In his work of 1968, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression, Michael Balint rejects the clinical accuracy and theoretical usefulness of Freud’s account of primary narcissism and attributes its persistence in the psychoanalytic lexicon to the erroneous belief that ‘the logically simple is necessarily the chronologically earlier’ (1968, 30). Balint’s theory of ‘primary love’ suggests that two-person-ness provides the starting position — what he calls ‘the basic fault’ — out of which the Oedipus conflict can develop (three-person-ness), or an absence of object-relation can develop (what he calls ‘the level of creation’ characterised by one — person psychology). Starting with two-person-ness in this way, Balint is positing a version of ‘in the beginning was the relation’ for his story of origins. Accordingly, in refuting the idea of a primitive singularity, and putting in its place a primitive relationship, the only narcissism that remains valid for Balint is a secondary one. We can track through the contours of his argument here and, even when we disagree with it, treat as productive the focus it brings to the problematic aspects of Freud’s primary narcissism.
Balint identifies in Freud’s writings three ‘mutually exclusive’, and even competing, accounts of ‘the individual’s most primitive relation with his environment’ (35); he calls these ‘primary object-relationship’, ‘primary autoeroticism’, and ‘primary narcissism’ — and finds them all wanting. Balint illustrates the first account, ‘primary object- relationship’, with reference to the quotation we considered above from the ‘Three Essays’ of 1905 stating that ‘the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it’. We have already seen that this passage prob — lematises the tenability of the distinction between the anaclitic and the narcissistic modes. For Balint it is a reminder that when Freud revisits the 1905 essay in 1915, to incorporate his newly established theory of narcissism, he does so to describe ‘an additional method of finding an object’ rather than to supplant the primary object-relationship (Balint, 1968: 36). Most simply, Freud is here read as prioritising the status of primary object-relationship in which the mother’s breast — as the prototypical sexual object — is external to the infant, and exists beyond the infant’s so-called omnipotence. The second account, ‘primary autoeroticism’, has its developmental history in Freud’s ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ paper (1910a), his ‘Schreber’ analysis (1911b), and ‘Totem and Taboo’
(1913). In each of these narcissism is considered as an intermediary stage between primary autoeroticism and object-relationship. Understandably, Balint locates the same ‘primary autoeroticism’ thesis in the 1914 paper with Freud’s remark that ‘there must be something added to auto-eroticism — a new psychical action — in order to bring about narcissism’ (37 [quoting Freud, 1914a: 77]). The final account is that of ‘primary narcissism’ which Balint regards as psychoanalysis’ ‘standard’ and ‘official version’ of an individual’s genesis (38-39). He finds this version expressed most succinctly in Freud’s analogy of the amoeba:
Thus we form the idea of there being an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexis much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out. (1914a, 75)
Here ‘an original libidinal cathexis of the ego’ suggests an ego already in place that doesn’t have to be developed. Balint is especially struck by how proximate this conception of ‘the individual’s most primitive relation with his environment’ is to that of primary autoeroticism (only two — pages apart in the 1914 text). Thus, he points to a contradiction within the paper of 1914 where primary autoeroticism and primary narcissism contend for the lead role in the story of origins. Balint notes, however, that beyond the brief comment just quoted, there is an absence of ‘concise description’ of the primary narcissism position (38). Accordingly, he turns to two passages from Freud’s wider corpus: The first, an addition to the ‘Three Essays’ (again from 1915); the second, from Freud’s late work ‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’ (1940) where the amoeba analogy is once more prominent:
Narcissistic or ego-libido seems to be the great reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which they are withdrawn once more; the narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things, realized in earliest childhood, and is merely covered by the latter extrusions of libido, but in essentials persists behind them. (Balint, 38-39 quoting Freud, 1905 [added 1915]: 218)
It is hard to say anything of the behaviour of the libido in the id and in the superego. All that we know about it relates to the ego, in which at first the whole available quota of libido is stored up. We call this state absolute, primary narcissism. It lasts till the ego begins to cathect the ideas of objects with libido; to transform narcissistic libido into object libido. Throughout the whole of life the ego remains the great reservoir from which libidinal cathexes are sent out to objects and into which they are also once more withdrawn, just as an amoeba behaves with its pseudopodia. (Balint, 39 his emphasis, quoting Freud, 1940: 150-151)
Balint identifies these passages to evidence his claim that primary narcissism, depicted as already ego-bound, became the official psychoanalytic creed overwriting earlier contradictions in the development of narcissism as a concept, and inhibiting a conception of an original harmonious relation. It is this second point that we will now go on to consider.
