psychoanalytic basics: the death drive and mental bisexuality

I've posted a lot about mental bisexuality but it seems to be very difficult for a lot of people.

We're going through Beyond the Pleasure Principle in one of my classes and here's some of what I wrote:

The argument for the death drive is the “conservative nature of the drives” and the urge to restore an earlier state of things. The problem here is that Freud uses the examples of birds migrating and fish spawning in old waters but in these examples, we seem to be talking about habits or the tendency to go where satisfaction had been. This raises the issue of how the aim of life can be death when the organism was never conscious of its inanimate state. Just because organic life might end because the organism runs out of energy (i.e. starves) or because the parts begin to break down from wear and tear (i.e. one ages) this doesn’t mean that it is an aim. Freud gives examples of how animals form habits just like humans but to say we want to capture a state that was never conscious is outside of these examples of habit. It is also outside the examples of the drive. Freud quotes Schopenhauer that “[death] is the true result and to that extent the purpose of life” but it isn’t so from the individual’s own consciousness and that is what is important in the formation of a drive. Otherwise Freud is making a leap from an observation or mortality to the claim that the organism itself somehow knows it will die.

What is much more compelling here is the idea that when inside and outside are separated in the consciousness of the organism that it then would have a drive for no such distinction to exist and to return to a unity with the object. This would make the “death drive” not a biological principle but a psychological one. The separation of inside and outside would divide the energy of the organism between energy associated with homeostasis and the pleasure principle and energy associated with the object.

Fenichel, although he has some problems with the terminology of Fromm and Horney but accepts their revision of the death drive in relation to psychological separation from the mother rather than a biological theory:

“The phantasy of suicide is the last hope if all other means have not succeeded in bringing relief of the burden of aloneness.” ...people who are pathologically striving for suicide usually… have fantasies connected with the idea of “death” which, it is true, might mean overcoming “the awareness of separateness of an individual.” 145-6 Fenichel, O. Psychoanalytic Remarks on Fromm's Book “Escape from Freedom”.

Many of Freud’s later ideas seem to point to this direction of early separation being a pre-phallic factor that carries over to the phallic-oedipal conflict.

Fear of castration is not, of course, the only motive for repression: indeed, it finds no place in women, for though they have a castration complex they cannot have a fear of being castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by a fear of loss of love, which is evidently a later prolongation of the infant's anxiety if it finds its mother absent. You will realize how real a situation of danger is indicated by this anxiety. If a mother is absent or has withdrawn her love from her child, it is no longer sure of the satisfaction of its needs and is perhaps exposed to the most distressing feelings of tension (New Introductory Lectures, p.87)

Freud has always maintained that the partial drives, like the pre-oedipal components of the superego are interconnected even though the idea of the “timeless realm of the unconscious” might make them seem static and individual: “The various channels along which the libido passes are related to each other from the very first like inter-communicating pipes, and we must take the phenomenon of collateral flow into account” (Freud, Three Essays, p.151 f.).

Freud in BPP also does much to pave the way for this understanding. He mentions the myth in Plato of an original state in which both the sexes were combined before they were cut in half (which could be read as the separation of inside and outside) and puts forward the idea of aggression or sadism emerging first in the individual and indicating the path that sexuality will later enter

In the obscurity that reigns at present in the theory of the instincts, it would be unwise to reject any idea that promises to throw light on it. We started out from the great opposition between the life and death instincts. Now object-love itself presents us with a second example of a similar polarity—that between love (or affection) and hate (or aggressiveness). If only we could succeed in relating these two polarities to each other and in deriving one from the other! From the very first we recognized the presence of a sadistic component in the sexual instinct. As we know, it can make itself independent and can, in the form of a perversion, dominate an individual's entire sexual activity. It also emerges as a predominant component instinct in one of the ‘pregenital organizations’, as I have named them. But how can the sadistic instinct, whose aim it is to injure the object, be derived from Eros, the preserver of life? Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death instinct which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object? It now enters the service of the sexual function. During the oral stage of organization of the libido, the act of obtaining erotic mastery over an object coincides with that object's destruction; later, the sadistic instinct separates off, and finally, at the stage of genital primacy, it takes on, for the purposes of reproduction, the function of overpowering the sexual object to the extent necessary for carrying out the sexual act. It might indeed be said that the sadism which has been forced out of the ego has pointed the way for the libidinal components of the sexual instinct, and that these follow after it to the object. Wherever the original sadism has undergone no mitigation or intermixture, we find the familiar ambivalence of love and hate in erotic life. (BPP, 53-4)

Edith Jacobson takes Freud’s and spells it out in regards to the ego:

“So far we have neglected to consider the vicissitudes of aggression in the development of ego interests. In fact, the above-discussed energetic shifts and changes, though reinforced by the ambivalence conflict with the love objects, support also its solution. The development of ego interests calls away from the love object not only part of the libido but also part of the aggression which, after being fused with libido and likewise neutralized, can become vested in the new objects. At the same time the experience of learning how to function independently turns aggressive forces inevitably and increasingly away from the love objects toward the self, since the child in his beginning, independent activities meets with constant hurts and failures. What he once experienced as disappointments and frustrations, hurts for which he blamed the parents only, he now begins to regard partly as injuries that he has inflicted upon himself. This attitude is greatly supported by his efforts to master his aggression and to build up enduring libidinous cathexes of his love objects. Thus he is apt to undergo experiences of realistic physical and of mental hurt, accompanied by feelings of inferiority and self-criticism which clearly manifest an increasing cathexis of the self-representations with aggression turned away from the love objects. They indicate the onset of "secondary masochism" which in pathological cases may invade the psychosexual life, may color the ego attitudes and actions, or may develop mainly in the direction of moral masochism. (The Self and Object World, P. 92).

So, initially while the aggression is fused in oral and anal ego ideals that ultimately carry over (through the interconnected tubes) to the phallic ego ideal of excellence (to conquer) when they defuse they either become hate towards the object in various forms (biting, swallowing, mutilating, killing, etc.) and following the Talion rule of projection are possibly felt to be returned upon the self from the object. As Jacobson points out, the more the ego is differentiated from the id there would be a turning point in which the aggression would be directed at the self without the Talion rule. This seems to happen at the phallic stage when self-contempt or feelings of inferiority occur (although this can be disavowed and resentment and jealousy are felt towards the father) and if the genital organization is reached then guilt and moral masochism are firmly in place (i.e. the individual has a neurotic structure as opposed to a narcissistic or perverse one).

While aggression and the phallic ego ideal are detailed well in a lot of psychoanalytic thought the problem of the ego ideal of love and the “masochistic” feelings of separation from the mother that longings for tensionlessness, not wanting to be separate, the need for punishment, etc. that belong to the passive or feminine side of the personality are not. It seems to me that as opposed to the projection and Talion rule in aggression that the passive position follows externalization. In primitive passive forms of the superego there is a decathexis of the body in somato-psychic autoimmune diseases, a decathexis of the self-representation in feelings of deadness, and feelings of having a bad conscience or having sinned (i.e remorse and not guilt). These feelings would be externalized and others would seem dead or boring, others would seem bad, and the magic of the world or objects in it would be reduced. By the time of phallic stage the ability to feel aggression emerges and can result in passive aggressive behaviour (i.e. the complaining of the masochistic character) or the introjection of aggression towards the object in depression. At the genital stage just as guilt (moral masochism) is established in the active, narcissistic, or masculine individual assertiveness would be established in the passive, masochistic, or feminine individual.

Much work would have to be done to clarify the stages but many analysts, such as Klein, link both hypochondria and depression and paranoia and melancholia to different phases of the anal stage. (Depression is at the phallic stage and the delusional quality of melancholia from the earlier anal stage, similarly there is paranoia concerning one's 'image' or how one appears to others at the phallic stage and a paranoia concerning one's body or physical safety in the anal stage). But, to see the overall picture here, that sadism eventually turns into masochism and that masochism eventually turns into sadism in the course of the development of the active (masculine) and passive (feminine) sides of the personality is established. Moreover, even though everyone, as Freud says, is bisexual (has both activity and passivity in them) what is decisive are the fixations. This means that someone can have just active fixations, just passive fixations, or have both and that real bisexuality in the character is not common.

becoming and not-becoming; compulsion and impulsions

while the words are clunky and not as penultimate as being and nothingness they seem more realistic to me.

On one side is the enormous plasticity of the organism that can adapt to so many situations of life and is drawn onwards to take on more knowledge and wisdom. This is becoming.

