Narcissism

I am always amused at how people who profess to lend little or no credence to psychoanalysis, are happy to invoke concepts such as narcissism and narcissistic personality with the intention of branding others.


I get the narcissistic label given to me quite frequently, as well that of being inconstant. It may be my modelling - the assumption is that by 'performing myself' I want to be centre stage and that's no good - or just the fact I have, over the years, learnt to pay attention to myself and my own needs and again that is "sooo selfish".

I can't stand lack of depth, lack of commitment and lack of intellectual rigour and when I am confronted with these I don't refrain from making my dissent heard, I just can't. I recently came across all three of these major 'lacks' in different situations: an intimate relationship that had run its course and had to be finished off; a course of studies which revealed itself to be not what I had expected; an absurd self-evaluation exercise called REF in which UK academics have to indulge, describing their research work as 'world -leading' or of 'international significance'. I will tell you about the REF in another post. Unrelated though these occurrences may seem, the theme of narcissism brings them together.

Let's go back to narcissism, then. It was Freud who introduced the concept, responding to Jung and Adler, in 1914. He first identified narcissism as a homosexual object-choice, then talked of it as a developmental stage that falls between auto-eroticism and object-love, a stage that is linked with the emergence of the ego. Later he saw narcissism as an "ongoing structure of the ego". Freud talks of two types of narcissism, the primary and secondary. Whereas primary narcissism is developmental, secondary narcissism is an "abnormal"regression to pre-objectal stage.

I am interested in Kristeva's take on both Freud and Lacan. She talks of a narcissistic structure of the ego and explains how we become individuals and how we come together and love: "she uses her notion of primary narcissism to reconceive the process of becoming a subject as a process that does not involve a break motivated by a threat that cuts the possibility of love without fear" writes Kelly Oliver in her Reading Kristeva.

For Kristeva narcissism is not to be condemned. We all are narcissists. Narcissism is self-love that makes one capable of loving others. Thus narcissism is healthy.
"Love"says Kristeva "reigns between the two borders of narcissism and idealization...All love discourses have dealt with narcissism and have set themselves up as codes of positive, ideal values."

Worth considering.

(All photos modelled by Alex B. Photographer: Korrigan. Location: Calais)