Week 4 Flashcards
(49 cards)
Is pathological narcissism as it’s sketched in this discourse the same ‘narcissism’ Freud sketches it, the same ‘beast,’ as it were?
-Note: we’re getting a few different sketches of ‘narcissism’ from a few
different moments in the 20th century…
-Freud’s essay on narcissism is from 1914…(He worked it out
BEFORE “The Ego and the Id,” which we studied last time)
-Kristeva and Derrida’s respective sketches of narcissism (which we’re
getting through the text “The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-
Possible Self-Love” by Pleshette De Armitt) would have been worked
out in the last half of the 20th-century…
-Heinz Kohut and Ernest S. Wolf are sketching narcissism within a
transformed psychoanalytic framework in their text “The Disorders of the Self and their Treatment” from 1978…
Why is ‘narcissism’ such a hot word
today?
-This seems to be partly because people who have been tormented by narcissists are generating a discourse designed to empower themselves and flip past power- relations that in the past were established between them and their tormentors…In
our world we pathologize behaviours and traits that make it impossible for
people to function under capitalism and also pathologize behaviours and
traits that aggravate other people/make them suffer…Narcissists often
function well under capitalism; and they are usually not troubled by their own ‘way of being’…
-The discourse on ‘narcissism’ can be conceived as what Foucault called a
‘counter-discourse’ (an attempt to turn power against itself, to flip the tables on a power-relation or set of such relations, with the help of a discourse with a certain
content)
-Think about Nietzsche’s Genealogy and the “slave revolt,” which involved
changing the meanings of the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’ so that the “slaves,” who were formerly branded bad, could be recast as good while their oppressors, the “strong,”
would be cast as evil…This new discourse on good and evil gave the “slaves” the political and cultural upper hand…
Why might it be philosophically/politically
important to study narcissism…
One contemporary sketch of pathological narcissism (think of the story of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection in the water and lives a life devoted to that image and bereft of other loves; Echo is the other main character in this story: she falls in love with him—this love is unrequited; she is cursed to simply repeat the tail-end of anything he says back to him)…
-We’re all originally, as young children ‘narcissistic’ (‘primary narcissism’)
-As young children, we don’t distinguish between ourselves, our bodies, and external ‘objects’ (using the word objects broadly: another person can count as an ‘object’)…
-The objects that are real to us are those which satisfy our needs (the need for nourishment, etc.) and we understand these objects as mere extensions of our own body (not as separate, autonomous objects): we’ll relate to our mother, for instance, in the same way we relate to our own arm…
-This, again: is normal: we’re all narcissistic in this way—so this
story goes—at a certain phase in our development…
-What makes narcissism pathological in adults? The young
child eventually starts to understand objects as
independent…When an adult is pathologically narcissistic, some
aspects of primary narcissism are carried over into their adult
life…
-They still related to people as extensions of themselves and
expect them to meet their needs and do what they want (in the
same way as a person expects their own arm to do what they will
it to do); it’s an afront to them when people do not do as they
want (this is their entitlement)
Why might it be philosophically/politically
important to study narcissism… continued
-They struggle with allowing people to be
independent/autonomous in general (or maybe there are some
people they do this with more than others: those they are closest to—
typically family members and intimate partners)…They may expect
select people to share their views/agree with them or in other
ways walk in step with them and never challenge them…Other
people are on their clock/their schedule…
-They may become enraged when people do challenge them (they
have a sense of themselves as ‘right,’ as always right—this conviction
is part of the conviction that they are superior to others, which is
related to the sense that they are really the only self, or the center
of a world; it is also in this way related to an inability to understand
the other as an independent self: how dare another person have views
that diverge from mine!)…
-Their need to be right (their sense of themselves as the ‘one who knows what’s what’), and sometimes their need to understand themselves as ‘good,’ or beyond reproach, makes it impossible for them to achieve critical distance from themselves/their own behaviour: they can’t engage in self-critique and correct bad behaviour; there are real respects in which they do not (because they cannot) ‘grow as people’…This stagnancy on their part becomes
more conspicuous as they age…
-They are often unresponsive to therapy for this last reason; talking to them about the issues you have with them in an attempt to resolve those issues is basically futile BECAUSE of their personality structure; they typically respond to such talk by denying the truth of what you’re saying, or by denying that what you’re saying happened ever happened (gaslighting), or by blaming you for the issue, or by downplaying the gravity of what they’ve done
(‘it’s not so bad’)…They only say sorry if this allows them to get what they want (they’re not actually sorry for what they’ve done, but they understand the ways in which offering apologies will allow them to manipulate situations and people in the way they desire to)…
-Related to the last point: They seem incapable of rendering themselves accountable to others…
-They have a need to be in control and to control others (this also seems related to a failure to understand other people as independent)…They may rage when they experience themselves as losing control over a person or situation…
-They lack empathy, or have ‘cognitive empathy’ rather than actual
empathy…That is: they might be able to figure out in an abstract way
that a person isn’t feeling great because they’re in a certain situation
(because they’ve learned that people in such situations usually feel
bad) and they might be able to act empathetic if this serves their