On the other side there is the timeless unconscious in which drives remain or traumas reside as "narcissistic scars". From here the drives can reach out as compulsions and the traumas can be re-enacted as repetition-compulsions

I've wondered about the difference between compulsions and impulsions. When I think of compulsions I think of eating food to cover up anxiety vs. impulsions like having a diet and then breaking it to eat some dessert which could be initially very pleasurable but later causes one self-hate or feelings of hopelessness


Freud talks about the unpleasure of the drive but he never provides the examples to allow his work to be an easy starting point.

It seems like I have a few readers (besides Russian spambots) does anyone know some good work on this to share?


In the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego. The former are then split off from this unity by the process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychical development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction. If they succeed subsequently, as can so easily happen with repressed sexual instincts, in struggling through, by roundabout paths, to a direct or to a substitutive satisfaction, that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure. (beyond the pleasure principle, p. 11)


As I have shown elsewhere, most of the repressions with which we have to deal in our therapeutic work are cases of after-pressure.1 They presuppose the operation of earlier, primal repressions which exert an attraction on the more recent situation. Far too little is known as yet about the background and preliminary stages of repression. There is a danger of overestimating the part played in repression by the super-ego. We cannot at present say whether it is perhaps the emergence of the super-ego which provides the line of demarcation between primal repression and after-pressure. At any rate, the earliest outbreaks of anxiety, which are of a very intense kind, occur before the super-ego has become differentiated. It is highly probable that the immediate precipitating causes of primal repressions are quantitative factors such as an excessive force of excitation and the breaking through of the protective shield against stimuli.

This mention of the protective shield sounds a note which recalls to us the fact that repression occurs in two different situations—namely, when an undesirable instinctual impulse is aroused by some external perception, and when it arises internally without any such provocation. We shall return to this difference later. But the protective shield exists only in regard to external stimuli, not in regard to internal instinctual demands.

So long as we direct our attention to the ego's attempt at flight we shall get no nearer to the subject of symptom-formation. A symptom arises from an instinctual impulse which has been detrimentally affected by repression. If the ego, by making use of the signal of unpleasure, attains its object of completely suppressing the instinctual impulse, we learn nothing of how this has happened. We can only find out about it from those cases in which repression must be described as having to a greater or less extent failed. In this event the position, generally speaking, is that the instinctual impulse has found a substitute in spite of repression, but a substitute which is very much reduced, displaced and inhibited and which is no longer recognizable as a satisfaction. And when the substitutive impulse is carried out there is no sensation of pleasure; its carrying out has, instead, the quality of a compulsion. (Inhibtion, symptoms, anxiety, p.94-5)

dialectical materialism and the split subject

I thought I'd share something that was very helpful for me to understand the Marxian idea of Homo Faber or the idea of humans as the tool-making animal.

Although we take for granted the notions that the mathematical formula for pi= 3.1415... or that if you plant a seed in the ground that a plant will grow from it or even that we can use words to communicate these tools didn't always exist.

The question is where did they come from?

Rationalist philosophers before Kant would posit a metaphysical world and a rational essence in humans which accesses that world.

Dialectical materialists like Marx take Kant's critique of 'pure reason' or metaphysics and take it one step further to say that these 'ideas' come into being as praxis or habits.

A person in a primitive tribe doesn't suddenly decide one day that it's better to plant a garden then it is to gather food all day. How does he know that seeds turn into plants? Do we imagine that he is paying a lot of attention to his environment and just figures it out? If that is so, why did technology appear so slowly throughout human history?

Instead as Roheim points out, these things are based upon unconscious phantasy which later received a rationalization and is given another use.

It may be 'natural', that is, phylogenetically pre-determined, for man to kill and eat animals or gather and eat berries, but it is certainly not 'natural' for primitive man to plant a garden or to domesticate animals. If we analyse the 'professions', apart from those of the hunter, the fisher and the gatherer of wild plants, we find that the most ancient of all professions is that of the medicine man. This is followed by trade and later by primitive agriculture, then the domestication of animals and finally plough culture. All these can only be explained as based on sublimations of specific aspects of the infantile situation. It shows very little insight into the mental processes of primitive man to believe that he is likely to plant yams because he has come to the conclusion that they will bring him a plentiful crop in the future, or that he keeps dogs because they are useful in hunting kangaroos. The carefree children of the jungle or desert never think of the morrow in pre-agricultural societies. But if they have associated phantasies of destroying the body with taking the yams out of Mother Earth, it would be easy to see how the reparation aspect of those phantasies might lead to a replanting, that this in turn might lead to an observation of the crop, and so secondarily to a practical result from the endopsychically conditioned activity. Or, if man extended the mother-child situation to the puppy of the wild dog, these dogs, brought up in human society, might prove useful in the chase; but this was a result of a play activity which nobody could have foreseen. My view, therefore, is that the bulk of human culture, even in its adaptational or ego-aspects, arises out of play or ritual activities. The reason for these activities lies in the infantile situation, and they acquire survival value secondarily by assimilating a part of the environment to man's needs. This is the way of culture—the transformation of id into ego. (Roheim, The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Culture, p.162-3).

the id is transformed into habits or praxis of which we can't give a conscious justification.

I can't tell you why 2+2=4. I simply memorized it and other small sums. With bigger numbers I was taught the praxis of carrying the 1 when I added, and the reason I know this is right is because everyone else does the same thing and there is no other way to do it. It's not because my rational soul knows the essence of the numbers because if it did then why do I have to force myself to memorize small sums and how to calculate big ones?

This isn't post-modernism. There aren't any tribes who have different mathematics than us. They either don't have any arithmetic (there are tribes that only count up to 5) or they have arithmetic like us (although they have different words or a different number base we'd have to learn).

It's the same thing with pi. Egyptians just took triangles and tried to see how many they could put into a circle and that is how pi was originally calculated.

And, with language we have to imagine that feelings like love and jealousy emerged in humans (the 3rd Chimpanzee) and that language was motivated from the desire to know what the beloved did when you were parted (so the unconscious symbiotic fantasy could continue) or out of jealousy of the attention shown to another and fear of attacking him, one begins to study the other's behaviour. Language too would arise very slowly.

The ego ideals, within the superego, are more intimately tied to the id than to the ego. We are 'driven' to get recognition or find love as much as we may be driven orally, for example, to want to chew gum even though it has no nutritional value, or smoke to stimulate the respiratory system, etc.

We use practical reason to go after our ideals and our id impulses. Our desires lead us and, as Roheim points out, we also create because we play. Practical reason is the secondary movement and not the leading one as philosophy would have it.

subject-object narcissist-masochist: hysteria; psychoanalytic basics: denial

This is a section of a paper on hysteria that focusses on the borderline types which are sometimes called hysterics. It focuses on the proto-phallic drive/ego ideal or what I've called in other posts the poly-phallic ideal. This is in contrast to the deutero-phallic or phallic-narcissistic ideal and the non-universal stage involving the phallic mother. Specifically, the hysteroid and histrionic type while the next part of the essay focusses on the female compulsive (phallic-narcissistic) and the "genital" hysteric.
...

I’ve mentioned the feminine ego ideal of tender giving, renunciation, etc. In a simple way all of this can be captured by saying that the masochist feels he or she must be “nice”. To be nice means that one shouldn’t put others out and in fact should share with them and make them comfortable and happy if possible. One shouldn’t use vulgar language, one shouldn’t draw attention to any achievement, and one shouldn’t make claims upon others. I don’t think that object-cathexis and self-effacement must go together but I understand them as masochistic features. Similarly, narcissism and ‘blame’ seem to go together. In an interesting article Bela Grunberger relates racism to the proto-phallic ego ideal which would seem to put blame on par with the masochistic ego ideal of self-effacement:

The anti-Semite's profound satisfaction flows from the fact that his ego is in perfect harmony with his ego-ideal. Having made his projection onto the Jew, he has found his Manichaean paradise: all that is bad is thereafter on one side—the side of the Jew—and all that is good on the other side where he himself is. . . The ego-ideal is narcissistic, and the satisfaction is that of perfect narcissistic integrity recovered through the projection on to the Jew (Grunberger, The anti-semite and the Oedipus Complex, p. 382)[1].

