On the Introduction of Narcissism to Psychoanalytic Theory: 1914 and Its Consequences

Abstract

It is an historical coincidence that just as Freud proposed his theory of narcissism as a treatise on love, which is of course a treatise on self-love, the old aggressive impulse was finding a new level of cultural expression with the First World War. Freud’s paper, although we cannot say it is a direct response to this historical moment, nonetheless captures some of its cultural contradictions: When the idea of a military heroism was about to be mobilised and then obliterated once and for all, and the potency of the individual was to be radically undermined by the technological and bureaucratic decrees of war, Freud attended to the question of individual integrity without irony. The First World War is the plenary event of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century theories about the dissolution of social bonds, and it is also the event that shattered the myth of the coherent individual subject: ‘Since that time’, Peter Sloterdijk tells us, ‘broken modes of consciousness visibly reign: irony, cynicism, stoicism, melancholy, sarcasm, nostalgia […]’ (122). Although we can perhaps see the argument for reading Freud’s paper as a kind of nostalgia before the event — nostalgia for an integrated self before the self-shattering of the war — I shall read it as a paper that foregrounds the difficulties of boundary crossings, the necessity of illusions of integrity and self-sufficiency, and the formative link between defining (and loving) the self and defining social relations.