Socialising Narcissus via the Case of ‘Little Hans’

In his work of 1921 ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, Freud, not uncharacteristically, deploys an animal metaphor to describe the form of narcissism. Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘company of porcupines’ crowding themselves close together ‘one cold winter’s day’ proves an apt image for describing the dynamics of group identification. As soon as the porcupines feel ‘one another’s quills’ they are induced to sepa­rate again — their movement to integration continually thwarted by the counter-movement to separation. With this mobility, ‘driven backwards and forwards’, the narcissism of groups is seen to resemble the narcis­sism of individuals (101). We saw in the last chapter that narcissism was considered by Freud to be an intermediary process, as much as a fixed state, and, moreover, a process with two directions: the construc­tion of the ego at the level of primary narcissism moving forward out of autoeroticism towards the external world; and regression at the level of secondary narcissism moving backwards to the ego away from the external world. This circularity is implicit in Freud’s conception of the ego-ideal where the process of idealisation (where a person may love ‘what he himself would like to be’ (1914a, 90)) implies its inversion: the failure of living up to this ideal and thereby forcing a split in the fabric of the ego. Thus, ironically, the narcissist’s failure of autonomy is structurally written in to his project of self-idealisation. What’s more, the incongruity of narcissistic social life emerges from this same bind. Here Freud’s example of the regressive self-idealisation of a parent’s love for their child (where a person may love ‘someone who was once part of himself’ (90)) is especially fitting. Reflecting the child’s own process of self-idealisation, the parents’ self-love through the child embodies the enduring double structure of self-assertion and failed autonomy which typifies narcissistic sociability. In this chapter I shall briefly consider both of these narcissistic movements — progressive and regressive — before identifying their operation within Freud’s case study ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909), otherwise known as ‘Little Hans’. Freud himself saw Hans as a ‘little Oedipus’ and we can certainly see how narcissism’s paradigmatic question concerning the neonate’s relation to its environment has been overlaid in this case by the terms of the Oedipal triangle, with its familiar castration anxieties and incestu­ous conflicts (1909, 97). That said, I propose to read ‘Little Hans’ for how the narcissistic dynamic endures; specifically for how it propels our pro­tagonist’s researches and forces his psychical breakdown. In the figure of Hans, whose self-idealisation and ultimate failure of independence are expressed through his obdurate scientific instinct — his desire to know — we behold our first example of what might be called a heroic narcissism.

Updated: 05.11.2015 — 22:26