When he returned to the topic of narcissism in his Introductory Lectures of 1916-1917, Freud reiterated that: ‘It is probable that narcissism is the universal and original state of things, from which object-love is only later developed, without the narcissism necessarily disappearing on that account’ (1917a, 416). Whilst narcissism is interrupted, then, it does not necessarily disappear; why, after all, would we imagine the pleasures of early narcissism, including the pleasure of the idea of self-perfection, to be given up easily? In its secondary instantiations, however, narcissism entails the cathexis of an altered object: in this case, not the ego itself but an idealised ego. Freud describes this as follows:
This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. (1914a, 94)
Thus, the establishment of an ego-ideal functions to sustain the selfattachment of narcissism. As the increasing demands of the reality principle threaten this narcissistic self-attachment, the ego converts the notion of its own perfection into an attachment based on an ideal-self. In other words, the subject projects an ideal ego that stands as the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood (at which point he was his own unadulterated ideal). Freud attempts to clarify how this process of idealisation is distinct from the process of sublimation:
Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido and consists in the instinct’s directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from sexual satisfaction; in this process the accent falls upon deflection from sexuality. Idealization is a process that concerns the object; by it that object, without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the subject’s mind. (1914a, 94)
Whereas in the process of sublimation, the libidinal drive is re-directed (but not repressed) on to a desexualised object (e. g. the sublimated energies of creative and intellectual pursuits), idealisation maintains a sexualised object either by overestimating it (as in the case of romantic love) or by placing growing demands on the ego to uphold the subject’s expectations of himself.1 The ego-ideal, formed by the internalisation of parental, societal and finally self-criticism, comes to act in a ‘critical capacity’ and takes on the function of prohibition that would, in Freud’s later thought, be characteristic of the superego (see ‘The Ego and the Id’, 1923).
The institution of conscience was at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society — a process which is repeated in what takes place when a tendency towards repression develops out of a prohibition or obstacle that came in the first instance from without. (1914a, 96)
Freud is underlining that this critical agency (ego-ideal, superego, ‘conscience’) is established out of the vicissitudes of narcissism and is the most important factor in the work of repression; which is to say that the process of self-idealisation sets the self up for failure.
Having established the relation between narcissism and the superego, we are forced to discern a particular cruelty — attributable most broadly to the costs of culture — in the transition between the two. Of course, we know that the logic of repression is a defensive one; it entails the denial of a desired pleasure on the basis that it harbours greater unpleasure, and in this sense always demands a sacrifice alongside a gain. We can suggest that the apparent contrast between narcissism’s ego investiture and the critical agency of the superego provides the most forceful illustration of this. In no uncertain terms, as we saw in Chapter 1, Freud tells us how the drive to be one’s own ideal (to recover the state of primary narcissism) is what people strive for to attain their happiness (1914a, 100). But whilst the ego-ideal is initially projected to uphold self-satisfaction — to sustain a narcissistic self-attachment — following its transition to the critical agency (the ego-ideal/superego) it appears to function to hold in check the pleasures once sought. At first glance, a strong narcissism appears to be the antithesis of the punitive critical agency. We might consider the contrast in presenting symptoms, the self-entitlement and solipsism of the first, against the self-flagellation of the second. Seen in this light, it appears that there would be an all-out reversal in what we might identify as the cultural values inherent in both positions: a move from a posture of concentrated self-gratification, to one of self-abnegation of comparable force. However, even when the demands of the superego appear wholly unreasonable — such that the barrier of expectation is raised to heights so unachievable that punishment for falling short is inevitable — at a structural level these demands are still operating in accordance with the (originally narcissistic) drive to be one’s own ideal. In other words, even the most castigating conscience demands the same self-sufficiency that is represented by the state of narcissism.
I am stressing the relation between narcissism and the development of the superego (via the ego-ideal) because, despite the fact that Freud leaves us in little doubt as to their proximity, it is a relation that is particularly attenuated in subsequent sociological readings of cultural narcissism (see Chapter 4). The idea that the prohibitions of the superego have become weak is a standard feature of accounts of cultural narcissism and one that is connected to presentations of the collapse of cultural authority and the removal of moral limits in a permissive society. Correspondingly, the narcissist himself is presented as a figure whose superego is particularly under-pronounced, and whose capacity for guilt feeling is strikingly diminished. This type of reading is in danger of neglecting the process which connects narcissism and the superego that Freud highlights via his account of the narcissistic development of the ego-ideal.
The notion that satisfaction is sought after through the attainment of the ego-ideal, which the paper of 1914 presents so clearly, receives a distinct iteration in Freud’s later work of ‘applied’ psychoanalysis, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, where he speculates as to the likelihood of mankind ever becoming happy. Freud’s schema of man’s developmental history runs along predictable lines: at the primitive stage, which is allied to primary narcissism, fantasy reigns and man’s omnipotence is not yet challenged; this is followed by the religious stage where omnipotence is (in part) transferred to the gods; and finally by the scientific stage where omnipotence is either to be discarded as an infantile illusion (as he suggests in ‘Totem and Taboo’) or reawakened as (an ultimately unsatisfying?) human ‘strength’ and cultural acquisition. In his depiction of the scientific stage of man’s development Freud returns to the idea of ‘striving to become one’s own ideal’ and thus situates the concept of narcissism centrally within his theory of culture. Whereas for religious man the gods were his cultural ideals, ‘to-day’ the man of science ‘has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself’ (1930, 91). Here is the latter part of Freud’s passage on the idea of man as ‘a kind of prosthetic God’:
When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that development will not come to an end precisely with the year 1930 a. d. Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilisation and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy with this God-like character. (92)
There is a deliberate ambiguity to be reckoned with here. Should we take Freud at face value and hear non-ironic conviction when he speaks faithfully of the onward march of technological progress? No doubt we should. But surely the force of his evocative image rests in an understanding of the more contradictory character of man’s (unnatural) achievement. The prosthetic God is the created Creator who is simultaneously ‘magnificent’ and grotesque because of this fundamental contradiction.
This ambiguous image is much discussed. Most often, the prosthetic extension to man’s narcissism is framed as part of the familiar tale of man’s self-alienation through his strived-for domination of nature, where technology — as ideology, fetish, or supplement — is the site of ambivalence around which power and prosthesis meet. What is important for our present discussion, is that Freud cautions that the attainment (or near attainment) of one’s ego-ideal, whether collective or individual, does not (yet?) assure ‘happiness’. We can read this as a further comment on the qualities of illusion within narcissism which speak to the structural impossibility of a total self-satisfaction. Indeed, the very idea that there was once a primitive society where man’s fantasy of omnipotence went unchecked must itself be revealed as fantastical.
I suggested in the last chapter that for Freud ‘feminine’ narcissism saves its subject from the Aristophanic bad faith of wanting perfect complementarity with another (the narcissist loves only the other’s capacity to mirror her own self-love). As Sloterdijk points out, even were the Aristophanic hermaphrodite fantasy to be achieved, ‘completeness appears again as deficiency — namely, as a lack of beauty’ (251); as with the prosthetic God, self-fulfilment — where it is always a merging of self and other — is endowed with grotesque qualities.