The Importance of Being Narcissistic?: On Julia Kristeva's Reinscription of Narcissism

Abstract

It is almost a consensus that the framework of Freudian psychoanalysis primarily hinges on the Oedipus scenario, whose ternary structure is what initiates the subject into identification with the Symbolic Law. In Kristeva's investigation of the psychic underpinnings of Western culture, however, the main character is no longer Oedipus but Narcissus instead, and it is the subject's narcissism that ”determines the choice of a love object and sets into motion the identifications essential to the subsequent development of the ego” (Brandt 89). To put it another way, speaking of the constitution of the subject, Kristeva believes that in the beginning there is pre-Oedipal narcissism whereas Freud and Lacan conceive Oedipal identification as the starting point. For Freud, nomwl adults are observed to succeed in effacing their infantile narcissism (557; italics mine) , and only those people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, will continuously exhibit ”a type of object choice which must be termed 'narcissistic' ”(554). For Lacan, likewise, the narcissistic moment in the subject is supposed to be ”transcend in a nonnative sublimation” in a later stage (1977: 24). Contesting Freud's thrusting aside narcissism in favor of a ”true” object choice and Lacan's separating from signifying ideals the narcissistic, drive-animated pre-object-orientation (Kristeva 1987a: 21, 38), Kristeva's new version of narcissism, ostensibly, is opposed to traditional psychoanalysis which posits narcissism as a stage required to be left behind by the Oedipalized subject. Nevertheless, a close reading of Kristeva's dynamics of narcissism would reveal her reinscription as equivocally in tune with the Freudian Oedipal structure, at least in the sense that her narcissistic structure is designated as a triad habouring ”the narcissistic subject, the abject mother, and the imaginary father” (Oliver 86) . In this paper, I would explore Kristeva's complex dynamics of narcissism so as to show, on the one hand, how the pre-Oedipal narcissism she valorizes is paradoxically Oedipalized. On the other hand, I would like to investigate what this paradox signifies in terms of Kristeva's relation to her psychoanalytic forefathers. Does Kristeva's version of narcissism provide ”a new way to conceive of the oedipal situation as well as a new way to use it in the analytic situation” (Oliver 70)? Or does the narcissistic structure she reinterprets ironically testify to her compromise with the patriarchal status quo?