The profound satisfaction of the racist can be taken as an example of an individual affect being displaced onto a group identification[2]. However, it also works at the individual level as C.W. Socarides notes in his study of the affect of Vengeance. He discusses them both as group vendettas manifest in “feuds, lynchings, or retaliatory political or military acts solely for the sake of national pride” or individual vendettas. Where the Count of Monte Cristo has a legitimate reason to seek revenge, it can be argued, the blame in the affect of vengeance is more petty as with an arrogant- vindictive co-worker who will blame his failure to get the raise on you (On Vengeance, p.358)[3]. Socarides writes:

The avenger often has considered himself to be a male without any phallic deficiency in adult life. In certain circumstances he may suddenly be threatened by loss of this self-image, loss of the love object, financial distress, etc. Resorting to vengefulness is a startling proof, however, of his unconscious infantile fears, his castration anxiety, feelings of inferiority and smallness. In adult life, the initial infantile aggression become manifest instead of the deeper underlying castration fear. Typically, such persons have developed a defensive screening out of their fear and have imagined themselves to be the proud possessors of a large phallus, the favorite child, loved and admired. This response to the adult frustration contradicts these earlier infantile convictions. This mechanism which consists essentially of attempting to deny the wrong that was done to him in childhood does not sustain him for long (ibid, p.367-8)

The proto-phallic ego ideal is tied to a confidence or ‘cockiness’ that one was somehow preferable to the mother overtop of the father[4]. However, the affect of vengeance also betrays that the narcissist in his denial does believe that the other who is blamed is superior to him. The racist object often has envied physical or intellectual capacities as Grunberger points out. I’ve chosen to use the more neutral word blame because the affect of vengeance constitutes a certain type emotion while the narcissist may blame others or circumstances for his failures without being vengeful and when things get to their most bleak he can even console himself with racism. A white man may be poor and miserable but at least, he can think to himself, he is not black, and at the individual level a boy can console himself with the idea that at least he isn’t a girl[5].

Sticking to the linguistic convention of shame that Alexander brought forward I think that we can see the same constellation at work in relation to the self-effacement of the feminine ego ideal. It seems to me that if the masculine subject can overcome inferiority feelings by externalizing them on women and somehow console himself with the thought that he can take pride in that despite his lack of accomplishments why couldn’t the same structure be in the feminine subject? Instead of experiencing the depression or self-pity from feeling that one will never find love and be alone if this is externalized on others then there is worrying about others and trying to help them as a form of denial that allows one’s own lack of love to be ignored. The same is possible at the level of group identifications and it is possible to see liberals who worry about minority rights and the unhappiness of others.

Just as the structure goes from blame to active vengeance in the masculine subject concern for the unhappiness of others can go to the affect of compassion. When the mother’s desire is seen to go beyond the child (for the father) he or she can deny the loss of love by loving the father. This gives us the link to religious ethical life being simplified to loving others that would be an imitation of individuals who are compassionate with everyone. On the group level besides those who simply pity or feel badly for others there are individuals who sacrifice themselves to crusade for the rights of others. In between these two positions we have the general sense of ‘being nice’ as a concern although it need not go to the heights of compassion or be preoccupied with pity.

A further way to conceptualize these two poles of narcissism and masochism comes from the basic political stance of liberal and conservative. The liberal feels that people are basically good and deserve help while the conservative feels they are basically bad and don’t deserve help. The liberal is careful not to offend any minority groups while the conservative often demonizes some of them. The liberal would like social programs to help disadvantaged groups while the conservative focuses on the abuse of such programs and the limitations to his own freedoms that tax dollars take away. Additionally, if we look at the aim people have in telling lies these two trends can also be seen. There is a common anecdote of the narcissistic person lying about having written a book. At first he claims that he will write a book to others and they begin to ask about its progress. He starts by lying about sketching the plot, then about having written the first chapter, and keeps telling those who ask to see some of it to wait until he finishes more even though he hasn’t even started. With the masochist ‘white lies’ are what come to the fore because they are made so that the other person doesn't feel rejected by them. An example here is a person who lies about liking the sweaters that her friend designs. She finds them to be ugly but doesn’t want to put down her friend’s attempts and this gets her to the point that she begins to receive the sweaters as gifts, and then begins to have to start wearing them in order to keep up the lie that she finds them to beautiful.

In Freud’s work there is the possibility of extending the narcissistic and masochistic positions. Freud essentially creates a complementary object position for the subject positions of conquering and loving that I just explored. From ‘conquer’ one wants to be the object of the conqueror and ‘be conquered’ and from love, to be the object of the lover and ‘be loved’. If the two subject positions can be captured by the two political stances the two object positions can be captured by the two major appeals of magazines and entertainment coverage in the news. The object narcissist is concerned with beauty and being the cause of desire to the subject and entertainment has always been filled with people more known for their beauty than for their talent. The object masochist is concerned with what can be called personality and whether it’s through humour, charisma, or the ability to inspire others there are many entertainers who similarly lack talent in the diversity of their art (i.e. play the same role in acting or re-write the same song in music). I will explore these positions in detail shortly but I’d to consider the subject narcissist and masochist positions in relation to another meaning of penis envy.

As we saw earlier, Freud’s late formulation of penis envy was related to depression and feeling like nothing can be done to help one. This is very different from what would be considered the classic position. However, as HP Blum along with earlier analysts has found the idea of penis envy as revenge on and wishing to be a man is related to the potential narcissistic (masculine) trend in a woman’s character[6]. In an explication of penis envy that will be a good segue to the object narcissist position is given by Karl Abraham:

In some of our patients we come across phantasies which refer to the possibility of a recognition of the man and to the formulation of conditions under which the patient, after their fulfilment, would be prepared to reconcile herself to her femininity. I mention first of all a condition I have met with many times; it runs: 'I could be content with my femininity if I were absolutely the most beautiful of all women'. All men would lie at the feet of the most beautiful woman, and the female narcissism would consider this power not a bad compensation for the defect so painfully perceived. It is in fact easier for a beautiful woman to assuage her castration complex than for an ugly one. However, the idea of being the most beautiful of all women does not have this effect in all cases. We are well-acquainted with the expression of a woman, 'I should like to be the most beautiful of all women so that all men would adore me; then I would show them the cold shoulder'. In this case the craving for revenge is quite clear; this remark was made by a woman of an extremely tyrannical nature which was based on a wholly unsublimated castration complex Abraham, Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex, p.)

The object narcissist position is based upon what Freud called narcissistic object choice[7]. Lacan drops the connection it has with potential homosexual objects to say that feminine narcissism wants to be the cause of desire of the male narcissist:

[Regarding] woman… in her stature as an object offered up to desire… we should not be surprised that the narcissism of desire immediately latches onto the narcissism of the ego that is its prototype (Ecrits, p. 617).

The idea of equating feminine narcissism with beauty has been made by other analysts[8]. It is common to say that someone can be narcissistic about their appearance or beauty and be very active in trying to appear fashionable and “hot”. However, the relationship between them seems to be lost and is what I hope to capture with the idea of ‘be conquered’. The narcissistic object position means that one seeks to find a narcissistic subject who has power, or is dominant and by possessing them one becomes more valuable. By causing desire in the man a woman can control him and the couple’s sex life. If the subject narcissist conquers and expresses his uniqueness in using his strength or intellect to make others recognize this, then the object narcissist wants to ‘be conquered’ by the subject narcissist and make him work in order to possess her. She wants to cause desire in him as well as prove the worth of her beauty or attractiveness by how far he’ll go. For example, She might pretend to be disinterested, she won’t return calls, and she generally sets up obstacles for him to get to her.

As the affects of vengeance and compassion above were linked to the denial of castration a position of denial is also discernable in the object narcissist. Firstly, like the narcissist subject position the superego of inferiority would constitute the ego ideal failure. Inferiority in regards to one’s beauty seems self-explanatory. As mentioned above, the obsession with objects of beauty in the media for those that question theirs is obvious. To the extent that this inferiority can be externalized we find a similar obsession in the object narcissist with judgment of the beauty of celebrities and others in general. This of course can be transferred to the group level in which narcissism in beauty is attached to one’s family, race, or ethnicity. This goes hand in hand with the idea that the men of other groups desire women of the narcissist’s group. For example, lower class men desire upper class women or black men desire white women irrespective of individual attractiveness.

If we take the same structure of the woman encountering the loss of the mother as mirroring her beauty to find she desires beyond her, then we can find a position of denial in which the father is taken as the subject. The object-position denial elicits the ‘masculine-gaze’ and an affect of ‘sexiness’ denies the narcissistic failure to be the object of desire. Here we have both cultivation of a hyper-feminine body and demeanor as well as the use of causing sexual desire to be used in the denial. In other words, when such a person doesn’t feel that he or she is properly admired in their relationship they begin to use the causing of sexual desire in others, if not sex itself, to deny this. This isn’t done indiscriminately of course, but with potent males. At the group level the example that comes to mind are the women who would have sex with the ex-pat English teachers in Eastern Europe without any designs of marriage, to get money from them, nor to be in a relationship with them. So, basically, a higher class or more esteemed ethnic group in a culture would mediate this attitude.

