We other narcissists: self-love in Freud and culture

William Rees

doi:10.1080/0950236x.2020.1839956

Abstract

ABSTRACT I examine the paradoxical place of narcissism in contemporary culture, and within the work of Freud. Paying close attention to the repeated moments of equivocation and contradiction within Freud’s descriptions of primary and secondary narcissism, I draw on the work of Jean Laplanche, who suggests that the ambiguities in Freud’s texts often mirror ambiguities within the constitution of the ego. I argue that we should read Freud’s inability to rigorously distinguish self from other in his explications of self-love not – or not only – as a failure on his part, but also as a trace of an alterity at the heart of identity. It is the very ‘failure’ of Freud’s concept of narcissism that leaves it open to the other and makes it remain a vital concept today, when the word narcissism has been reduced to an impoverished notion of self-obsession. In closing I suggest that, with his knotted and never fully coherent concept of narcissism, Freud provides us with a way of thinking about human relationships outside of the binaries of selfless v selfish love that so commonly constrain our popular and theoretical ideas about love.

Highlights

I examine the paradoxical place of narcissism in contemporary culture, and within the work of Freud
Paying close attention to the repeated moments of equivocation and contradiction within Freud’s descriptions of primary and secondary narcissism, I draw on the work of Jean Laplanche, who suggests that the ambiguities in Freud’s texts often mirror ambiguities within the constitution of the ego
I argue that we should read Freud’s inability to rigorously distinguish self from other in his explications of self-love not – or – as a failure on his part, and as a trace of an alterity at the heart of identity. It is the very ‘failure’ of Freud’s concept of narcissism that leaves it open to the other and makes it remain a vital concept today, when the word narcissism has been reduced to an impoverished notion of selfobsession

Summary

Getting over oneself

The term narcissism was coined in 1899 by Paul Näcke, who used it to describe a subject who treats himself like a sexual object. (A year earlier, Havelock Ellis had described a similar phenomenon, using the term ‘Narcissus-like’.) Freud begins his 1914 ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ by dismissing Näcke’s definition, suggesting that narcissism is something far farther-reaching, not merely ‘a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature’ (SE 14, pp. 73–4). Later, the subject will, if the ordinary life-story runs its course, experiment with the other kinds of loving, these forays in object-relations will always remain tentative, precarious modifications of that original and abiding self-love If, as this accounts suggests, the subject begins closed unto itself, it is unclear how – or, whether – it could ever be prized open. Because what’s curious about Freud’s gender-bending psychodrama in the Leonardo essay is that the narcissist’s self-love is a disguised way of remaining faithful to the (m)other: ‘While he seems to pursue boys and to be their lover, he is in reality running away from the other women, who might cause him to be unfaithful’ This ‘autoerotism’, far from excluding all others, involves a kind of three-way: subject, mother, and same-sex love object. One’s first love, Freud would seem to imply, might be the hardest to get over

An open-and-shut case?

Between two points of view

A call from inside

A happy ending?