Abstract
This chapter puts forward the view of narcissism and melancholia as developed in the object relations tradition of psychoanalysis, and explores ()post)Kleinian perspectives on the individual/society relation.
Beginning with an overview of the ways in which Melanie Klein disagreed with Freud’s account of ‘primary narcissism’, the argument proceeds on the understanding that narcissism is a form of defence against object relations that are felt to have failed, or are feared to fail in the future. Identified in broad terms as a narcissistic disturbance of the self’s relation to objects, melancholia is cited as the piece of theory that indicates Freud’s increasing recognition of the significance of relations with external and internal objects for the well-being of the self. With reference to the work of Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld, and Esther Bick, the chapter demonstrates how the Kleinian tradition extended and deepened the Freudian concepts of narcissism, mourning and melancholia.
The chapter then moves to consider how the title terms, as conceptualised in the object relations framework, can be brought to bear on an understanding of shared social states of mind. Two examples are explored in some detail: The seminal work of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich on how the ‘inability to mourn’ marked the climate of post-war Germany (The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour , Grove Press, 1975 [1967]), and Paul Gilroy’s development in cultural theory of the concept of melancholia to explain post-colonial states of mind in British society (After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture , Routledge, 2004). In both cases, reflections are offered to extend the respective analyses up to the present day. The work of the Mitscherlichs and of Gilroy are offered as exemplary ways to develop effective applications of clinical concepts that engender careful and context-specific analyses of psychosocial dynamics. The chapter concludes by identifying further contemporary directions for such research.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
There is a large research literature on this—for an introduction see Bullowa (1979).
- 3.
Britton (1998, 2003) describes narcissistic defences as reactions to the unconscious encounter with the Oedipal situation, signifying deep difficulties in tolerating or coming to terms with it. He identifies, with reference to clinical work but also to several literary texts, many sub-varieties of these defences. The capacity to enter the depressive position—to bear depressive anxiety—is in his view the precondition for tolerating the Oedipal situation and accepting the reality of triangular relationships, which is the precondition of thought.
- 4.
There is a link between this argument and Wittgenstein’s argument concerning the impossibility of a private language.
- 5.
The attraction of Freud for a circle of philosophers in England—including Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim—was related to the recognition that Freud’s idea of the unconscious added a further dimension to the idea that rational understanding conferred the possibility of enhanced freedom. Hampshire drew attention to a deep affinity between Freud and Spinoza’s philosophy. At the end of a passage about this in his book on Spinoza, he concludes: ‘In reading Spinoza, it must not be forgotten that he was before all things concerned to point the way to human freedom through understanding and natural knowledge’ (Hampshire 1951, pp. 141–143). Freud rather elliptically acknowledges this connection too, in his paper on Leonardo da Vinci.
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Psychoanalytic writing has admittedly sometimes been part of a critique of capitalism from within, such as in the work of Marie Langer and the Frankfurt School.
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The influence of this perspective on radical culture and politics is by means confined to France, as the success of Zizek’s writings demonstrates.
- 8.
De Tocqueville described the conditions of existence of this state of mind, in the erosion of social solidarities by individualism; Rousseau showed what followed from it in his theory of the merger of all rational individual wills in a ‘general will’.
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Drawing on both precapitalist and aspirationally post-capitalist—socialist—ideas to do so, at times evoked by the same writers, as Raymond Williams (1958) described.
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- 11.
Perhaps such a melancholic response to loss is an explanation of the dominant structure of feeling of Israel’s political identity. It is found impossible to ‘let go’ of the ‘dead objects’ of the Holocaust, and the hatred from which catastrophe arose is, in an endless repetition compulsion, relocated within and projected onto new enemies.
- 12.
‘This disparagement of the object’s importance and the contempt for it is, I think, a specific characteristic of mania, and enables the ego to effect that partial detachment which we observe side by side with its hunger for objects’ (Klein 1935, pp. 278–289).
- 13.
Robert McNamara’s retrospective examination of the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, and his own active role in the misjudgments that brought it about, is perhaps another instance of a work of mourning. Books by McNamara, and Errol Morris’s documentary film about McNamara, The Fog of War, document this. Morris’s later film about another U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, starkly displays an opposite state of mind.
- 14.
Paul Foot (1969) put this view of Powell very perceptively.
- 15.
In a book that set out a triumphalist view of the British Empire, Niall Fergusson (2003) admitted that only its white subjects gained any substantial economic benefit from it.
- 16.
The large response to the Legacies of British Slave-ownership website www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/, which reports what happened to the compensation paid to slave owners at the time of abolition, is an instance of positive and inquiring attitudes.
- 17.
Even the melancholic Powell, and the possibly manic-depressive Churchill, kept hold of some more positive identifications, which to some degree offset their bitterness at what they believed had been rejected and lost. Part of Powell’s version of Englishness involved his attachment to a much earlier tradition of classical education, and the love and command of language of both these figures won them respect from some who detested their reactionary views.
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Rustin, M. (2017). Narcissism and Melancholia from the Psychoanalytical Perspective of Object Relations. 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_2
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