purposes (making you like them, or think they’re decent, or something
like this), but they don’t actually have the ‘feelings’ that come along
with normal empathy: they don’t hurt because you hurt; and they don’t
actually care that you’re hurting…Their lack of empathy will
eventually shine through in specific situations, even if there were
occasions when they went through the motions of caring and
successfully fooled you into thinking they were empathetic…
-They ‘punish’ people in various ways for “failing” to meet their unreasonable expectations…
-Their sense of superiority is in a complex way compatible with feelings of insecurity/inadequacy; they achieve a sense of security or fuel their self-confidence by
dominating and destroying others (they tear people down—however blatantly or subtly— in order to build themselves up)…
-Last point continued: You’ll never be able to please a narcissist because they are relating to you as someone to tear down; everything you do, no matter how good it is, is something they’ll respond to negatively; they also try to groom you to be dependent on their approval; if you didn’t depend on their approval, then their disapproval wouldn’t hurt you in
the way they need to hurt you to feel good about themselves…This aspect of narcissism is more damaging than the aspect that simply involves feelings of superiority/grandiosity…
-*Note: it’s not clear how this last aspect of narcissism could be understood to stem from an
inability to recognize distinctions between the self and external objects; what is it’s source?
Hegel recognized something like this dimension of narcissism when, in the
Phenomenology, he suggested that the subject must annihilate otherness to shore up it’s ‘self-certainty’…
-There’s more to say, but we’ll leave it at that…
So going back to our question: Why might it be philosophically/politically important to study narcissism?
-The discourse on ‘narcissism’ might give us a vocabulary for talking
about problematic people and structures that can’t seem to
engage in self-critique & change by themselves (they are self-
reinforcing instead)…
-Whole ‘disciplines,’ ‘political systems,’ and other structures might be
narcissistic if they prove incapable of critically interrogating the norms
that structure them…
-Whole cultures can be narcissistic (work-place cultures, etc.)
-The discourse on ‘narcissism’ might help us think about particular
forms of subordination (effected by narcissistic individuals and
larger narcissistic structures) and think about how we’re supposed to
effectively push back on these forms of subordination…
There’s certainly a relationship between narcissism and forms of social injustice we try
to think about in philosophy…
-Has anyone studied ‘epistemic injustice’ (check out Miranda
Fricker’s text if interested)? (The term captures dynamics in which
objectively interlocutors are not in fact positioned as having equal
credibility: one interlocutor, as a result of the random social privilege
they possess and for no other reason, relates to the other as less
credible. It’s harder for what the person cast as ‘less credible’ has to
say to get any uptake)…
-Narcissists (who think they know and are right) position their
interlocutors as less credible…Especially if what their interlocutor is saying does not exactly mirror the narcissist’s own convictions…If their interlocutor is mirroring their convictions, they’ll probably accept what they’re saying…
Are we de-politicizing certain behaviours and phenomena by calling them ‘narcissistic’?
-Is narcissism just the name we give to privileged people who can’t make themselves accountable to others because of the way their privilege has shaped their psychology (e.g.,
making them understand themselves as right and beyond reproach)?
-Are we de-politicizing the phenomenon of privilege (and the
forms of “moral” superciliousness, epistemic injustice and unaccountability that go along with it) by calling it ‘pathological narcissism,’ by ‘psychiatrizing’ it?
-Consider the fact contemporary articulations of ‘misogyny’ resonate deeply with contemporary articulations of ‘narcissism.’
-Think specifically about the sense of entitlement to women’s bodies/sexuality, energies,
attention, etc., that characterize misogyny, as well as the forms of epistemic injustice that
do: women are positioned in advance as less credible, as more ‘correctable,’ or as those who OUGHT to defer to what the men who are addressing them are saying…They’re also
positioned as more morally wrong or morally questionable (they are cast as ‘bad’ or ‘evil,’ for instance, when all they’ve done is “fail” to give men the things they believe they’re entitled to—but aren’t ACTUALLY entitled to)…
-Also think of the forms of anger/rage that men punitively level at the women who don’t give them what they believe they’re entitled to (sex, time, attention, companionship, energy, etc., etc.), or who don’t behave as they believe they OUGHT to…
-Consider the phenomenon of ‘white fragility’ and how it interfaces with ‘narcissism,’ too…Many of many of the behaviours we just flagged as misogynistic could equally be
described as racist when playing out between white people and people of colour…
-Similar dynamics seem to characterize ‘classist’ interactions as well…
Some interesting details from Kohut and Wolf’s article (1978)…
-Narcissism is interestingly cast as helping therapy (not hindering it): “Of the patients who suffer from disorders of the self, only those with narcissistic behaviour and personality disorders are capable of tolerating the frustrations of the reactivated narcissistic needs of their vulnerable self to which the working-through process in analysis exposes them without a protracted fragmentation or depletion of the self. In other words, of all the primary disorders of the self only narcissistic behaviour and personality disorders are analysable” (416)
-They flag what we flagged as the relation between narcissism and
feelings of insecurity/inadequacy: hypersensitivity to ‘failure, disappointments, and slights’ is an aspect of pathological narcissism;
a ‘weakened’/‘defective’ self is cast as the heart of the disorder…
Note that these thinkers have an
understanding of the source or cause of ‘pathologies of the self’ that differ from the causal story we find in classical psychoanalysis …
Classical psychoanalysis, as we’ve been seeing, centers originary trauma, drives and defenses…
The general ‘atmosphere’ in which a child is raised matters more,
these people suggest…
What do we mean by ‘atmosphere’?
