy the mythic hero to represent simple and pernicious self-fascination. If we cannot say with assurance that Narcissus is knowingly in love with himself, then we are surely at a loss to identify his crime. In this section we shall focus on the question of how Narcissus recognises, or indeed misrecognises, himself in the water by keeping in mind the Seer’s ironic proclamation that ‘Narcissus will live to a ripe old age, provided that he never knows himself’ (Graves, 286).
Robert Graves translates the moment of Narcissus’ captivation as follows: ‘At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful boy who confronted him, but presently he recognised himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess?’ (287). Of course, it is not clear from Graves’ reading just what the quality of Narcissus’ recognition may be — nor how long is the moment implied by the word ‘presently’ — but we can nevertheless see how this instance of possession and non-possession is the critical moment of any interpretation of narcissism. It is also the moment that sanctions my reading of the double structure of primary narcissism; in later chapters it will be this doubleness which allows us to consider the sociability of this (in)famously solitary-minded figure.
It is important, I contend, that in returning to the mythic scene we are returned to the poolside in order that we can reconsider its environmental complexion — perhaps it is not as immobile a setting as we have sometimes been led to believe. The poolside is not quite the Winnicottian mother’s face offering itself up as the gift of first sight in which Narcissus has the opportunity to see himself, nor is it quite Lacan’s manufactured mirror with its steady surface which promises to cohere the bits and pieces of the onlooker’s body. On the contrary, in this watery environment we can imagine that the reflective surface would not give forth a static or stable image because the undulating motions of the pond would be a constant source of disruption to Narcissus’ gaze. And, unlike the good-enough mother, Mother Nature here will not be held accountable for her provision of a ‘holding’ environment. The waters in which Narcissus sees his reflection will not just contain it, rather they will also compel the dissipation of the image and then permit its re-formation, effecting in this fashion Narcissus’ movement between the poles of possession and non-possession. And what is it exactly that Narcissus is trying to possess? An image, for sure, but how does he relate to it; does he know it to be the mirror-image of himself, or has he fallen for himself as if he were an other?
We can anticipate that our response to this question will have consequences beyond the realm of metapsychology. Indeed, that the relation between Narcissus’ self-love, self-knowledge and self-possession pertains to his standing as a figure in social and political thought is most evident in Herbert Marcuse’s well-known text of 1955 Eros and Civilisation. Specifically it is Narcissus’ lack of knowledge with regard to his own boundaried self that, for Marcuse, frees him from the conventions of social power and marks him out as an emancipatory political figure — a ‘culture-hero’ (1972 [1955], 120-125). Reading Freud, Marcuse starts from the position that the history of man is the history of his repression, but ultimately challenges what he considers to be Freud’s generalisation that a repressive organisation of the instincts has necessarily determined, and will continue to determine, the reality principle throughout civilisation. Marcuse argues that Freud’s reality principle turns ‘historical contingencies into biological necessities’ (41-42). With this line of thought, he suggests the existence of possible alternative reality principles and calls the prevailing historical form ‘the performance principle’. Under the sign of the performance principle, contemporary society is acquisitive, antagonistic, and subject to the totalising logic of administration: Man’s gratifications are profitable, and man’s happiness becomes instrumental in the continuation of his performance. Because ‘the individual lives his repression ‘freely’ as his own life […] [r]epression disappears in the grand objective order of things which rewards more or less adequately the complying individuals and, in doing so, reproduces more or less adequately society as a whole’ (48).
Thus, happiness, for Marcuse, is a symptom of what he calls voluntary servitude; the performance principle supports a system of domination in which the subject collaborates in his or her own un-freedom. It is via the creation of ‘false needs’ that the performance principle is responsible for surplus repression. Whereas repression in Freud’s account of civilisation, which Marcuse terms basic repression, denotes the ‘modifications of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race’, surplus repression represents ‘the restrictions necessitated by social domination’ (42). The possibility of transcending the performance principle and releasing the individual from the surplus repressions of the particular socio-political order would allow for a re-channelling of human desire in line with the original ‘polymorphously perverse’ disposition of the infant. Thus, as Freud encourages us to ‘loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between [sexual] instinct and [sexual] object’ (Freud, 1905: 148), so Marcuse identifies in the model of polymorphous perversity — where desire is unbound to a single object — the possibility for a qualitatively different and non-repressive reality principle (Marcuse, 101). It follows from his presentation that, precisely because the diversion of the libido away from the self and towards socially ‘useful’ aims is a prime characteristic of civilisation under the performance principle, primary narcissism — where the pleasure principle is not yet interrupted and libidinal energy is still undifferentiated — contains the ‘germ of a different reality principle’ (124).
