Current clinical approaches to narcissism in light of North American authors
The authors who best defend and illustrate narcissism in psychoanalysis lean on a famous turn in Freud’s work which is the 1913 text On Psychonalysis, in which Freud presents narcissism as a structural and structuring moment for the subject. A recent release (April 2002) of the Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse begins thus:
“Necessarily implicated in any problem linked to the self, the question of narcissism could only be largely reclaimed, diversified, enlarged by [Freud’s] many successors, and not the most minor (with the notable exceptions of Melanie Klein, who ignores him and Jacques Lacan, who finally abandons him.)”
I wanted to reconsider things on a more loyal level, by questioning the point of a clinical practice of narcissism among some North-American authors of ego psychology, but also French ones, like Bela Grunberger, for whom narcissism is the motor of any psychoanalytic cure.
Although it may displease some to admit, Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage and hence his conception of the self as alienation and self-delusion, misunderstanding and deception, is a major contribution to grasping the stake of narcissism. For post-Freudians, the cure is centered by the ideal self (the relationship between the ideal self and the ideal of the self) and moves towards this strange attractor which Lacan names object a, the object which causes desire, the object of fantasy, the subject’s only ontology. In that movement, the clinical approach to narcissism as such may dry up, except of course, when it comes to the elaboration of psychoses (ref: our organization’s works). However, the paradox lies in the fact that our societies are becoming increasingly more propitious to a culture of narcissism. We cannot miss the North America example which serves as a warning about current changes: multiple personalities, chameleon identities, deconstruction of sexual identity, a tendency to borrow and choose identifications as if they were garments.
The American writer Philip Roth has talent for giving life to his multiple selves. This can even be seen in his latest novel, The Human Stain.
In one of her articles, the writer and sociology professor Régine Robin (who lives in Montreal) reminds her readers of the following edifying little story: in 1983, while he was receiving Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli Prime Minister at the time, President Regan told him he had personally witnessed the liberation of a death camp. It was not true. But he thought it was the right thing to say. He would have liked it to be true…. “A product of Hollywood cinema, Regan had difficulty drawing the line between the real and the imaginary. A period of generalized simulacra…”, writes the Canadian sociologist. I believe the term is right and fecund to address the clinical treatment of narcissism in its quality of destructiveness, as suggests the argument proposed for this colloquium. Our modernity manufactures a hero who remodels history in its own image and confronts the dark side (of the debarred Other?).
This new narcissism is not just contemplative before the mirror.
The authors we studied perhaps deserve credit for underlining this fact. In Civilization and its discontents, Freud writes about sadism: “When it enters the stage without any sexual aim, even in the blindest outburst of destructive rages, we cannot be unaware that its satisfaction is accompanied yet again by an extraordinarily pronounced narcissistic pleasure insofar as it shows the self the realization of its ancient wishes of omnipotence.” As Freud says Group psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921), the return of an all powerful and “absolutely narcissistic” leader, always possible, will serve as the thread for our colloquium[1], a possible return under the apparent culture of frenzied individualism.
Kohut first came up with the term grandiose self to describe the grandiose and exhibitionistic image which the child convokes in certain circumstances. Kohut equally describes infantile solipsism (there is no other
reality for the child than himself) as cases of paranoid delirium or even the illicit perverse acts of adults. Kernberg borrows the expression under the term grandiose self*, a closed loop circuit from self to self. Starting in the fifties’ in the United States, Heinz Kohut‘s idea of self[2] is developed in similar ways to the Winnicottian self (which rules the child’s relationships to the outside world). It seems his influence over the general American analytic movement was decisive.
Kohut defends the interesting notion according to which narcissism doesn’t oppose itself as such to object relations, but constitutes a parallel and necessary current, guiding the subject towards the realization of an authentic self ,meaning a self which satisfies legitimate narcissistic needs. This hypothesis is clinically supported by phenomena of depersonalization and parceling mentioned both by psychiatrists and by Melanie Klein or Winnicott. Any harm done to narcissism is paid by a tendency to destructiveness.
For example, Kohut mentions chronic narcissistic rage as one of the psyche’s most pernicious affections. This brings to mind the beautiful monologue which serves as an introduction to Shakespeare’s Richard III and which Freud uses in “A few character types drawn from psychoanalysis” (Imago IV, 1915-1916). Monologue of Gloucester, the future king[3]: “But I, that am not shaped for such sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking-glass ; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty to strut before a wanton ambling nymph ; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them ; Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, have no delight to pass away the time, unless to spy my shadow in the sun and descant on mine own deformity ; and therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days.”