“Selfobjects are objects which we experience as part of our self; the expected control over them is, therefore, closer to the concept of the control which a grown- up expects to have over his own body and mind than to the concept of the control which he expects to have over others. There are two types of self-object: two kinds of selfobjects: those who respond to and confirm the child’s innate sense of vigour,
greatness and perfection; and those to whom the child can look up and with whom he can merge as an image of calmness, infallibility and omnipotence. The first type
is referred to as the mirroring selfobject, the second as the idealized parent imago…Depending on the quality of the interactions between the self and its self objects in childhood, the self will emerge either as a firm and healthy structure or as a more or less seriously damaged one” (414)…
“[P]sychological survival requires a specific psychological environment—the presence of responsive-empathic selfobjects” (416)…If conditions are (consistently) right (if a parent fails once in a blue moon, this won’t affect much), the developing child will eventually “replace selfobjects and their functions by a self and its
functions” (ibid).
The forms of aggression and other reactions that characterize narcissism are defensive
responses on the part of the
weakened/damaged self…
-Mirror hungry personalities: “thirst for selfobjects whose confirming and admiring responses will nourish their famished self” (421)…These responses allow them to counteract their sense of worthlessness…
-“Ideal-hungry personalities are forever in search of others whom they can admire for their prestige, power, beauty, intelligence, or moral stature. They can experience themselves as worthwhile only so long as they can relate to selfobjects to whom they can look up” (ibid)…But, haunted by the feeling of a ‘structural defect,’ they eventually find defects in those they idealize…This cyclically prompts the search for others to idealize…
-“Alter-ego personalities need a relationship with a selfobject that by conforming to the self’s
appearance, opinions, and values confirms the existence, the reality of the self. [Eventually,]
The alter-ego-hungry discovers that the other is not himself and, as a consequence of this discovery,
begins to feel estranged from him” (421-422)…This also prompts a search of replacements…
-Merger-hungry personalities try to control their self-objects…they experience the other as their
own self, they feel intolerant of his independence: “they are very sensitive to separations from him
and they demand—indeed they expect without question—the selfobject’s continuous presence”
(422)
There’s more to say about Kohut and
Wolf
-We haven’t made a comprehensive list of the pathological
responses/characters they’ve outlined…
-Therapy for them: involves fixing the self’s structure…They seem to think that sometimes cures are effected quite rapidly once the self comes to bear the appropriate relations to its
selfobjects…
-Their vision of therapy does resonate with Freud’s to a certain
extent: it involves making the patient aware of the experiences with selfobjects early in life that made them who they are as well as drawing attention to the ways in which their behaviours in the present stem from those early (deficient) experiences…
Freud’s “On the Introduction of
Narcissism”
-What is a cathexis? (an energy bond!)
-The drives can ‘bond’ to objects…
-Narcissism (as Freud sketches it): the ego itself is the object of a cathexis, rather than an external object (the drive energy that attaches to the object, ‘libido,’ is withdrawn from the external world and directed inward instead)…The patient’s lack of interest in the external world makes them unamenable to psychoanalytic treatment, we’re told…In a way, Freud is sketching narcissists as untreatable…
-Freud acts as if the drive energy directed at objects comes at the
expense of drive energy directed at the ego and as if drive energy
directed at the ego comes at the expense of drive energy directed at
objects (the more of one, the less of the other)
Ego-drives and narcissism
In the text, we see Freud associating the energies which take the
ego as their object with ‘ego drives’ (‘ego libido’) and the energies
which take other objects as their objects with the sexual drives…
“Primary narcissism”
-Freud seems to think that the ego is cathected originally and before any object-cathexes are forged…The term ‘primary narcissism’ captures this idea: the narcissism that first
characterizes the child, before it attaches to other objects…
“We thus find the notion taking shape in our mind that it was the ego that originally underwent libido-cathexis; some of this libido is later transferred to objects, but essentially it stays put, and relates to the object-cathexes rather as the body of an amoeba
relates to the pseudopodia that it sends forth” (5)
The ego-drives and the sexual-drives exist in harmony and are indistinguishable originally,
Freud tells us…Eventually they’re pitted against each other…
“A child’s first experiences of autoerotic sexual gratification occur in the context of vital functions conducing to self-preservation. Sexual drives initially develop by imitating the ego drives and their gratification, and only subsequently make themselves independent of them” (16).