One characterlogical style of hysteria can be explained from this object position. This view, as outlined by Lawerence Josephs is to see the hysteric as playing a game of predator and prey with men in which the object of the hysteric is to get revenge on the man by causing desire in him and then leaving him in the lurch[9]. “The hysteric not only wants to win the object’s love” he writes, “but to then go on to inflict the humiliating wound of rebuffing the other at the height of infatuation” (Josephs, Character and Self-Experience, p. 167). Marion Burgner in her famous article on the phallic-narcissistic stage similarly asks for the hysteric to be reconsidered as phallic-narcissistic, but, so far as she is blatantly sexual and doesn't impart a sense of having an ideal based upon the mother's phallic image I'd correct this to belong to the proto-phallic stage. Burgner in the Phallic-Narcissistic Phase writes:

While as adults these patients were often able to have heterosexual intercourse (thus indicating the relative intactness of their drive development), their relationships to their objects were frequently characterized by interactions on a phallic-narcissistic level; for example, an inability to achieve a reciprocal relationship in which the object's real qualities and characteristics are recognized and valued, and in which the needs and demands of the object are accepted; a tendency to use the object solely as a source of admiration or condemnation, as a substitute for internalized approval or sanctions; an emphasis on exhibitionistic and voyeuristic behavior in relation to the object; an incessantly phallic-competitive interaction with the object. Indeed, we were struck, as we examined the level of object relationships of these patients, how many of them could also be described as hysterical characters, and we would further suggest that in the hysteric the phallic-narcissistic level rather than the oedipal one is the nodal point of the regressive behavior. Much of what is often described as oral-demanding behavior in hysterics is perhaps better understood as a manifestation of phallic-narcissistic demands for admiration and narcissistic supplies from the object. 178

The object-narcissist hysteric who is pre-oedipal has also been called a hysteroid in contrast to the oedipal level hysteric[10]. Easser and Lesser, whose quotation opened this paper, give a good illustration of this type:

In many instances the hysteroid would appear to be a caricature of the hysteric, much as the hysteric has been said to be a caricature of femininity. Each characteristic is demonstrated in even sharper dramatic relief. The bounds of social custom and propriety are breached. The latent aggressivity of the exhibitionism, the competitiveness and the self-absorption becomes blatant, insistent, and bizarre. The chic becomes the mannequin; the casual, sloppy; the bohemian, beat. Thus, a hysterical patient was able to enjoy the pleasures of the beauty parlor only after analysis had broken through her defense against exhibitionism while a hysteroid patient changed the color of her hair one to two times a week to keep pace with her rapidly shifting moods.

The adaptational functioning of the hysteroid is erratic. Inconstancy and irresponsibility cause the patient to suffer realistic rebuffs, injuries, and failures. By contrast, the hysteric often voices desperation and provokes concern in others but rarely is in actual danger. Historically, in the hysteroid, academic and vocational patterns usually reflect the same erratic quality of attainment, alternating with periods of serious dysfunction.

In object relationships, the hysteric has difficulty within the relationship, the hysteroid with the relationship. Friendships are maintained over long periods by the hysteric. These are characterized by much affectionate display, much ingratiation, and many emotional storms. The hysteroid starts friendships with great hopes and enthusiasm. The friendship commences with idolatry and ends in bitterness when the expectation of rescue, nurture and care is not fulfilled. These relational ruptures are often succeeded by detachment, isolation, depression, and paranoidlike trends. The hysteric uses emotional relationships to copulate symbolically, to hold her partner as guardian over her own erotism, to contain her own physical impulses. Since emotional engagement for the hysteroid embodies the impulse to engulf and incorporate the object, this in turn is viewed as a reciprocal threat of self-depletion. The defensive movement of detachment becomes a psychic imperative (Easser & Lesser, Hysterical Personality, p.398-9).

This dramatic engulfing of the object, jealousy, and revenge play into a femme fatale character that many would probably call borderline. I'd prefer to use pre-oedipal character. There is no doubt pre-phallic fixations that would apply and they are seen in regressions to hypochondria, states of deadness, etc. however I'm only focussing on the proto-phallic and the 'genital' stage for this paper[11]. The neurotic or genital version of the object narcissist hysteric will be discussed in the next section.

Turning to the masochistic position, the masochistic quality can generally be seen in sacrificing one’s own growth and development for assisting the other in expressing his uniqueness, or by seeking to be liked by others or having their approval. Freud points to the object position of the masochist when he writes:

loving—being loved, corresponds exactly to the transformation from activity to passivity.… according as the object or the subject is replaced by an extraneous one, what results is the active aim of loving or the passive one of being loved—the latter remaining near to narcissism. (Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, p.133)

Freud says that being loved is “near to narcissism” but again one must pay attention to the phenomenology. Just because a person talks a lot and seems to draw a lot of attention it doesn’t mean that they are establishing their power or dominance. Rather, as the object narcissist wants to be the cause of desire in the subject, the object masochist wants to the cause of interest, delight, or fascination in the subject. Here qualities like charm, endearment, exuberance, or spirituality and depth are in order[12]. Hans Sachs contrasts the loving woman who sacrifices her individuality for her husband’s glorification with a version that very well fits ‘be loved’ in its inspiring side:

The women of whom I am thinking are almost always remarkably charming in appearance and exceptionally attractive socially—at least, to men; they do not usually form any satisfactory relations with other women. A woman of this sort has the power of entering into the idiosyncrasies and interests and ideas of the particular man with whom she happens to be talking, so that he feels she thoroughly understands him and is accordingly greatly attracted to her. We are astonished to see how such women, although they have never followed out any course of mental training or pursued any serious studies, know quite a lot about a number of, often very difficult, subjects. But a finer ear soon detects that what they say is not original, but simply an echo of some man or other whose knowledge and views they have borrowed. All the subjects on which they talk—science or art, sport or religion—can be assigned to particular periods in their lives and to particular men, from whom they have derived their views. They do not even try to reflect upon and reconcile the various points of view: they simply treasure up the individual utterances of different men and actually do not hesitate calmly to advance quite opposite opinions, taken from different sources. (Sachs, ‘One of the Motive Factors in the Formation of the Superego in Women’p.42-3).

Following the structure established the ideal of rousing, intriguing, or delighting the object and being loved by it would also have a superego failure in depression and feelings of emptiness. This in turn can be externalized onto others and this would be synonymous with feelings of boredom. In the step of denial things would go a step further and the person would defend against the failure of their ideal in relation to the mother by becoming ‘enthusiastic’ about the father. The phenomenology of this state, as in the other states, is that the feeling of satisfying the ideal is in place and the denial involves reference to an action involving another so it is a “denial à deux” (Greenson, On Enthusiasm, p.10). Preoccupation with vengeance allows the subject narcissicist to remain superior to others, eliciting sexual desire allows the object narcissist to feel beautiful (sexiness and beauty being different), preoccupation with compassion allows the subject masochist to feel like she has love, and the object masochist enthusiastically talks about how great another person is and keeps her sense of receiving approval, or the chance of it, from someone important.

As with the other denials this can go through group identifications so that involvement in certain group activities and excitement about various experiences with other groups can be the cause of enthusiasm. Instead of meeting the most interesting person ever and talking about him or her the enthusiast can talk about how it was the best time ever to go to another’s family’s place for dinner, or an Episcopal church in which everyone sings, or be excited for a holiday beyond the self-interest in personal presents. As with the other denials in group identifications the racist, the minority rights fighter, and the person who enjoys sex with someone of a more esteemed group others must also be convinced of the worthiness of, or one’s worth for being involved with it. Greenson writes:

There is an air of extravagance and expansiveness about enthusiasm—a readiness to use superlatives. The enthusiastic person does not merely feel good or even very good, but great—in fact, "the greatest!" There is a sense of exuberance, richness, an abundance of good fortune; yet with it all, there is some awareness that one is exaggerating; but it is enjoyable, and one is reluctant to give it up… One cannot remain enthusiastic alone. Like laughter, one needs cohorts, accomplices. They have to be converted to enthusiasm, or else the enthusiasm is endangered. (p. 2-3)[13].

In an article entitled ‘A Reevaluation of Hysterical Relatedness’ Marylou Lionells paints a picture of the hysteric that is directly relatable to what I’m calling the object masochist[14]. She uses the terms self-as-agent and self-in-relation for what I’ve identified in classic psychoanalysis as narcissistic vs. masochistic trends in the personality and places the hysteric in the latter category (Lionells, ‘A Reevaluation of Hysterical Relatedness, p. 577). She even quotes Freud’s position that “being loved, is the most important thing in life” for someone of this libidinal type (ibid, p. 571). She does a literature review in which she supports a view of “emotionality as an interpersonal tool designed to elicit approval” and her findings are as follows:

the hysteric seeks sustained interest, excitement, and especially approval… while all interacting persons manipulate others to fulfil personal needs, the hysteric achieves his particular goal by seeming relatively helpless and dependent… To the extent that I’m hysterical I care more that you like me than that you agree with me or even understand me… hysterical approval seeking is a search for emotional holding, though phrased as if help is what is needed. The hysteric can behave quite independently as long as a fantasy is maintained that another presides over that activity as a parent, authority, seat of power, and fount of love (ibid, p. 571-3).

