Abstract
In Freud’s 1914 theorisation of primary narcissism, the shift from auto-erotism to object-love coincides with the emergence of the ego as an internal object. Underlying this twofold advent is the mediation of a narcissistic formation predicated on a double process of self-idealisation and identification. Interestingly, Freud discovers this narcissistic entity retrospectively, in what he perceives as an inability, in human subjects, to mourn ‘the lost narcissism of [their] childhood in which [they were their] own ideal’. This leads Freud to postulate the existence of an ideal ego, ‘the target of the self-love’ that is constitutive of infantile narcissism and that elicits, via mechanisms of displacement and projection, the unconscious preservation of a narcissistic ideal of omnipotence and perfection. Something unmournable thus seems to preside over human subjectivity from the outset, arising from the lethal convergence of self-idealisation and identification. Such is the monster in the mirror, the unamendable narcissistic entity whose vicissitudes this chapter offers to explore in relation to a series of clinical observations and theoretical reflections. More specifically, this chapter focuses on clinical material that illustrates Freud’s 1917 account of melancholia: ‘a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’ (244). Often plagued with a persistent case of negative therapeutic reaction, on the edge of unanalysability, the cases discussed feature an ego that does not always seem able to prevent its own destruction—another typical trait of melancholia, according to Freud, making melancholia ‘so interesting—and so dangerous’ (252). By elucidating the murderous fantasies and the mechanisms that tie melancholia to primary narcissism, this chapter strives to demonstrate how the melancholic ego is always in the process of disintegrating, as if the identification with the self-idealized totality in the mirror had to be undone relentlessly and the ego had to be fed to the monster in the mirror.
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Notes
- 1.
The idea that the sexual drive becomes auto-erotic is especially interesting for it implies a threefold split involving three distinct sets of pairs: the drive and its object, desire and need, and the part and the whole. All three pairs become split and irreconcilably separate. What Freud in fact captures powerfully in this section of the Three Essays is how sexuality thus departs from self-preservation and endorses a self-serving logic, a logic led by fantasy.
- 2.
This is interestingly underscored by the etymology of the word ‘incorporation’, which includes a key reference to the body. This is also true of the German word Einverleibung.
- 3.
In the Standard Edition, the German term Trieb is translated as ‘instinct’. I am deliberately modifying this translation in the present context to convey the distinction between instinct (Instinkt) and drive (Trieb). On the subject, see Jean Laplanche’s thorough discussion in ‘Drive and Instinct: Distinctions, oppositions, supports and intertwinings’ (2011 [2000]: 5–25).
- 4.
A ‘turning round upon the subject’s own self’ is indeed one of the vicissitudes ‘that a drive may undergo’ according to Freud (Freud 1915: 126, translation modified).
- 5.
See Bruce Fink’s discussion of his choice of ‘to assume’ and ‘assumption’ in his English translation of the Ecrits in the Translator’s endnotes (Lacan 2007: 759).
- 6.
According to Lagache, the ego-ideal and the superego, on the other hand, involve another pole of identification and are thus inscribed in triangulated configurations, implying the mediation of a third term; in other words, they are supported by processes of secondary identification.
- 7.
In the myth of Oedipus, the queen and the king of Thebes (Lauis and Jocasta) order that their son be killed (by infant exposure, a common practice in Ancient Greece) to avert the fulfillment of a prophesy—the very prophesy that Oedipus eventually fulfills. Oedipus is saved by the compassion of his executioner and entrusted to a childless couple unaware of his true identity.
- 8.
While the Oedipus complex is primarily predicated on the failure of infanticide, we could argue that its success conversely bars the access to the triangular sequel, as psychosis compellingly illustrates. Psychosis can indeed be seen as a prime illustration of the kind of psychic murder that forecloses subjectivity, dooming the subject to the unfettered tyranny of the monster in the mirror. Brett Kahr interestingly develops the notion of ‘infanticidal attachment’ when discussing the aetiology of psychosis. This kind of attachment, Kahr affirms, must ‘contain one or more specific experiences of deadliness that would have made the infant fear for his or her life on one or more occasions’ (2007: 129). Because my preferred focus is not aetiological but phenomenological, I would suggest that, in the psychotic experience, the parent’s infanticidal wish tends to be endowed with distinct literality, regardless of the ‘actuality’ of the wish itself. In this sense, infanticide is featured in every possible attachment style—secure and insecure alike—and its literal inscription in psychosis fundamentally signals, in my view, the impairment of the mechanisms of secondary repression.
