Abstract
Sigmund Freud’s twin papers, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917 [1915]), take as their formative concern the difficulty of setting apart the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ worlds, and of preserving a stable image of a boundaried self. Whilst it is true that the term narcissism especially has come to be deployed in ways that seem foreign to the complexities of Freud’s 1914 paper (by its reduction to a personality disorder or its use as a broad-brush cultural diagnosis), we suggest in this introductory chapter that neither narcissism nor melancholia can be thought about today without expressing some debt to Freudian metapsychology. However, whereas Freud was most evidently concerned to describe the structure of ego-formation, subsequent commentators have preferred to emphasize the cultural and normative dimensions of these terms. Accordingly, we consider the respective discursive histories of narcissism and melancholia and find that although they have been put to work in very different ways they remain grounded by a shared concern with mechanisms of relation and identification. Indeed, this shared concern is the basis upon which they’ve been most productively reanimated in recent years: the rise of melancholia as a critical aid to the study of cultural displacement and dispossession, and the determined redemption of narcissism from its pejorative characterization as fundamentally anti-social.
We argue that what is most noteworthy in this post-Freudian literature is the increasing relevance of metapsychology to social and political theory. The language of psychoanalysis, extrapolated from the clinic, permits a detailed examination of the boundaries which construct and challenge the terms of social solidarity. Specifically, this takes place though careful reading of the complex practices of (dis)identification at the heart of ego-formation (at both individual and group levels), and the associated mechanisms of defence, for example: introjection, incorporation, projective-identification, and splitting. By recognising the complexity of how communities get made, and connecting this with recent literature on counter publics and the commons, we demonstrate that Freud’s frameworks of narcissism and melancholia remain essential for any contemporary understanding of political association.
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Notes
- 1.
Freud wrote the following to Karl Abraham: ‘Tomorrow I am sending you the narcissism, which was a difficult birth and bears all the marks of it. Naturally, I do not like it particularly, but I cannot give anything else at the moment. It is still very much in need of retouching’ (ON, 222).
- 2.
To say that ‘On Narcissism’ lacks a principal organizing binary, is not to say that there aren’t binary conventions operating throughout the paper (e.g., ego-libido/object libido; and variants of narcissistic/anaclitic attachment).
- 3.
- 4.
Freud’s identifies numerous narcissistic figures that embody a positive social attraction for the other: children in a state of self-contentment; ‘certain animals […] such as cats and the large beasts of prey’; literary representations of ‘criminals and humorists’; and charming narcissistic women (ON, 89).
- 5.
Eng is citing Cheng’s (1997) article ‘The Melancholy of Race’, and Muñoz’s article of the same year (1997) ‘Photographies of Mourning: Melancholia and Ambivalence in Van Der Zee, Mapplethorpe, and Looking for Langston’. In addition to Cheng’s subsequent monograph The Melancholy of Race (2001), we might now add to this roster of names: David Eng and Shinhee Han (2000), Ranjana Khanna (2003), Paul Gilroy (2005), Derek Hook (2014), Jermaine Singleton (2015).
- 6.
Identified as a foundational psychical conflict that can inspire a vast range of defensive responses, ‘conflict due to ambivalence’ is a favored coinage across Freud’s work.
- 7.
It has been well noted that the only autobiography Freud willingly offered up to history was the biography of his association (1914b).
- 8.
It is possible that James Strachey’s rendering of herumtummle as ‘to potter about’ misses the dig in Freud’s language; alternative translations such as ‘to romp’ or ‘to mess about’ perhaps give a better sense of the sexual component that Freud sneakily attributes to Adler’s new freedom. [Es ist soviel Platz auf Gottes Erde und es ist gewiß berechtigt, daß sich jeder, der es vermag, ungehemmt auf ihr herumtummle, aber es ist nicht wünschenswert, daß man unter einem Dach zusammenwohnen bleibe, wenn man sich nicht mehr versteht und nicht mehr verträgt.] (GW, X: 95–96).
- 9.
Strachey has translated the German verb fesseln, which connotes both captivation and tying up as ‘to hold’. Perhaps there is a stronger sense of the charismatic, or at least libidinally charged, quality of the hold in question in Freud’s original expression. [Aber ich darf wohl für mich geltend machen, daß ein intoleranter und vom Unfehlbarkeitsdünkel beherrschter Mensch niemals eine so große Schar geistig bedeutender Personen an sich hätte fesseln können, zumal wenn er über nicht mehr praktische Verlockungen verfügte als ich] (GW, XVI: 80).
- 10.
In a letter to his trusted ally Lou Andreas-Salomé, Freud resolved to ‘hold onto the homogeneity of the core’ of his scientific discipline lest it become ‘something else’ (Gay 1989, 216; Freud 1914d)—this after having frankly admitted his personal opinion of Adler ‘he is a loathsome individual’ (Freud 1914c, 19).
- 11.
The condensed narrative that Freud offers in Totem and Taboo runs as follows: ‘Sexual desires do not unite men but divide them. Though the brothers had banded together in order to overcome their father, they were all one another’s rivals in regard to the women. Each of them would have wished, like his father, to have all the women to himself. The new organization would have collapsed in a struggle of all against all, for none of them was of such overmastering strength as to be able to take on his father’s part with success. Thus the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together, but—not, perhaps, until they had passed through many dangerous crises—to institute the law against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for despatching [sic] their father. In this way they rescued the organization which had made them strong—and which may have been based on homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the period of their expulsion from the horde’ (144).
- 12.
Though this is an obvious critique of Freud, Derrida is in fact interrogating the work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Nancy. Indeed Nancy concedes, responding to Derrida’s query, that ‘community’ does indeed resonate with Christian references to spiritual and brotherly love, which threaten to idealize and thereby cover over the prepositional fragility of the ‘with’. A community of priestly brothers in transcendent identification with the father attain their ‘proximity and intimacy’ symbolically, without suffering what Nancy calls ‘removal’—which is to say, the immanent, embodied discomfiture of sharing space. (For a fuller discussion of this debate, see Matthews 2016, 80–81).
- 13.
Most obviously, within Freud’s corpus, the theorisation of the ego-ideal was set to receive further redefinition with the introduction of the superego in 1923.
- 14.
Bersani takes his lead from Freud’s Group Psychology text: ‘It seems certain, writes Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, “that homosexual love is far more compatible (than heterosexual love) with group ties, even when it takes the shape of uninhibited sexual impulsions—a remarkable fact, the explanation of which might carry us far”’ (Bersani 2010, 49).
- 15.
See Calhoun (1998) for a pre-Millennium appraisal of ‘community without propinquity’ that warns against exaggerating the novelty of the Internet.
- 16.
Nancy speaks of community as ‘literary communism’, the interruption of the myth of the one, which is not necessarily communicable—‘no form of intelligibility or transmissibility is required of it’—but which nonetheless constitutes a ‘work’ offered up for communication (73).
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Sheils, B., Walsh, J. (2017). Introduction: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community. In: Sheils, B., Walsh, J. (eds) Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63829-4_1
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