Alongside Orpheus, who Marcuse also advocates as a representative of an alternative reality principle, Narcissus stands as an image of ‘joy and fulfilment’, whose life of beauty and contemplation offers a ‘revolt against [a] culture based on toil, domination, and renunciation’ (120-121). Whilst Marcuse admits that in his rejection of Echo’s love, Narcissus is conventionally positioned against Eros, it is a central tenet of his project that this convention should be challenged. He states that ‘as the antagonist of Eros, Narcissus symbolizes sleep and death, silence and rest’, but then goes on to offer a vital qualification:
His silence is not that of dead rigidity; and when he is contemptuous
of the love of hunters and nymphs he rejects one Eros for another.
He lives by an Eros of his own, and he does not love only himself.
(He does not know that the image he admires is his own.) (123)
Marcuse is clear: Narcissus ‘does not know that the image he admires is his own’ — and so it must be if Narcissus is to represent something more than a proprietorial and destructive egoism. In order to corroborate an alternative reality principle that is non-divisive — that does not set one against the other — the Eros that Narcissus embodies is not the Eros of the civilised order, for only in this way can Narcissus’ moment of withdrawal from the world be recast as ‘a oneness with the universe’ (123). Marcuse, then, is not concerned to mobilise the reading of Freud’s concept of narcissism that Balint convened under the rubric of ‘primary autoeroticism’ because the developmental logic of this position — narcissism as a pre-cursor to the maturity of object-love — would fail to offer ‘the archetype of another existential relation to reality’ which is precisely what Marcuse finds in primary narcissism: ‘Primary narcissism is more than autoeroticism; it engulfs the "environment," integrating the narcissistic ego with the objective world’ (123).
It should be noted that the ‘germ of a different reality principle’ based on narcissism’s potential for an integrative ethic requires a re-inflection of Freudian theory. First, and most obviously, the idea that multiple reality principles are up for grabs is non-Freudian. In debate with Marcuse on this point, Eric Fromm (1971) has insisted that the principles of mental functioning are economic rather than social (and normative) in character: Fromm argues that the reality principle cannot be determined by the contents of a given reality. Second, we recall that in Freud’s paper of 1914, it was the illusion of self-sufficiency and the drive to recapture it which comprised the common pursuit of happiness. We also saw that primary narcissism signified both a state of non-recognition of the Me/Not-Me distinction and the trepidatious negotiation of this state which was key to his psychoanalytic understanding of the development of the ego. Marcuse’s political project, however, necessitates that he turns what is — at least notionally for Freud — a non-recognition of the other into a fundamental relatedness with the other. What is curiously productive about this move is that Marcuse identifies precisely that which was denied by Balint; namely, a ‘fundamental relatedness’ in the concept of primary narcissism itself (Marcuse, 124). For Marcuse it is not the structure of primary narcissism which is the problem, but the way in which it has been situated in the overall story of the self. Third, and most significantly for the terms of our argument, although an integrative and relational experience is privileged in Marcuse’s account of primary narcissism, the quality of illusion that we considered with reference to Freud’s bird’s-egg footnote in his 1911 paper is lost sight of.
In his ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ paper, Freud explains that the reality principle only comes into practice when the expected satisfaction of the pleasure principle fails to occur. It is only from such failure that the ‘attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination’ is abandoned and the psychical apparatus forms a conception of the real circumstances of the external world (1911a, 219). Because Freud identifies as hallucinatory the modus operandi of the pleasure principle, we might speculate that he would diagnose as fantasy the use of primary narcissism to pave the way for an alternative reality principle — such as in Marcuse’s work. Moreover, and perhaps in spite of our sympathy for Marcuse’s general desire to redeem Narcissus’ reputation, by radically modifying the reality principle — by seeking to eradicate its repressive function — he essentially compromises the mechanisms of frustration, and the overcoming of frustration, that are central to Freud’s presentation. Although for Freud it is incontrovertible that the pleasure principle be disappointed, and with it the narcissistic myth of self-sufficiency, it is never renounced entirely. Freud explains that ‘the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it’ (1911a, 223). This action of safeguarding the pleasure principle within the dominion of the reality principle is also key to the safeguarding of Freud’s dialectal mode of understanding. Because Marcuse’s new reality principle does away with the frustrations characteristic of Freud’s dialectic, we might wonder whether his version of subjective desire can have any real vitality: its integrative and binding qualities meet no counter-force of ego-failure or environmental withdrawal. As an ideal construction without regression (i. e. primary narcissism without any secondary movement), Marcuse’s vision of narcissism underplays the conflict inherent in character development. The reason I have insisted on the illusion of the infant’s self-sufficiency in Freud’s account (which then becomes the focus of Lacan’s) is because without it we have no way of recognising that the infant’s desire is desire for himself, and, although his project of self-possession will necessary fail, it is from this failure that desire is renewed.