It isn’t sex which is desired by this type of hysteric, just as presenting oneself as needy or dependent is really about wanting to be emotionally held the object masochist hysteric can also use sex to get another person to spend time with her (ibid, 574)[15]. The dependence on the fantasy of a parent that presides over activity and the threat of helplessness when that fantasy fades creates a position that is comparable to the hysteroid but, conceived of masochistically. While the hysteroid will engulf another, get into fights, be jealous, and seek to cause the love object pain (i.e. is power based) the object masochist hysteric will conjure up all kinds of problems regarding to feelings and things she needs help with in order to hold onto another person’s attention (i.e. is anxiety based)[16]. If her track record with personal relationships and work is similarly as spotty as the hysteroid then we can speak of another borderline type that would prefer to be engulfed rather than to engulf another. The borderline power, revenge, and sex in one that is without friends and guilt and the helplessness, exaggeration of feeling, and frigidity that is without friends and guilt leads us to appreciate the proper identification with the father that establishes morality and assertiveness in the Oedipus complex. This will be discussed in the next section.

[1] Again, psychoanalytic writers often turn Oedipus into everything and Freud clearly attached to the ego ideal to the castration complex which must be kept separate from the Oedipus complex. I’ll try to differentiate it in the next part of the paper.

[2] This new ego ideal is group membership or a social narcissism in identification with the head of the group. This can be seen in the little boy who says ‘My dad can beat up your dad’ even though no individual merit is at stake, the sense of pride is located in the sense of belonging to the family. This group identity will later take other objects such as country, which a citizen may irrationally claim is the best in the world even though he has never beyond its borders and thus has no point of comparison. “In addition to its individual side, this [ego] ideal has a social side” Freud writes, “it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation” (Freud, On Narcissism, p.101). His most succinct formulation of the working of this ideal is made in Future of an Illusion:

The satisfaction which the ideal offers to the participants in the culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their pride in what has already been successfully achieved. To achieve make this satisfaction complete calls for a comparison with other cultures which have aimed at different achievements and have developed different ideals. On the strength of these differences every culture claims the right to look down on the rest… The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal… can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws (Freud, Future of an Illusion, p.13).
[3] Horney, in the expansive types, in Neurosis and Human growth has a subsection on the arrogant-vindictive type but at this point she no longer examines its associations to phallic-narcissism.

[4] I think this position can undergo further refinement but for the purposes of this paper I am only interested in exploring the levels of shame vs. guilt and don’t have the space to delineate

[5] Just as women are exchanged from the beginning of social organization but misogyny proper enters in patriarchy so too does the cultural Other who is inferior and bad appear to bolster up the narcissism of groups. One’s own tribe is made of real human beings while the Other tribe has sex with animals, their mothers, or is bad in some way.

[6] i.e. men have penis envy of paternal phallus and women with narcissistic fixations do as well.
Penis envy is also found in boys an may be discerned in the boy's envy of the larger penetrating and impregnating paternal phallus… penis envy might be regarded as the developmental organizer of female masculinity. To derive femininity mainly from penis envy would be developmental distortion and reductionism (although penis envy contributes to feminine character). A feminine identity and self-representation has other important roots. Penis envy may indirectly and adaptively foster a heterosexual feminine orientation, but penis envy is commonly an impediment to femininity (Blum, Masochism, the Ego Ideal, and the Psychology of Women’, p.185-6).

This view seems to have been taken up earliest by Alfred Adler who examines the castration complex of psychoanalysis not along sexual but characterological lines. Adler writes:

When a girl imagines that she can change into a boy, it is because the feminine role has not been presented to her as the equal of the masculine role. She revolts against what she believes to be a permanent perspective of inferiority for her. The Freudians have interpreted this fact as what they call the 'castration complex. (Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind, p).

Adler deserves immense credit for criticizing the fixed biological psychoanalytic view with a sociological one that can recognize a distinction between early indigenous tribes in which gender roles seem to exist but with more fluidity and without the explicit misogyny of later patriarchal tribes and civilization up to the present. However, when he writes that “In civilization every woman wants to be a man” he continues to read every person as functioning through the narcissistic side of their personality (Understanding Human Nature).
[7] The sexual ideal may enter into an interesting auxiliary relation to the ego ideal. It may be used for substitutive satisfaction where narcissistic satisfaction encounters real hindrances. In that case a person will love in conformity with the narcissistic type of object-choice, will love what he once was and no longer is, or else what possesses the excellences which he never had at all. The formula parallel to the one there stated runs thus: what possesses the excellence which the ego lacks for making it an ideal, is loved. (On Narcissism, p.101).

[8] In a very interesting article J. Harnik ties this to the woman’s entire body being a phallus: in men the genital continues to be the centre of their narcissism, whilst in women there is a secondary narcissism which becomes attached to the body as a whole. (Hárnik, ‘The Various Developments Undergone by Narcissism in Men and in Women’, p. 69). He even goes on to outline how the need to be admired, desired, or “loved” for one’s beauty exists in men as well in bisexuality, which is the case for all the positions:



This narcissism is strongly marked in a number of men whose love-life is also frequently characterized by a reversal of the typical relation between man and woman: they are attracted by a woman who falls in love with them and displays towards them the sexual overestimation appropriate to their own narcissistic valuation of themselves. It is entirely in accordance with our views on bisexuality to assume that a given psychic mechanism operates in both sexes, only more powerfully in the one than in the other… (ibid. 71)


[9] Lawerence Josephs description and I’m left with the impression that his book on character is partly an amalgam of every bit of behaviour that is described as hysterical and partly a more subtle picture that notes the potential bisexuality in the hysteric and how she’d rather identify with love, ‘being nice’, and her masochistic side while repressing her narcissistic side.

[10] In McDougall’s ‘Anonymous Spectator’ a very good clinical example of a pre-oedipal character although it is an illustration of a phallic-narcissistic one. It  is illustrated and theoretically elaborated as ‘the circumvention of the oedipal complex’ without internalization of the father or paternal phallus. McDougall calls all pre-oedipals perverts but I'd prefer to reserve that name for a certain type of pre-oedipal character:

For K. had invented his own solution to the Oedipal conflict. In rendering his father inexistant (helped, no doubt, by the complicity of his mother) K. had kept intact his illusion of being his mother's sole love object. His "phoney diplomas" procured him certain rights, but they had cost him dearly. In spite of his increasing feeling of depression K. could neither give up the "diplomas" (by now an integral part of his identity) without pain, nor could he precipitate the "catastrophe" without anxiety. He sought reassurance in the eyes of the onlookers (p. 300)



[11] Let us look at some further general patterns in patients with narcissistic personality disorders. In their histories, their prominent orientation to external relationships for affirmation and confirmation is quite evident. We can often determine through questioning, the pattern of their search for idealized figures. All of these patients have a major problem with self-esteem, manifested by feelings of worthlessness, major self-doubts, or feelings of ugliness. No amount of external assurance lasts for long, because they cannot sustain their own opinions, and are always looking to others for support. On occasion, an exaggeratedly arrogant attitude is a thinly veiled façade for self-doubts that we can sense… The other major diagnostic signs and findings involve the phenomenology of the narcissistic regression. The fear of temporary fragmentation, or the temporary fragmentation itself, results from a temporary decathexis of the self or self-objects. These structural regressions of the self and the attempts to adapt to them have certain characteristic ways of being described by the patient or observed by us. One way the patients manifest this is to worry about the mind and/or body and its functioning. They report vague, or sometimes insistent, preoccupations with fears of cancer, dying, or heart attacks. A related complaint is feeling like a “mummy” or “ghost,” or the sensation of having a plastic shield all around the body. In other words, the patient doesn't feel or experience himself as being in touch with others, the world, or himself… Another group of patients manifest symptoms diametrically opposed to those just described. They are chronically hyperactive “achievers,” constantly climbing new heights and pursuing new goals. Characteristically, they speak very rapidly, articulately, as though under great pressure, sometimes with accompanying spastic and agitated movements of the head or body. These patients will refer to these moods as “hyper,” or “zooming,” because they are regularly hyperactive in speech and work and constantly push for increase in both quantity and excellence in performance. When they are not succeeding in reaching impossible standards of perfection, they are brooding and worrying about failing or being surpassed by others. What becomes evident in the analysis after a time is that this hyperactive pressure of speech and activity is an intense effort to disguise an underlying sense of deadness, a narcissistic regression of the self, a sense of being damaged, injured, vulnerable. The chronic excitement is not only reactive to the underlying deadness, but also a derivative of the archaic grandiose-exhibitionistic self… One of the symptoms that represents an attempt to overcome the regression in the self is sexual fantasying or infantile or perverse acting out. The patient unconsciously attempts to counteract the underlying threat of fragmentation or deadness by sexualizing a relationship in a search for intense stimulation and response. An additional contributing motive in the sexual acting out may be an attempt to express some of the grandiose-exhibitionistic self. The overt form of fantasy or acting out takes either a heterosexual or a homosexual form and is consistent in a given patient. When the fantasy or acting out is of a homosexual nature, the patient is seeking a sexualized merger with someone of the same sex. But whatever the sex of the objects sought, they are need-satisfying, narcissistic, and interchangeable, for there is no deep, emotional, lasting tie, with these objects although clearly they are desperately needed.
(Forman, ‘Narcissistic Personality Disorders and the Oedipal Fixations’ p. 70-2)



[12] See Appendix II on Greek Gods for a more in schematic presentation of the four types.