And Freud concludes: “we all think we have the right to hold a grudge against nature and destiny for congenital and infantile damages, we all demand compensations for precocious mortifications to our narcissism.”
Many authors have noticed[4] that the prevalence granted to narcissism forced infantile sexuality into the background, meaning ultimately our entire conception of repression.
Kohut’s strength (like for the controversial question of borderline states we discussed in Belgium) lies in the fact that he starts with a clinical approach to the limits of transference. Some patients’ wounded self first and foremost demands to be restored.
The analyst in these cases submits to not so classical and often disconcerting methods of transference. Idealizing transference, the analyst is perfect and the analysand is part of him or mirror transference, the analysand is perfect and wants confirmation from the analyst. Of course, this threatens the foundational dissymmetry of transference, and creates functional equivalence, forced in this case, but where we can easily recognize our most current social ideals.
Even if it seems funny or caricatural, this clinical approach is not without interest: the narcissistic patient keeps an eye on his analyst, he controls him and is on the lookout for any equivocal sign. The only rule is admiring approval. A formidable variation on benevolent neutrality, founded on what we now agree to call a new practice.
Kohut is not interested in classical neuroses, nor even in psychoses. He tries to describe and to gather an otherwise dispersed symptomatology composed of depression, sexual disinterest, delinquent activities, addictions, poverty of emotional bonds, lack of humor, pathological lying, hypochondriac physical preoccupations and so forth. None of these symptoms are specific in and of themselves but are united in the type of transference previously described.
I shall leave aside the necessarily constructive and restorative aspect of analytic interpretation in the cures of patients who present narcissistic deficiencies which therefore require compensations, according to Kohut.
For, behind this narcissistic transference appears a subject without compass, even if he commands to be looked at, without name even if he speaks.
Our cherished national actress Isabelle Adjani commented the release of the film La repentie (The repentant), a film about which critics are not sure whether she is the actress or the subject[5]. Speaking about the woman whom she plays in the film, Adjani says”
“She’s a contemporary girl who tries to drop everything so she can lose her identity, including her social identity and find herself amidst a virginal freedom…. The journey of a girl who tries to leave herself, without suffering, without severing because all there ever is, is severance, a girl who lives in the present, a present which floats in the impermanence of time. Her life plan is to not have a plan. She’s in the moment. She moves forward under the sign of inconsistency and insouciance erected as an art of living. Yet this inconsistency is not insignificance, it’s the famous unbearable lightness of being. Nor is it indifference. This inconsistency is about letting yourself be carried by contingence and incidence. Neither self-gaze nor haggard-self, but chance-self open to winds of all directions, to all possibilities without incarnating a single one.”
Better than a long commentary, I believe this beautiful quote from a beautiful actress offers possible readings of Kohut’s work on narcissism.
What was analyzed as a deficiency becomes a wish, an ambition. The heroine of the film comes out of prison but she is psychologically both the prisoner and the jailer. “Jailer” because she is actually “the best guardian of herself. She doesn’t want anyone to decide her fate for her and it is her fate which pushes her to move along.” In Kernberg’s terms, this implies the relationship from self to self. This hijacking of narcissism seems essential to me: the nosography doesn’t limit itself to the practice of describing case studies, it invents it, in the strongest sense of the word, meaning it produces it. Psychoanalysis invents a new subject guided only by his own self since all other instances are rejected.
The “chance-self” is an adventure which many people now want for themselves. As Charles Melman suggests, it commands a clinical practice which is without any phallic referent yet non psychotic. In its own way, Lars von Trier’s latest film, Dogville, illustrates this veiled mechanism.
Herbert Rosenfeld has written a lot about psychotic states and transference. He underlines the aggressive aspects of narcissism in its relationship to the dis-intricating drives. Beyond Hartmann, Rosenfeld refers to Karl Abrahm and, oddly, also to Reich. But it is Melanie Klein’s conception of envy which especially guides him:
“It seems that envy represents an almost completely disunited destructive energy which is particularly unbearable for the infantile self and that, early in life, it starts being split and warded off from the rest of the self[6].”