(The first sexual objects = the people who care for the child and protect it—this is what Freud calls an ‘imitative object choice’) The other object choice is a ‘narcissistic object choice’…Freud tells us that every human being originally has two sexual objects: “himself, and the woman who cares for him” (17); he seems to mean to say: every human being has an imitative and a narcissistic object choice…
One object choice can later become dominant…
The individual’s ‘double existence’
mirrored by the sexual drives and ego drives
“The individual really does lead a double existence both as an end in himself, and as a link in a chain that he serves against his will, or at any rate regardless of his will. He even supposes sexuality to be one of his designs—whereas on an alternative
view he appears as a mere appendage of his germ-plasm, to
whose purpose he devotes all his energies in return for the
reward of a mere sensation of pleasure…The separation of the
sexual drives from the ego drives would simply mirror this dual
function of the individual” (7-9)
There’s no studying narcissism directly
-Our understanding of normal narcissism is derived from the
study of various pathologies (organic illness and hypochondria)
and from the study of love-relations…
-When a body is in physical pain, it seems its energies are
withdrawn/directed inward…Freud insists they’re also attached to
the ego—this supposedly explains “[t]he notorious egoism of the
ill” (12)
Is narcissism, as Freud understands it, self-undermining?
-The psyche might experience it as unpleasant when too much
ego-libido builds up (the build up increases the level of tension in
the psyche—we’ll see Freud associate increases in stimulation and tension with the opposite of pleasure in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” as well)
-This discomfort might prompt the psyche to invest in objects?
Love
“The highest phase of development achievable by the latter [object-libido] appears to us to be the state of being in love, which presents itself to us as an abandonment by the individual of his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis” (5) “[I]n the end we must necessarily start loving if we are not to fall ill” (14)
-Freud goes back on his original claim about love as involving object-cathexis towards the end of the piece: “a love happily achieved in actual reality corresponds in turn to the primal state in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be differentiated from one another” (28)
Freud’s disturbing gender essentialism in this essay
-He “compares” ‘male’ vs. ‘female’ love…
-He associates ‘full object-love as per the imitative type’ with men …This love “depletes the ego to the benefit of the object” (17)…It involves ‘sexual-over-valuation’ of the love object (a
kind of idealization)
-“Things develop in a quite different way in the commonest and probably purest and most authentic type of female” (17)…Women, he tells us (though there are some exceptions, he notes), love narcissistically: “a woman comes to feel sufficient unto herself…Strictly speaking, such women love only themselves, and with the same intensity as men display in loving them. Their need, furthermore, is not to love, but to be loved” (17)
-Narcissistic women are supposed to be ‘magnetically’ attractive, like cats and villains! Perhaps non-narcissistic people are drawn to them because they envy “them their blissful
psychic state” and “unassailable libido position” (which the non-narcissistic people have given up) (see 18)
-Narcissistic women may eventually be capable of object-love, says Freud, if they have a child: they will relate to the child as an extension of themselves…
When parents love their child, this love is just a repetition of their own original narcissism
-They act as if the child is perfect (when this is not objectively the
case)
-They overlook and conceal faults
-They act as if the cultural and other constraints that applied to them do not apply to the child: “Things are to be better for the child than they were for its parents…Disease, death, the forgoing of sensual pleasure, the curbing of one’s own will—none of this is to apply to the child, the laws of nature and of society are to stop
at its door; it really is o become the very core and centre of creation once again: His Majesty the Baby, as we one thought ourselves to be” (20)
Omnipotence and narcissism
-Note what is, according to Freud, the relationship between narcissism and magical thinking: “an overestimation of the power of their wishes and psychic acts” (5) is characteristic of the narcissist
In this essay, Freud reflects on the ego- ideal and, without naming it, the super-ego
-Sexual drives are repressed when they conflict with a person’s
ego-ideal (the ego represses them)
-The ego ideal makes it possible to measure the actual ego AGAINST the ego ideal…What part of the psyche does this measuring?
-Freud is interested in the ways in which a narcissistic attachment to the ego-ideal can happen…(there are different types of narcissistic attachment: we can be attached to ourselves as we are, or can be attached to a person we were, or can be attached to a person we would like to become (we might say the
ego-ideal here), or to a person “who was once part of our own self” (19).
