The role of repetition in narcissism and self-sacrifice: A Freudian Kleinian reflection on the person’s foundational love of the other

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through reexamination of Freud’s thinking on the “compulsion to repeat”, including detailed study of his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), this paper brings to the fore a central tension in Freud’s thinking on the roles narcissism and love in his foundational view of the person. While Freud conceptualizes the person as self-serving, aiming primarily to maximize personal satisfaction in accordance with the “pleasure principle,” he develops an alternative view of the person as primarily loving, desiring to truly encounter the other and reality, even if painful, and guilty when he fails to do so (largely because of conflicting narcissistic/destructive aims). This basic loving desire is associated with Eros and the life instincts, which, counter to what is commonly thought, is what Freud ultimately posits as lying beyond the pleasure principle. From this perspective, narcissistic pleasures become associated with death. The paper goes on to show how while Freud struggled to conceptually ground the view of the person as contending with his desire to love and inevitable inner obstacles to it, Kleinian psychoanalysis takes this view as basic and develops it further. One significant development finds expression in ideas on how the desire to love is not only non-narcissistic, but, rather, is self-sacrificing. Clinical implications are noted.