Current clinical approaches to narcissism
in light of North American authors
Jean-Jacques
Tyszler
I will begin with a paradox that
some readers might not appreciate, one that may wound our narcissism as Lacanians: against
all odds, we’ve fallen behind in elaborating a clinical
approach to narcissism. I say “against all odds” because Lacan does develop questions around the notions of the
mirror, the specular, the self and paranoia.
Regarding psychoses, the work in our field and within our organization
is not lacking, and it is built upon the
leads left open by Lacan (for example, about relationships
between image and object). But despite the fact that it narcissism is precisely the field most subjected to current
social changes, we’ve neglected
the position of narcissism in ordinary clinical practice,The authors who best
defend and illustrate narcissism in psychoanalysis lean on a famous turn in
Freud’s work in On Psychoanalysis (1913),
in which Freud presents narcissism as a structural and structuring moment for
the subject. A recent release of the Revue
Francaise de Psychanalyse (April 2002) thus begins:
“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.)”
Here, I
want to reconsider things on a more loyal level by mainly 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 our understanding of the stakes 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 that Lacan
names “object a”,
the object that causes
desire, the object of fantasy, indeed 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 have become increasingly more propitious to a culture of narcissism. We cannot miss the example in the U.S.A. that 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, Canadian writer and sociology
professor Régine Robin reminds her readers of the following edifying little
story: in 1983, while President Reagan was receiving Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir, he told him he’d personally witnessed the liberation of a death camp. It simply wasn’t true. Reagan just
thought it was the right thing to say at the moment. He would have liked it to be true…. “A
product of Hollywood cinema, Reagan had difficulty drawing the line between the
real and the imaginary. A period of widespread
simulacra…”, writes Robin. I believe the term is correct and allows us to
address the clinical treatment of narcissism in its 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 in Group
psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921), the
return of an all powerful and “absolutely narcissistic” leader is always possible; the
idea of a possible return of such
a leader under the apparent culture of frenzied
individualism will serve
as the thread for our colloquium[1],
Kohut first
came up with the term grandiose self to describe the grandiose and
exhibitionistic image which the child convokes in certain circumstances. He also 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, 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 Kohut’s influence over the general American analytic
movement was decisive.
Kohut
defends the interesting notion that narcissism
doesn’t exactly oppose itself to object
relations but constitutes a parallel and necessary current, one that guides the
subject towards the realization of an authentic self, meaning a self that 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 towards
destructiveness.
For
example, Kohut mentions chronic narcissistic rage as one of the psyche’s most
pernicious affections. This brings
to mind the beautiful monologue that opens Shakespeare’s
Richard III, and which Freud uses in “A few character
types drawn from psychoanalysis” (Imago IV, 1915-1916), the 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 pushed the topic of
infantile sexuality into the background and thus,
our entire conception of repression.
Kohut’s
strength (like for the controversial question of borderline states we discussed
in Belgium) lies in his starting §with
a clinical approach to the limits of transference. Some patients’ wounded self demands to
be restored first and
foremost. The analyst in these cases
submits to not so classical and often disconcerting methods of
transference. With idealizing
transference: the
analyst is perfect and the analysand is part of him. With mirror transference: the analysand is perfect and wants confirmation
from the analyst. Of course, this threatens
the foundational dissymmetry of transference and creates a functional equivalence, forced in this case, but in which we can easily recognize our current social
ideals. Although it might appear comical or caricatural, this clinical approach is not without
interest. The
narcissistic patient keeps an eye on the analyst; s/he controls him/her
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 neither interested in classical neuroses nor
psychoses. He tries to describe and
gather an otherwise dispersed symptomatology composed of depression, sexual
disinterest, delinquent activities, addictions, poverty of emotional bonds,
lack of humor, pathological lying, hypochondriac preoccupations and so
forth. None of these symptoms are
specific in and of themselves but they’re united
in the types of transference just
described.
I shall
leave aside the necessarily constructive and restorative aspect of analytic
interpretation in the cures of patients who present narcissistic deficiencies that require compensations according to Kohut. For, behind this narcissistic transference, there’s a subject without compass, even if s/he demands being looked at,
a patient without a name even if s/he speaks. Rather than comment more on Kohut’s narcissism, I believe the the
following quote by Isabelle Adjani about the
film The repentant (a film about which critics weren’t sure whether she’s
the actress or the subject[5]) summarizes such patients.
“She’s a
contemporary girl who tries to drop everything so she can lose her identity, including her social identity, in an attempt to find herself amidst a “virginal”
freedom…. It’s about 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 that
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 the winds
of all directions, to all possibilities without incarnating a single one.”
What was initially analyzed as a deficiency, a lack is presented here as an
ambition, an actual wish. The film’s heroine
comes out of prison but
she’s psychologically both the
prisoner and the jailer. “Jailer”
because she’s actually “the best
guardian of herself. She doesn’t want
anyone to decide her fate for her, and it’s
her fate that 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” that many patients claim to want for themselves nowadays. As
Charles Melman suggests, it commands a clinical practice that is both without
phallic referent yet non psychotic. In its own way, Lars von Trier’s latest
film, Dogville, illustrates this veiled mechanism.
[1] See Marie-Françoise Laval-Hygonenq’s article, Le
narcissisme de Freud. Le narcissisme, monographies de psychanalyse, P.U.F, April 2002.
∗ Translator’s note: in their French translations, Kohut’s terms are
“soi grandiose”, whereas Kernberg’s are “moi grandiose”.
[2] See in particular The analysis of the self. A systematic approach to the psychoanalytic
treatment of
narcissistic personality disorder.
[3] Quoted in “Some character-types met within psychoanalytic work”.
[4] Paul Denis, “La perspective de Heinz Kohut”, in [Journal quoted
earlier?]
[5] Author’s note. We no longer
know whether the work of art isn’t the artist himself! “The object lends itself less to
fetishism but the art world compensates by its narcissism”, in Catherine
Millet, L’art contemporain.