Balint suggests that many of the difficulties raised by the concept of primary narcissism result from the tension between Freud’s developing theoretical ideas and the clinical data that he was working with. In the face of broad clinical consensus regarding the moribund status of primary narcissism, he argues that psychoanalysis should now ‘follow the biologists in facing the end of the amoeba myth’ (Balint, 1949 [1937]: 273). The clinical examples in which Freud identifies a regression to a state of primary narcissism can, according to Balint, be better understood as regressions to a primary relationship. In order to develop a critical perspective on Balint’s reading of Freud, we shall focus on his discussion of sleep, which, along with schizophrenic states, he identifies as one of the more persistent cases for Freud’s primary narcissism thesis.
For Freud the ‘condition of sleep [… ] resembles an illness in implying a narcissistic withdrawal of the positions of the libido on to the subject’s own self, or, more precisely, on to the single wish to sleep’ (1914a, 83). Balint acknowledges that sleep enacts a regression to a ‘primitive state’ but wants to describe this as a ‘primitive state of peace with [a holding] environment’ rather than a regression to primary narcissism (1968, 50). In answering what this single wish to sleep is a wish for, he quotes a lengthy passage from Sandor Ferenczi’s On Forced Phantasies (1924), of which the following is an excerpt:
The child, frightened, crying, shaken by the traumatic experience of birth, soon becomes lulled in this sleeping state which creates in him a feeling — on a reality basis, on the one hand, and on the other hallucinatory, that is, illusory — as though no such tremendous shock had occurred at all. Freud (Introductory Lectures) has said, indeed, that strictly speaking the human being is not completely born; he is not born in the full sense, seeing that through going nightly to bed he spends half his life in, as it were, the mother’s womb. (Balint, 1968: 49 [Ferenczi, 1924: 73])
Balint goes on to say that the sleeper wishes to regress nightly to ‘a more primitive, more satisfying form of relationship with objects whose interests were identical with his’ and hence his regression is not ‘to that of primary narcissism in which there is no environment to which to relate’ (50-51). Here, and in no uncertain terms, Balint reads primary narcissism as a denial of the environment. But such a conclusion must be considered partial when we recognise that Ferenczi has underlined the vital point of primary narcissism’s structure: it has both a ‘reality basis’ and an illusory force. This doubleness is of considerable import to the presentation of narcissism that I am offering in this chapter.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence to be found against Balint’s hypothesis that primary narcissism denies an environment of primary relationality is located in an important footnote to Freud’s paper of 1911 ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ — the context of which is Freud’s justification for his hypothesis that the reality principle is established through the disappointment of the pleasure principle:
It will rightly be objected that an organisation which was a slave to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could not have come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction like this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant — provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother — does almost realise a psychical system of this kind. It probably hallucinates the fulfilment of its internal needs; it betrays its unpleasure, when there is an increase of stimulus and an absence of satisfaction, by the motor discharge of screaming and beating about with its arms and legs, and then it experiences the satisfaction it has hallucinated. (1911a, 219n my emphasis)
The image Freud goes on to evoke is of a ‘bird’s egg with its food supply enclosed in its shell’: In order for the bird-foetus to be described as self-sufficient one would have to bracket-out ‘the [environmental] provision of warmth’ that sustains it (219n). Referring back to our previous discussion regarding the problematic distinction between the anaclitic and narcissistic modes of object-choice, we can say that Freud’s 1911 footnote suggests that the primacy of the anaclitic (the bird — foetus’ dependency on his egg-environment) has to be in place in order to make possible the narcissistic state (the bird-foetus’ apparent self-sufficiency within the egg). In other words, the illusion of a self-contained system suggested by the enclosure of the egg, is underwritten by wider environmental provision. The importance of this note for a revaluation of primary narcissism has been considered by Josh Cohen who concludes, rightly in my opinion, that ‘it is the very fact of infantile helplessness which conditions its illusions of autonomous self-enclosure. The objectless state is the paradoxical effect of the maternal object’s care’ (Cohen, 2007: 34). With this 1911 footnote, then, Freud has anticipated Balint’s basic criticism that primary narcissism presents an individual who ‘is born having hardly any or no relationship with his environment’ (Balint, 1968: 66). In Freud’s conception, the presence and the care of the mother (or nursing environment) is taken as read. As Winnicott puts it, recapturing the aspect of illusion or hallucination assumed in Freud’s presentation (but overlooked in Balint’s): ‘the environment is holding the individual, and at the same time the individual knows of no environment and is at one with it’ (2004 [1958], 283).
