You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature […] Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard III (quoted in Freud, 1916, 314)
Disability, and in particular motor disability, being so obviously bound up with the body, is inescapably accompanied by narcissistic pain and mortification owing to the experiences of castration, loss and deficiency with which it is associated. In On narcissism: An introduction (1914), Freud too draws attention to the close connection between physical illness and narcissistic pathology, stating that a better knowledge of narcissism can be gained precisely through the study of situations involving organic injury.
In the view of some authors (Antony, 1976; Niederland, 1965), the disruptive narcissistic wound associated with the physical «defect» actually comes to constitute the nucleus and foundation of a disabled subject's self.
The central importance of the defect might perhaps be explained by Schilder's (1935) hypothesis that, in the case of a physical problem, narcissistic libido tends to flow towards the affected and painful parts of the body as if they were erotogenic zones, massively cathecting them and causing them to become the seat of the ego. This is a development of Freud's observation, again in On narcissism: An introdution (1914), that in organic illness the entire libido is turned back on to the sufferer's ego, the flow of narcissistic libido being concentrated on the illness and on the affected organ.
From a different perspective, the onset of severe narcissistic problems could be attributable to the wound suffered by the parents' self through the collapse of the illusion of being omnipotent progenitors who have created perfect offspring (Antony, 1976; ). According to Winnicott (1967), this grave wound, which bears no proportion to the actual defect, is transmitted to the child through the parents' «look» - that is, how they look at the child - and ultimately becomes the nucleus