In the Introduction to this book we considered Freud’s ‘three blows’ the­ory of scientific development where man was thrice deposed from his central station in the universe; once by Copernicus, twice by Darwin, and then, of course, by Freud himself with the revelation that ‘the ego […] is not even master in its own house’ […]

In her work of 1997, The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler foregrounds the figure of the ‘turn’ as the key to understanding the ‘becoming’ of the reflexive subject (30). In contrast to sociological framings of reflexivity (Chapter 4), Butler’s presentation helps us to think further about the conceptual difficulties inherent in what we recognised […]

Written in 1915 (though not published until 1917), ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ extends the work of Freud’s paper ‘On Narcissism’ of the previous year. The translation of Freud’s 1914 title ‘Zur Einfuhrung Des Narzissmus’ as ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, suggests that the paper promises an introductory sketch of narcissism, whereas the German title indicates that the […]

I have been making the claim throughout this book that Narcissus can be raised from his recent history of negative attribution and brought centre-stage in the performance of sociability. Of course, some might argue that Narcissus should be left exactly where he is: they might say that it is simply not possible to relocate him […]

I suggested at the top of this chapter that the configuration of the Narquette promised a utopian release from the determinations of gen­dered identity. But perhaps my drawing of this figure whose strength and attraction is indexed to her mastery of play and illusion still bears too close a resemblance to a reading of feminine […]

The contemporary theorist Leo Bersani has made the prospect of narcis­sism as an aesthetic social principle central to his work. In his seminal text The Culture of Redemption (1990), he locates the ‘aesthetic of narcis­sism’ as pivotal to his development of a ‘general ethical-erotic project’, identifying in Freud’s 1914 essay the possibility of reading narcissism […]

The ‘Narquette’ of this chapter title, is a figure who now needs intro­duction. Because we would struggle to discuss this figure without the use of a gendered pronoun we shall assign the Narquette a feminine linguistic identity (in short, the Narquette becomes a she). However, as will become clear in due course, the he-ness or […]

Freud tells us that patients who suffer but also take pleasure in suffering their own exceptionality will make themselves known to the analyst via an explicit refusal to renounce any satisfaction, or submit to the tem­porary discomforts that therapy must entail: ‘They say that they have renounced enough and suffered enough, and have a claim […]

Our focus in this chapter on the high point of cultural critiques of narcissism from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, has left open the question of narcissism’s discursive circulation beyond this historical moment. There is no doubt something in the claim that, with hind­sight, the type of narratives explored above look to have been ‘rather […]

Lasch conceives his new Narcissus in relation to the character-type of the ‘American Adam’ whose ‘rugged individualism’ and ‘unbridled egotism’, we are told, were much celebrated in nineteenth-century American literature (1991, 10-11). Lasch is quick to point out, how­ever, that the resemblance drawn between the two characters on the grounds of a shared ‘imperial’ sense […]