In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud is concerned to distinguish the phenomenon of the ‘traumatic’ neuroses, which indicate the limit of the pleasure principle, from that of the ‘normal’ neuroses. Of the many problems presented by this famously complex paper, one of the most enduring is the correspondence made between the traumatic neu­roses of those […]

From the Greek nostos meaning to return home, and algos meaning pain, the term nostalgia was coined by the seventeenth-century Swiss physi­cian Johannes Hofer to refer to a potentially fatal homesickness observed first in soldiers estranged from their homeland. As per the narcissist in Freud’s lexicon, characterised by megalomania and the withdrawal of libido from […]

Tonnies’ account of the shifts from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft is often read as shorthand for the fall from community. Where once the indi­vidual in his identity and interpersonal relations was organically bound to small-scale associations, in modern society he is impersonally gov­erned by the logic of commercial exchange. As a tale of transition that anchors […]

The question ‘what does it mean to have something in common?’ is at the heart of the narcissistic dilemma of social recognition. Because it engages with the unresolved intricacies of differentiation and identification — differentiation from the other; identification with the other — it is also the basis upon which narcissism intersects with sociol­ogy. Writing […]

Although it is Little Hans’ appetite for knowledge that provides the focus for Freud’s scientific study, there is obviously more than one Wissbegierde at play in the case history as it is recorded. Indeed, this case tells the story of a three-way research project in which Freud, Hans’ father, and Hans himself work towards the […]

In Freud’s open letter of 1907, Hans was upheld as a commendable example of unadulterated childhood: his natural curiosity had not been oppressed, and he was able to give expression to his fantasies in an open and ingenious manner seemingly free from phobic anxiety — all of which, broadly speaking, was heralded as the achievement […]

Herbert Graf (the real name of ‘Little Hans’) made his debut on the psychoanalytic stage two years prior to Freud’s publication of his full case history in 1909. In his open letter to a Hamburg physician (Dr. M. Furst), Freud deploys Hans (then Herbert) evidentially to support his thesis that ‘sexuality should be treated like […]

Although the infant-narcissist’s characteristic ‘megalomania and [… ] diversion of interest from the external world’ cannot be heralded as a straightforward cultural virtue, psychoanalysis recognises the impor­tance of narcissism for defining an ethical position in the world (1914a, 74). For example, we can note how narcissism permits the imagina­tive identifications that are the prerequisite of […]

As is the case with Freud’s account of the ego-ideal (to love what he him­self would like to be), so too does the narcissism of parenting (to love someone who was once a part of himself) demonstrate the doggedness of the dream of self-perfection. When one loves someone who was once a part of oneself, […]

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 […]