Rosenfled describes patients who deny the Other any importance, whether it be the parental Other or the analyst in the context of the cure or the small others in the familial and social circle: “It is professional successes and his personal relationships which he ruins by these self destructive acting-outs. Some patients become suicidal and their desire to die, to disappear into oblivion, is openly expressed since death is idealized as a solution to any problem.” It is a contribution to our modern depression. “A patient dreams about a small boy in a coma who dies after being poisoned. He lied on a bed in the courtyard and was threatened by the hot midday sun which was starting to reach him. The patient was standing near the boy but wasn’t doing anything to move or protect him. He only felt critical about the doctor who was treating the boy, felt superior to him, because it was up to him to see that the child should be moved into the shade.”
Naturally, the interpretation is conducted in terms of meaning, but the choice of agonizing rather than accepting the yoke of transference is rightfully underlined by Rosenfeld. “In these types of cases, there is a very determined chronic resistance to analysis and only a very detailed unveiling of the system allows the analyst to make any progress.”
In his own way, Rosenfeld convokes the analyst’s desire and his way of putting his share of reality into the balance.
Drifting subjects, subjects dying with envy… The clinical approach to narcissism describes constellations who regularly leave the practitioner facing a wall. The privilege given to self identifications to the detriment of grasping the object of fantasy, object a, sometimes provokes a surge of enthusiasm in reading through the lens of narcissism.
Thus, another author, Clifford Scott, speaks of auto-envy, envy oriented onto one’s self.
But it is Bela Grunberger, a French author of Hungarian origin, who, over the course of fifteen years starting in the 1950’s, gave the notion of narcissism as a separate psychic instance, therefore an instance not ruled by the drives, its fullest scope.
This radical position found supporters but was also criticized by some post-Freudians, in particular by André Green. Here, I refer you to the studies published under the title Le narcissisme. Essai de psychanalyse. (published by Petite Bibliothèque Payot), but also a very rich book, Narcissisme, christianisme, antisémitisme, written in collaboration with his student Pierre Dessuant, who also wrote the Que Sais-je edition on Narcissism.
We cannot adhere to Bela Grunberger’s idea of a pure narcissism, the persistent trace of a certain prenatal coenesthesia. Fetal science has become the inkwell of psychoanalysis. However, the clinical examples are often audacious, like this passage among some children’s “treasures” – heterogeneous, used, truncated and mismatched objects – and the systematic avoidance of oedipal rivalry for adolescents. According to Grunberger, this phenomenon which marks our contemporary civilization culminates in agglomerates where young people live completely isolated: “They isolate themselves in a narcissistic world where they live with those who are like them, meaning with their own images, including in their language and clothing and in a state of sexual lack of differentiation.”
A new clinical approach written in 1966! For those who wish to read it that way.
The authors quoted are far from Lacan’s elaboration (during the same period as Grunberger), for whom the self is a fundamentally paranoid instance.
Still, they leave us with wise questions and observations: the post-Freudian subject, the subject of a globalized economy, is more monopolized by narcissistic gratifications than by object relationships. The proliferation of merchandise-objects, technical gadgets, is linked to this closed-circuit libidinal economy.
This jouissance aligns the complaint of an unbearable narcissistic wound as soon as the subject is no longer complimented and encouraged.
The envy of what the other has or Desires is constitutive of the self in and of itself, according to the image of he who is like him. The radical character of the impasse “either me or the other” is underlined by these authors and perhaps we should see in auto-envy, the envy of the body proper rather than the self, the royal entrance to all addictions. “I self enjoy” (“je me jouis”).
Analytical discourse is another kettle of fish.
The discourse on narcissistic deficiencies pervades far beyond the field of pedopsychiatry and what the tenants of ego psychology don’t see very well is that they also manufacture this solitary hero seen in Hollywood films with their obligatory replication sequels (War #1, #2, #3, etc…). The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Lacanian analysis has its word to say about the displacement underlined in clinical observations. It should
also avoid that the discipline itself – psychoanalysis – be put to the service of the “grandiose” or the “free as a bird”.
In his article of 1914, Freud warns us of the narcissistic woman’s irresistible charm.
It will not be an easy task….
We must refer to the July 2003 edition of the Revue Française de Psychanalyse Dedicated to “narcissistic perversion”. This excellent edition, which seems to already be unavailable, gives its full scope to the term narcissistic perversion, inspired by the words of P-C Racamier.
It is not always easy to decline the wide variety of certain psychic strongholds or manipulations which manifest themselves in individual clinical treatments, institutions or even in the business world. The destructive aspect of the narcissist is well analyzed insofar as non-sexual jouissance is concerned. And these authors ask some crucial questions, like for instance: “what elements actually give the speech of narcissistic perverts its tremendous efficiency?”