[13] Greenson, since he doesn’t pay attention to the reference to the father or other that gives structure to these denials, gives a case study of an individual who would better be characterized as having a fixation as an object masochist as one who causes delight in others without reference to an other (Greenson, On Enthusiasm, p.14-9). Additionally, he focuses on buying clothes and accruing ‘fetishes’ such as clothing that one can get excited about. Each of these phallic-narcissistic ideals can have fetishes that stand in for power, being beautiful, love, and being loveable but I believe that the object relation is key to the structure.

[14] In a collection of Analytic Aphorisms both the object narcissist side with sex and desire for the masculine gaze and the object masochist side with desire for holding are noted:

The hysteric lives out an invitation to rape and lives in perpetual fear of it.
There is a fusion of orality and vaginality in the hysterical woman.
The hysteric attempts to protect herself from childish impulses and at the same time gratify them. p.264 Kramer, C.H. (1967). Maxwell Gitelson: Analytic Aphorisms


[15] Another example which seems to be a mixed subject and object type, like Karl Abraham’s example of aggressive penis envy, would give us a picture of Freud’s depressive penis envy:



From the time she left home to go to college, the patient had led a life of sexual promiscuity, but with total frigidity. Her original pattern was "to lead men on but not have relations with them, " but when one of them angrily criticized her for this, she became anxious and thereafter was almost always compliant. Intercourse meant nothing to her but she felt it was "unfriendly" to refuse a man who wanted her. During the act, she blocked off all sensation below the waist, almost to the point of anesthesia. Being kissed and fondled above the waist was the only part of sex she enjoyed, and she often wished she had "only scales below the waist, like a mermaid." Nevertheless, if she did not have intercourse for any length of time, she would become anxious, and equated it with feeling "starved."
Prior to her marriage and afterwards, she always had to have a boy friend "on the side." She described this on one occasion as "love insurance, " on another as "extra food in the pantry."
Although she was a more than averagely good-looking person, she had a deep conviction that she was unattractive and that no one could love her for herself. Being loved was more important than loving. She once said: "I can't let myself love anybody unless I'm absolutely certain they love me, and I'm never certain."
She was terrified of aggressive attitudes in others, but even more so of any aggressive feelings in herself. She was so concerned with what others thought of her, and so eager to please everyone, that she had lost the sense of self and had no real identity or convictions of her own. Responsibility of any kind frightened her, although she was both intelligent and talented. She cultivated an elaborate façade of pseudo stupidity as a defense against having to deal responsibly with household problems, with her children or with money. The idea of growing old was frightening to her, and she clung to the pattern of the child-wife. She showed a marked tendency toward fabrication and exaggeration which was a source of frequent friction between herself and her husband (Marmor, Orality in the Hysterical Personality, p. 664-5).




[16] Also, while the object narcissist needs people to recognize her beauty the object masochistic trend in the individual is on the side of being cute. “Being cute (not necessarily beautiful), alert, responsive, and cheerful are common attributes. Budding hysterics often seem to have an innate sense of humour. They spontaneously clown and entertain. They show a quick wit, making use of analogy and metaphor…” (Lionells, ‘A Reevaluation of Hysterical Relatedness, p.583).

feminine subject- subject masochist

I've sound some good examples of the subject masochist position that I've equated with Hermes. The subject masochist position is generally one of devotion and the corresponding idealization of the other. In the figure of Artemis I claimed that her status as a virgin and her masculine attributes weren't about her being a war goddess but about an identification with the father whom was abandoned as a love object. In the figure of Hermes the devotion isn't in a romantic relationship but one in which the assertive strivings require that one is doing something for, with the approval of, or for the glory of another person.

John Murray in a classic article on the ego ideal writes:


During the war, psychiatrists of the Air Force worked in convalescent hospitals with combat crew members who had been rotated home after their tour of flying duty. Many of these young men were suffering from various degrees of reactive depressions. I had the opportunity to participate in the treatment programs of many such cases and found that there was a classical pattern which occurred repeatedly. As illustration: a passive, dependent young man served as gunner, and for a time found it a grand and exciting experience; then some severely traumatic missions occurred and the lad seemed to have exhausted his emotional resources. He weathered this, however, by regressing to an identification with his ideal—his pilot. He was thus able to carry on through further missions until the pilot was killed. From this point he barely staggered through the remaining ones to complete, finally, his tour of twenty-five missions. By then, however, he was a clear-cut case of "operational fatigue—severe."

In the hospital he was given pentothal interviews during which the gamut of war experience was rerun with full emotional impact. Often the interview opened with a burst of anger and hatred at the planes, which at first had promised so much and later left him in his present disastrous state. Never again would he enter a plane or have anything to do with one. He raged in hate for the enemy and asked, "Why did they have to kill my wonderful captain and leave me so lonely?" All day long he sat and dreamed of his old friend, mainly indulging in angry thought toward the pilot for letting himself be killed—a proof that the pilot did not love his gunner enough.

Then feelings shifted and he told of the earlier, more glorious days when he felt like his pilot. Now would come the restitution he longed for. With a firm, strong voice he would say that if the captain were alive today he'd fly anywhere with him—Lorient, Regensburg, Schweinfurt—any or all of the hard ones. This was his big hope and its fulfillment would provide the strength he had to have. The future would now set aside the fears and provide the promise of his dreams—if only the captain. …
The elements of such an interview, repeated so frequently in wartime experience, clearly illustrate many of the basic principles which concern us. In the first place we see the hopeful, expectant young man with a highly adequate self-image, part of a fine group of which he is justly proud. His legitimate narcissistic feelings ride easily and lightly on his shoulders. After the loss of these through traumatic experiences, we see a regression to identification and the partially successful struggle for effectiveness by this device. Next the loss of the strong loved one sets the stage for further regression—introjection and a narcissistically oriented preoccupation with his ideal expressed in anger and depressive longings. Such rejection of reality and the substitute fantasies can be valid only when regressive primitive narcissistic entitlements are stronger than the sense of reality. Restitution results when the fantasy of the return of the pilot makes the world again appropriate to fit his expectations and gives them a sense of imminence.

All this shows clearly the classic elements in the pathology of depression. But one aspect often misses adequate consideration. We see in the foreground the shock and loneliness over the loss of the libidinal object and the problem of restoration of balance through finding new libidinal objects as replacements. At this point I wish to emphasize the significance of the loss of an object which was a symbol of all the patient hoped to be; the pilot embodied and gave a sense of imminence to the patient's hopes and dreams; when this symbol was lost any hope of fulfillment of these longings and expectations was completely shattered. The validity of his ideal self-image died with the pilot: alone he was too weak and helpless.

In the course of treatment of these depressive reactions one had first to help the patient accept and overcome the pain of, and often guilt associated with, the libidinal loss, but before the ego was strong enough to accept the future it was necessary in some measure to restore the hope for an ideal, gone when the external symbol of this was killed. Therapy was not truly complete until a new orientation occurred, one which restored the healthy narcissistic conception of self, embraced the feeling that the future held hope, and included a replacement for the pilot as a symbol of these essential self-image feelings. Incidently, Robert Waelder in his paper on narcissism given at the Boston Symposium (27) recalled that during the First World War official psychiatry interpreted war neuroses as escape motivated by self-preservative urges, seeing in them a refutation of the psychoanalytic doctrine of the sexual etiology of the neuroses. Freud pointed out that the experience of the trenches constituted not only a danger to life and limb but also to the narcissistic equilibrium and the erotic feelings about oneself, and that the cause of the traumatic neuroses might well lie here rather than in the threat to the loss of life. His point is clearly confirmed in my experience in treating and caring for war neuroses; the loss of the proper esteem for the self-image is paramount (Murray, J.M. (1964). Narcissism and the Ego Ideal p..476-9)

psychoanalytic basics: transference and world-views

I’d like to share a conceptual tool that should make it easier to talk about how regressed your patient is. The Moderns seem to talk about the Oedipal or object level neurotic and everything before that is narcissism. Meadow talks about the patient having no object in awareness to symbiosis with the object and gradual separation to the point where the analyst will receive an object transference. The analyst with a lot of experience may intuitively grasp this but it doesn’t do much for the novice. In Totem and Taboo Freud uses the history of worldviews (Weltanschauung) that will allow us to examine the transference and discourse of the patient to convey the patient’s regression:

At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. At the religious stage they transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of influencing the gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes. The scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death (Totem and Taboo, p.88)

Freud simply examines these worldviews by the decreasing amount of narcissism they represent. In primary narcissism, in which the child is its own ideal there is omnipotence (animistic stage). In secondary narcissism ego and object libido emerge as impulsive connections with an outside power which is greater that the individual (religious stage). Lastly, in science one appeals to one’s peers in the reproducibility of the experiment and individual narcissism is reduced and the beautiful sentiments surrounding another world in which those suffering in this world will have bliss in the next is substituted for finitude.

