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, the subject’s original and narcissistic notion of his selfperfection is transferred on to the associated object of the child. Hence, a parent’s love for their offspring is depicted by Freud in terms as blind — if not more blind — as any romantic love. The parents can see no fault in the infant and will happily forgo their own pleasures to secure his because, as per the (narcissistic) collapse of the subject-object distinction, the baby’s pleasures are the parents’. Ultimately by placing the infant as ‘the centre and core of creation’, the parents will be able to fulfil the wishful dreams which they themselves have failed to realise (1914a, 91). It is possible to explain this strange parental behaviour in various ways. Before doing so, it should be noted that at this juncture I am only concerned to follow the logic of Freud’s 1914 text rather than engage with the many ways in which the narcissism of parental love has been re-read and critiqued especially by feminist scholars and theorists of maternal subjectivities. Staying with Freud, then, we could deploy a quasi-Darwinian frame to situate the displacement of a parent’s selfinterest onto the secondary object-choice of the child as an extension of the instinct of self-preservation. Another way of putting this would be to say that self-preservation and species-preservation are united in the narcissism of parental love. But Freud is not particularly concerned to emphasise this complementary rationale — complementary because the parent’s self-love is masked by the nobler sentiment of species-survival. In a more provocative tone he explains:
At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child. Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature. (91)
The implication of Freud’s argument is that although narcissism may be the ‘libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of selfpreservation’, it is not itself reducible to self-preservation (73-74). This is because the obdurate opacity at the heart of the parent-child relation — vacillating between boundary confusion and a conflicted process of differentiation — does not allow us to assume that such entangled narcissisms have a shared goal.
As much as we can pinpoint the blind narcissism of the parent operating through the child, so too can we reflect once more on the narcissism of the infant. One of the criticisms levied at Freud’s theory of primary narcissism, dealt with at some length in the previous chapter, was that it put forward a monadological conception of the neonate and underplayed the importance of its relations with the environment. Indeed, what kind of theory can speak of infantile omnipotence and of infantile helplessness, as Freud’s does, without tying itself in knots? But, of course, the purpose of Freud’s paradox — captured most forcefully in the image of ‘His-Majesty-the-Baby’- is to bring to the fore the power of illusion and fantasy (the baby’s and the parents’) in the creation of such a state of affairs (91). The interlocking narcissisms of the parent-child bond mean that His-Majesty-the-Baby only commands a love which mirrors the narcissism of his (parental) subjects. A parent’s love is childish, Freud tells us, and the baby is King!
For today’s reader, the idea that the anxiety of finitude (the mortality of the ego) can be ameliorated through the figure of the child is incredibly familiar. This major familial dynamic has been explored thoroughly: the perceived importance of nurturing and preserving the child’s autonomy, alongside his imagination, and capacity for play, belongs as much to the legacy of the development of psychoanalytic thought as it does to other discursive practices that concern themselves with the question of the child’s acculturation such as psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy and ethnography. It is also the case that parenting and family relations are frequently cited as the areas of everyday life that have been most subject to therapeutic governance and intervention. Christopher Lasch, about whom there will be more to say in Chapter 4, writes of the ‘proletarianization of parenthood’ to describe the emotional and ethical illiteracy of the modern parent whose functions have been expropriated by various socialising and therapeutic agencies (1991 [1979], 167). Lasch’s is just one voice — albeit, at one time, a particularly prominent one — in a chorus of twentieth-century, broadly Anglo-American sociological commentaries that decry the expansive reach of modern systems of scientific, technological and bureaucratic expertise for their transformative effects on cultural sites of intimacy and public authority. The baby, still paraded as King, is now accompanied by various royal aids — risk assessors, welfare advisors, early-years educators, the supports of new media such as DVDs and apps for infant stimulation — all of which are tasked with ensuring his physical and psychical survival, and thus his entry into the intelligible world of culture. Following Freud, we would have to assume that the operation of multiple and interlocking narcissisms are at play in this cultural deification and prostheticisation of the child.