By underscoring the function of the imaginary, the Lacanian Mirror Stage can be set against Marcuse’s restaging of the Narcissus myth. Lacan points to the specific requirements of desire — difference and lack — as being constitutive of the subject. In her explication of this neo-mythic scene, Mitchell describes the moment of the infant’s rapture at the mirror’s surface as the act of ‘Zero that mis-thinks itself as One’ (1979 [1974], 386):
The infant is at first not yet One, but Zero (mathematically Zero is never nothing, nor is it something); for One to exist at all, two are needed, even if the second is in fact the reflection in the mirror. Zero is not identical with itself, whereas One, like all objects, is. Zero indicates the lack, it is a situation of non-relationship in which identity is meaningless, but because it makes the lack visible, it sets in motion the movement forward. (385-386)
In addition to underlining the illusory quality that we are interested in here (i. e. it is as if the neonate is a monad), Mitchell’s terms are helpful for their stress on the subject’s non-self-identical beginnings that provide the catalyst for his desire for identity. She makes clear that the wish to return to the ‘illusion of a primordial unity’ rests upon the experience of a separation (or non-unity) because ‘the very notion of desire cannot come into being before there is something missing’ (386-387). This is the paradox that inscribes the structural impossibility of satisfaction at the centre of desire itself. As we saw above, the non-correspondence between the infant’s helplessness and the wholeness of the mirror-image incites the infant to misrecognise as his own the superficial coherence in the mirror. Explicating Lacan, Mitchell explains:
The baby is helpless, ‘still sunk in his motor incapacity and nurseling dependency’, but the image he is given of himself, through others and then in the mirror, is not helpless — on the contrary it is whole and coordinated. The mirror-image must be more perfect than itself — the itself that is not yet constituted — as Narcissus discovered to his cost. Because he stayed hooked on his image and couldn’t tolerate its absence, Narcissus never constituted himself as a subject. (386)
Once again it seems that Narcissus is destined to remain in a condition of pre-subjectivity, but the inflection is now quite different to that of ‘oceanic feeling’ that allowed Marcuse to read into narcissism a fundamental relatedness. In the Lacanian model it follows that the little Narcissus inevitably ‘knows’ that what he sees in the reflection is himself, otherwise he would have no gestalt image around which to constitute his identity-defining illusions — but crucially his knowledge is faulty. In desiring to claim ownership of his reflection — in desiring to possess it — Narcissus is blind to its ‘secondary’ status, blind to the fact that his image exists at one remove from himself. As Mitchell explains, the reflection in the mirror is the ‘second’ that permits the imaginary constitution of ‘one’. It may be productive to think about this blindness in relation to its equivalent blind spot in Freud’s narcissism paper which, we might venture, can be read as a performative echo of the narcissistic tension.
It is clear that ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ is a paper that deals with the question of ego development. It is not so clear however — because Freud does not make it clear — at what point the ego is being theorised as a subject, and at what point as an object5 (Freud gains ground on this topic with the development of his theory of melancholia, as we shall see in Chapter 6). It is perhaps only fitting that this is Freud’s conceptual struggle for it is also Narcissus’ dialectical bind: Narcissus and his image are constitutionally confused in their cohabitation as subject and object. But it is not a foregone conclusion that this confusion must lead to paralysis. The question, ‘does Narcissus know that the image with which he is besotted is his own?’ has no simple answer, specifically because his imaginary identification with his reflection — the point at which the ego-as-object and the ego-as-subject become integrated — signals a simultaneous turning away from, or overwriting of, his environment of care. At its most acute, the narcissistic paradox demonstrates the simultaneity of knowledge and ignorance in the same breast: Narcissus apprehends his image as his own (knows himself) and remains blind to the environment that supports him (does not know his others). This means also that he is blind to the process by which his self is constructed. Underlying this formative disavowal, and marking a clear divergence from a conception of a primary harmony (e. g. Balint, Winnicott), is our appreciation for the necessity of the fictions of identity in the face of a primary disequilibrium. Which is to say that the movement of the narcissism dialectic — between self-sufficiency and unboundedness — is harnessed to a power that is not of Narcissus’ design. This speaks to the structural paradox of primary narcissism identified at the start of this chapter where it was the neonate’s position in a precarious environment that provided the catalyst for the production of his fictive self-sufficiency. As we go on through the chapters of this book we shall come to know this structural bind by the refrain ‘the mother can always leave’. By not assuming that primary relationality is benign (i. e. remaining with Freud and Aristophanes in sceptical attitude towards the purported harmonious relation that existed prior to the development of the ego), then the operation of illusory identifications need not indicate false-selves, or immature subjects. Rather, Narcissus’ apparent blindness to his environment, a consequence of his imaginary, can be seen as a condition of his distinctive and productive mode of sociability.
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