There are two important corrections to make to these world-views. The first is that Freud wrongly attributes omnipotence to the child in primary narcissism as if the ego was fully developed and had a place for an ideal and it just happened to select itself first. Later analysts like Lacan and Hartmann corrected this by introducing the concepts of the mirror stage and self-representation which represent the child being able to take itself as an object in a new way (i.e. an ontogenetic development). Edith Jacobson writes:

Freud describes the megalomanic attitudes of children, primitives, and schizophrenics, their belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and in the magic of words, as evidence of “primary narcissism”. Actually, however these attitudes appear to be manifestations of beginning “secondary narcissism” or, as we should rather say, of preoedipal stages of ego formation and of a beginning establishment and cathexis of self and object images… To these stages the psychotic ego appears to regress (The Self and the Object World, p.102).

Thus, when you experience a true narcissistic transference in which the patient wants to believe you are identical to him it has nothing to do with him believing he is omnipotent. As soon as megalomania or extreme idealization of that analyst occur the patient is in secondary narcissism or the religious stage. In animistic religions primitive tribes simply externalize human motivations, feelings, and sensations in to nature (i.e. anthropomorphize). The psychotic patient in primary narcissism does the same to the analyst. One of my patients at field placement asked how old I was and when I deflected he told me 69 (his age) and when I ask him questions about the mundane things he brings up he’s always quick to ask me if I like the same food as him or whether I’ve been to the same places. Another one of my patients is always mentioning the degrees that the people around him have and how the head social worker sent me to him and that she doesn’t make mistakes. He’s in a realm where there is power and an ideal. He idealizes others and goes throughout the rest home talking to different staff members (an object cathexis as opposed to narcissistically inflating himself in an ego cathexis). However, he occasionally brings up his magic abilities, such as picking winning lottery numbers or tickets for people and feels that I am ungrateful and using him as a ‘stepping stone’ because I’ll add his knowledge to my own and write a book that will make me famous and rich.

The second correction to Freud’s analysis of world views is that individual narcissism doesn’t simply disappear after the child renounces its incestuous desires towards the mother and accepts ‘the law’ of the father. After the mother is given up as a sexual object by the boy and girl they turn towards the father and this longing Freud equates with both religious longings for God as well as the relation with the father imago which also creates the devil (Freud, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’). In other words, the end of the religious stage will always deal with matters of good evil and personal sin for those with an emphasis on object drives or with glory, pride, and narcissistic injury for those with an emphasis on ego drives. Our use of the word shame covers both these positions i.e. “Aren’t you ashamed your younger brother beat you in an arm wrestle” or “You should be ashamed of yourself for saying such dirty words”.

Although science does appear historically after the great monotheistic religions of good and evil have their day it is certainly still not fully accepted within any culture. The president must be religious to get elected, psychoanalysis (the science of the mind) is not accepted in universities, and the social sciences suffer from post-modern fragmentation. Freud clearly recognized that no culture was ready to fully accept psychoanalysis and that it’s acceptance represented the danger of it being watered down. He also recognized that after individual narcissism (i.e. the secondary narcissism of various ego ideals) a social ideal was formed that it was possible to derive narcissism from:

The satisfaction which the ideal offers to the participants in the culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their pride in what has already been successfully achieved... On the strength of these differences every culture claims the right to look down on the rest… The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal… can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws (Freud, Future of an Illusion, p.13).

In a more contemporary view, one can be a piece of white trash with massive credit card debt and harassed by child protective services but one is American! And, even though you don’t have a passport and have never travelled anywhere else you know that America is the best place in the world. Historically, science had its beginnings along with nationalism the marked the bourgeoisie’s replacement of medieval guilds and the church’s grip on intellectual life with capitalism. So, while we bring the schizophrenic into an object transference after moving past shame, the neurotic who has accepted ‘the law’ has to be moved beyond his social narcissism and compulsive adherence to norms. He has turned his ‘magical’ and impulsive relations to secondary narcissism into fantasies but he suffers from compulsive problems related to identity and social narcissism. Here I have a patient who could never leave her husband. She “loves” him but no longer feels passionately about him or enjoys sex with him. When I question her general ideas of expectations of their families and friends and pleasant things about the arrangement come up. She feels something is lacking in her life and she just plans for vacations which are never really satisfying. The sacrifice of the magical self (ego drives) or magical world (object drives) in the neurotic means that he is committed to identities and his transference is based upon the analyst having recognized credentials and prestige within society. Historically speaking, the world-view of science will only come into existence once this social narcissism has been overcome and neither corporate interest, national boundaries, nor post-modern relativism interfere with science.

In sum, we are dealing with three types of transference:

-primary narcissism in which the patient externalizes his own attributes to the analyst just as what is human is externalized into nature in animism

-secondary narcissism in which the patient idealizes the analyst or is the possessor of magic and wants to be admired or mirrored just as gods are worshipped and either have children with humans or grant mortals power in religions.

-social narcissism in which the patient accepts the opinions of the elite in the groups he belongs to as worth more than his own and the analyst is deferred to because of his education or dismissed because his lack of it just as September 11th meant that all Muslims were bad and racism writes over the individuality of a person in favour of their group identity.

There are, of course, interesting sub-phases of these general groups. For example, the shame I mentioned in relation to religions of good and evil. There would also be states before the animistic transference in which transference just touches upon the analyst like light on a window. Anyway, I hope this sketch might allow you to convey your impressions of your patients in a more satisfying way.


There's an update of this post at
http://psychoanalysis-tcp.blogspot.com/2012/05/economics-of-libido-pt-2.html

Freud's remarks on gender: narcissism and masochism

Freud saw an antithetical relation between object libido and ego libido after they emerged from primary narcissism:

"We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more of the one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted... Finally, as regards the differentiation of psychical energies, we are led to the conclusion that to begin with, during the state of narcissism, they exist together and that our analysis is too coarse to distinguish between them; not until there is object-cathexis is it possible to discriminate a sexual energy—the libido—from an energy of the ego-instincts (On Narcissism, p. 76).

In other posts I've shown that love and idealization of the object has been identified by Jacobson, Horney, Kohut, etc. as being feminine. So, even though Freud claims that anaclitic love object cathexis is masculine I believe the others are seeing more clearly and the ego vs. object libido here is masculine vs. feminine.

This antithetical relation builds upon an earlier distinction between activity and passivity which is how Freud wants to characterize masculinity and femininity:

It is, moreover, a suggestive fact that the existence of the pair of opposites formed by sadism and masochism cannot be attributed merely to the element of aggressiveness. We should rather be inclined to connect the simultaneous presence of these opposites with the opposing masculinity and femininity which are combined in bisexuality— a contrast which often has to be replaced in psycho-analysis by that between activity and passivity (Three Essays, p.160).

The first reason he doesn't want to call this trend masculine and feminine is because the child must develop the cognitive capacity first for it's attitude to the world to be a masculine or feminine one. However, it is important that he sees active and passive expressions in the anal stage which is also where he holds that “Defaecation affords the first occasion on which the child must decide between a narcissistic and an object-loving attitude (Freud, ‘On Transformations of Instinct’, p. 130). Freud writes:
 Here the opposition between two currents, which runs through all sexual life, is already developed: they cannot yet, however, be described as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, but only as ‘active’ and ‘passive’. The activity is put into operation by the instinct for mastery through the agency of the somatic musculature; the organ which, more than any other, represents the passive sexual aim is the erotogenic mucous membrane of the anus. Both of these currents have objects, which, however, are not identical. Alongside these, other component instincts operate in an auto-erotic manner. In this phase, therefore, sexual polarity and an extraneous object are already observable. But organization and subordination to the reproductive function are still absent (Three Essays p.198-9).

