Epilogue: Narcissus and Cassandra

Stromberg, David

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-42695-8_7

David Stromberg²

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Abstract

The Epilogue concludes the book with a comparison of Freud and Klein as historical figures, as well as their symbolic significance within the psychoanalytical tradition. It explores how death is linked to love in their work by discussing each of them in terms of the mythological figures they described–Freud as Narcissus and Klein as Cassandra. It uses their own words to suggest that we are constantly in flux between seeing ourselves and seeing the other, and that it is in the space between the two that love emerges from intimacy.

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Notes

1.
Freud 75, 85.
2.
Freud (2001) 85.
3.
Klein (1975a) 293.
4.
Freud (2001) 98.
5.
Freud (2001) 99.
6.
Freud (2001) 99.
7.
Freud (2001) 100.
8.
Freud (2001) 100.
9.
Freud (2001) 101.
10.
Plato (2008) 34–35.
11.
Freud (2001) 100.
12.
Julia Kristeva (1987) 124. Liran Razinsky (2012) expands on this idea, noting that Freud’s “categories of narcissistic love [suggest that] a person may love what he is, was, would like to be, or what was once part of himself,” adding that the “death of a double…brings to mind the fragility of one’s own existence” (56).
13.
Kristeva (1987) 124.
14.
Klein (1975a) 293.
15.
Klein (1975a) 293.
16.
Klein (1975a) 294.
17.
Klein (1975a) 294.
18.
Klein (1975a) 279.
19.
It is interesting to note that, for his history of psychoanalysis, Joseph Schwartz (1999) portrays psychoanalysis itself as Cassandra, and the rivalry between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein as a competition over who would be the spiritual daughter of Freudian psychoanalysis.
20.
Klein (1975a) 293.
21.
Klein (1975a) 293.
22.
As Meira Likierman (2001) writes: “Anna Freud increasingly took the devastating line that Klein’s work could not really quality as psychoanalysis, and within three years, they were to confront each other publicly in the Controversial Discussions….Not surprisingly, therefore, the discussions drew in not only their corresponding small circle of adherents, but the entire [British Psychoanalytical] Society….The situation was finally settled through a compromise whereby Klein’s thinking was recognized as psychoanalytic, implying that she was allowed to keep her membership in the British Psychoanalytical Society” (55–56).
23.
Klein (1975b) 302.
24.
Klein (1975b) 302.
25.
Klein (1975b) 302. The section quoted in Freud (2010) appears like this in English translation: “When all nature was divided in this way, to each human being came the longing for his own other half, and the two halves embraced and entwined their bodies and desired to grow together again.”
26.
Klein (1975b) 302.
27.
Klein (1975a) 295.
28.
Klein (1975a) 295.

References

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———. 1975b (1963). On the Sense of Loneliness. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, 300–313. New York: Random House.
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Jerusalem, Israel
David Stromberg

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Stromberg, D. (2020). Epilogue: Narcissus and Cassandra. In: IDIOT LOVE and the Elements of Intimacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42695-8_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42695-8_7
Published: 06 May 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-42694-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-42695-8
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