It goes without saying that Freud’s note composed in 1911 precedes his development of the theory of primary narcissism proper; but I would argue that the taken-for-granted status of the qualification — ‘provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother’- justifies the thought that Freud would have retained this basic premise as he went on to develop later aspects of his metapsychology. Balint is correct therefore when he states that narcissism ‘can be preserved only on the condition that [the narcissists’] environment is willing, or can be forced, to look after them’ (55); the point would be that he is not correct at the expense of Freud. Of particular interest here is Freud’s admission that the satisfactions enjoyed by the seemingly self-sufficient narcissist are the satisfactions of his hallucinations (always supported by an environment of care). This powerful idea leads us to confront one of Freud’s classic and paradoxical images that has proved problematic for later theorists: the image of the omnipotent infant, or what Freud preferred to call ‘His-Majesty-the-Baby’. The necessary narcissism of infancy reflects what Juliet Mitchell calls ‘the megalomaniac moment of the neonate when the baby and the world are apparently indistinguishable’: In neonatal narcissism it as if the neonate is a monad (Mitchell, 1979 [1974]: 39).
It is my suggestion that what Balint takes to be the contradictions of Freud’s concept of primary narcissism may be better accounted for by considering narcissism’s double structure — exemplified by Ferenczi’s argument that regression to a primary state has both ‘a reality basis’ and a basis in ‘illusion’. Moreover, it remains for us to establish the character of Balint’s alternative to primary narcissism, namely ‘primary love’, and in particular to question the place of illusion and formative conflict within it. Balint insists that at a primary level, ‘environment and individual penetrate into each other, they exist together in a "harmonious mix-up"’ (66). Immediately we can see that his terminology transgresses the Freudian truism that aggressivity and power-lust are factors in the development of the ego. For Balint the fantasy of infantile omnipotence is ‘out of tune’ with the primary dyadic experience; for the infant, he tells us, ‘there is no feeling of power’ (70). An obvious criticism here might be that while the ‘mix-up’ of individual and environment may be ‘harmonious’ for the baby, the same experience may be at least a fraction more discordant for the environment (i. e. the mother-figure). But Balint is sure that, in the ideal situation, neither party experiences the ‘need for either power or effort, as all things are in harmony’ (70). This is quite a claim: whereas the satisfactions of early infancy in Freud’s account are understood as the experience of hallucinations — just as, in Ferenczi’s account, the state of sleep enacts for the child the illusion that the trauma of birth has not occurred — Balint’s account eradicates this fictive element by insisting that the harmony of primary love is real. Furthermore, Balint positions this primary harmonious relation as the template from which all subsequent psychical developments emerge: ‘[…] the re-establishment of the harmonious interpenetrating mix-up, between the individual and the most important parts of his environment, his love objects, is the desire of all humanity’ (74). Although this echoes Freud’s perspective on the drive to return to the state of primary narcissism, it also marks a point of significant difference — for in resetting the prototype, Balint inevitably recasts the repetitions. Freud writes, ‘to be their own ideal once more, in regard to sexual no less than other trends, as they were in childhood — this is what people strive to attain as their happiness’ (1914a, 100). Thus, self-sufficiency — the imagined self-satisfactions of attaining one’s own ego-ideal — rather than the ‘harmonious mix-up’ is what is emphasised in the Freudian story.
This returns us once more to the paradoxical condition of the infant’s fantasised ‘self-sufficiency’; the infant who could not be ‘self-sufficient’ were he not so utterly abject and dependent. If, for Freud, it is a variant of this same fantasy that colours the condition of secondary narcissism, we may well say that the myth that saves the narcissist (the original illusion which establishes the conditions for an ego) also damns him (the illusion that inhibits complementarity in love). Indeed, this is where the complexity of the theory of primary narcissism informs the practice of the psychoanalytic clinic. Although there is no doubt a process of disillusionment at play in Freud’s conception of psychoanalytic therapy, there is also a central recognition of the first illusion of the infant — an illusion which ‘bear[s] the burden of existence’ — which does not present itself straightforwardly for demystification (1920a, 45). In the next section we shall observe how this theoretical and clinical dynamic is articulated through the image of the mirror. It is the mirror that Winnicott and Lacan use to explore Freud’s intuition that the infant’s state of blissful oneness is dependent on a formative illusion.