Freud is clear that every human being is a bisexual mixture of active- narcissistic and passive-loving trends:

In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex. These either persist without function as rudimentary organs or become modified and take on other functions. These long-familiar facts of anatomy lead us to suppose that an originally bisexual physical disposition has, in the course of evolution, become modified into a unisexual one, leaving behind only a few traces of the sex that has become atrophied. Three essays, p. 141

in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or a biological sense. Every individual on the contrary displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last character-traits tally with his biological ones (ibid. p. 219 footnote).

Now Freud later seeks to get rid of the tie between activity to masculinity and vice versa by pointing out that in other animals, such as spiders, the females are active. However, he has linked masculinity/activity to the somatic musculature and in humans men generally have more musculature so it makes sense to keep this linkage although Freud's point is well taken.

In his later work, Freud makes femininity or passivity synonymous with masochism:

This feminine masochism which we have been describing is entirely based on the primary, erotogenic masochism, on pleasure in pain (The Economic Problem of Masochism, p. 162).

In a previous post, I talked about this relation as one of degeneration in contrast to destruction. In a frustrating encounter with the object one can either try to destroy it, which shows self-love, or remove the offending organ out of love for the other. All these words anthropomorphize the child and are by no means conscious thoughts going on in it.

There is a relation of resonance with the object in which one degenerates and
there is a relation of antagonism with the object in which one is destructive.

The narcissistic man who has repressed his sexuality can put down women and be aggressive towards them.
The masochistic woman who has repressed her sexuality out of love for her husband (i.e. she loves him and doesn't want to hurt him but is not sexually attracted to him) will degenerate her sexual interest.

Up to the New Introductory Lectures Freud keeps bisexuality and the active and passive aims as the centerpiece of his chapter on Femininity:

One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims. This is not, of course, the same thing as passivity; to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity. It is perhaps the case that in a woman, on the basis of her share in the sexual function, a preference for passive behaviour and passive aims is carried over into her life to a greater or lesser extent, in proportion to the limits, restricted or far-reaching, within which her sexual life thus serves as a model. But we must beware in this of underestimating the influence of social customs, which similarly force women into passive situations. All this is still far from being cleared up. There is one particularly constant relation between femininity and instinctual life which we do not want to overlook. The suppression of women's aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favours the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been diverted inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine. But if, as happens so often, you meet with masochism in men, what is left to you but to say that these men exhibit very plain feminine traits? (New Intro lectures, p.115-6)

Afterwards, Freud chooses an 'anatomy is destiny' approach which seems to make reality more important than inner life or fantasy and goes against the power of his thought.

Again, if we conceive of two relations to the object: resonance as the feminine, passive, or masochistic aim and antagonism as the masculine, active, or narcissistic aim then we can talk about two libidos the ego libido and the object libido as Freud used himself. These libidos would have their own economy although, as Freud points out, they ultimately derive from the same ur libido

It would not be surprising if it were to turn out that each sexuality had its own special libido appropriated to it, so that one sort of libido would pursue the aims of a masculine sexual life and another sort those of a feminine one. But nothing of the kind is true. There is only one libido, which serves both the masculine and the feminine sexual functions. To it itself we cannot assign any sex; if, following the conventional equation of activity and masculinity, we are inclined to describe it as masculine, we must not forget that it also covers trends with a passive aim. (ibid, p.131).

Through out the entire development of the individual, from the womb until it leaves off the path of eros and individuation and turns to neurosis or death, there is the bisexual functioning of aggression and sex which, since the sexual function doesn't arise until the phallic stage, is better put as ego libido vs. object libido or narcissism vs. masochism.

There are two more important points to make

1. The musculature of the male which designates him as active is mythologically seen as corresponding to consciousness, the sun, the sky, etc. while the female corresponds to the earth, moon, etc. However, the feminine part of bisexuality is important for much of what it termed the ego qua perceptual-consciousness system or the subject in philosophy. The systematizing functions, logic, etc. is one part but mimicry, empathy, etc. is equally important in a "strong ego" capable of aesthetic engagement and reading the feelings of others.

2. Though the average person is capable of developing basic skills in math and empathy with others (i.e. dynamically everyone's bisexuality goes through the same stages of development). What is important when dealing with an individual is the economic factor which, when it's not a matter of a parent or culture directing an individual towards developing certain abilities, is a matter of fixation. In a previous post I talked about the fixation of sadism in different stages that are fused with ego functions to make them economically selected and defused in the superego return of aggression upon the self. By parallel there would be a fixation of some longing for the object that is manifested in different ways (bite, swallow, mutilate, kill, etc. vs. to be embraced, to be surrounded, to bask in the presence of, etc.). These part drives would play an economic factor in ego functions of receptivity to the object from the primordial level of colours and form in art, to mimicry and doing impressions of others, all the way up to what Nietzsche calls the 'historical sense' upon which 19th century philosophy was based.

So, although everyone dynamically goes through the same stages of development, the primary repression or fixation of certain instincts, as well as adaptive failures (which I'll have to write about some other time), are key for how a person functions in a "bisexual" way. It is possible that a very muscular man will have a very feminine character because of what has been traumatic for him and caused fixations on masochistic side of his personality.

psychoanalysis to this extent is also philosophy of authenticity:

There are a few people who stand up and sing the national anthem with pride at sporting events, a majority who go through the motions (not self-consciously but as an unconscious social drive), a few who self-consciously don't want to disappoint someone there, and a few who don't even care to keep up appearances.

the same goes with kissing.

There are many people who kiss because it's what they think people should do (as the unconscious social drive). There are some who don't bother to kiss and have no such drive to keep up appearances. Then there are a few who really have eroticized kissing and get off on it.

Freud's system is subtle enough to account for all these differences and it's only in the hands of autistic narcissists that his models have become the laughing stock of academia.

But, the bourgeoisie is his own grave digger and by university being as boring as the world of money-making there's no place left for us to go. We have to create something great so that we can kneel down before it as our masochism demands.

perversion- subject masochist

I've come across an interesting fact.

The unicorn is used as a symbol of Christ in medieval Christianity

Thus enters what is called the virgin capture and, with it, the Christian interpretation. According to Physiologus, the story is an allegory of Incarnation. The unicorn is a symbol of Christ, his fierceness the Messiah's power, his solitude and whiteness Christ's chastity, his small size Christ's humility, and his single horn the unity of Christ with God and Father. The virgin is, of course, the Virgin Mary, and the huntsman is the Holy Spirit, acting through the Angel Gabriel in “driving” Christ into the womb of Mary and then taking him to the palace of the king — that is, enlisting him for his Father's work. Mohacsy, I. (1984). (The Legend of the Unicorn: An Illumination of the Maternal Split, p. 389).

I already mentioned in a previous post on perversion that the religious mystic has a denial of both the sexes and the generations in chastity, the doctrine of souls, and calling us to be like children.

Christ as the unicorn therefore follows the displacement upwards from below that I've already shown for both the object narcissist (the face) and masochist (the nose).

masculine subject- object narcissist pt. 2

In a previous post on perversion I wrote

With the object narcissist I believe we have the position of penis envy par excellance in the radical feminist. The radical feminist denies the difference between the narcissistic and masochistic positions and denies the difference between the generations by having a radical political agenda which doesn't seek to speak to the generational differences and becomes more of an aesthetic object for English students than an actual political force.

I was unhappy with this formulation and turned to Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto to become more exact.

From the last post we have two movements the first is the object narcissist's genitalization of her entire body so that she is the cause of desire in the subject narcissist. The next step, the perverse one, is that she genitalizes (or displaces upward from below) her face so that the beauty of her face is the cause of desire in herself and thereby negates the male.

Taken as a full out sexual perversion this is a true case of narcissism in which the object narcissist would, as clinical data shows, masturbate with a mirror at their own image.

As a social perversion we see in Solanas' work that men aren't just turned into the weaker sex but should be eliminated altogether.

In addition the differences between the generations are wiped out in a society run by women in which there are no leaders:

"There's no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other, complete and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws, or leaders"

Interestingly, there is no reference to the male genitals but rather the "stupid, sickening face" of males.

Although Solanas proposes that men be killed or use surgeries and medicine to become women, if possible, she also has an interesting third alternative she brings up.

"It will be electronically possible for him to tune into any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this, as it won't hurt them in the slightest and it is a marvelously kind and human way to treat their unfortunate, handicapped fellow beings"

Even though she has taken away the generational authority of the father we see that the father imago can't be eradicated since it is a building block of the mind. It must return and with the narcissist it returns in paranoia.

I'm writing a paper on this for a conference on perversion and I'll probably post it here in the future.