- 9.
In the psychotic experience, this murderousness is often conveyed by terrifying accounts of infanticidal mothers actually threatening the life of individuals. Knives and sharp objects are weapons of choice significantly, inscribing the pivotal figure of the omnipotent phallic mother in very legible fashion. Due to the failure of repression, the parent’s murderousness comes through as literal.
- 10.
Serge Leclaire furthers this discussion by positing the murder of the ‘wonderful child’, the ‘tyrannical representation of the infant-king’ (the ‘core and centre of creation’) as ‘the most “primal” of all fantasies’ (Leclaire 1998 [1975]: 5) and as a pivotal stake in the analytic process. ‘There is for all of us, always, a child to kill’, Leclaire continues. ‘The loss of a representation of plenitude, of motionless jouissance must be relentlessly mourned and mourned again. A light must be eclipsed so it can shine and spread out on a background of darkness’ (…) ‘I’ begin at that moment, already subjected to the inexorable second death—the other one, the one of which there is nothing to say’ (ibid.).
- 11.
The question of suicidality definitely resonates with this formula, as clinical observation amply confirms.
- 12.
In metapsychological terms, this could be a chance to briefly locate the death drive in the complex landscape of primary narcissism, something Freud himself never explicitly does. In fact, as André Green points out, Freud never really considers ‘possible relationships between narcissism and the death drive’ however close he might have come to discovering them (2002: 636). There is some kind of hiatus in the Freudian corpus between the 1914 theorisation of narcissism (featuring the opposition between narcissistic libido and object-libido) and the post-1920 theory of the drives (featuring the opposition between life drives or Eros and death drives via mechanisms of fusion and defusion). This leads Green to develop a ‘dual conception of narcissism’ likely to be mapped onto the irreducible dualism of life and death drives, opposing a ‘positive narcissism, whose aim is to reach unity, a narcissism aiming at oneness’ and a ‘negative narcissism, which strives toward the zero level, aiming at nothingness and moving toward psychic death’ (637). Negative narcissism is thus at the service of the death drive, seeking defusion and dissolution and striving for a return to some inanimate and inorganic state. Green’s dual view of narcissism resonates fruitfully with primary narcissism and its constitutive ‘assumption’ of omnipotence. We see how the subject’s primary identification with an inanimate mirage of unified perfection can give way to both life and death narcissism. Along the same lines, it is worth mentioning the work of Francis Pasche who opposes narcissism and anti-narcissism (1965).
- 13.
Anticipating some of his forthcoming insights into fetishism (1927), Freud understands that the hair surrounding the horrific wound has an alleviating function, like the snake-like hair on the head of the Medusa. The same logic applies to Medusa’s petrifying gaze, according to Freud: the stiffness induced by the gaze is equally restorative, offering ‘consolation to the spectator’. From this, Freud draws the ‘technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration’ (273).
- 14.
This is the context in which Vernant reads Medusa’s snake-like hair, which, along with the monster’s horrifying grimace, contributes to the desired effect. ‘What is being “staged”’, Vernant suggests, ‘is not virility, the male sex in general, but this very specific form of masculine behaviour peculiar to the warrior when possessed with a force of death that likens him to a “rabid” wolf or dog’ (294).
- 15.
This naturally brings to mind Lacan’s discussion of ‘the gaze as object a’ in Seminar XI (1964).
- 16.
Chabert’s observation is made with reference to Freud’s text ‘Some Character-Types Met in Psycho-Analytic Work’ (1916).
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Bonnigal-Katz, D. (2017). The Monster in the Mirror: Theoretical and Clinical Reflections on Primary Narcissism and Melancholia. 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_6
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