On narcissism

Essential Papers on Narcissism, edited by Andrew P. Morrison, New York/London:  New York University Press, 1986,  viii + 491 pages, pb $22.50

What are the determinants of subjective experience? At least we can know about the ego, which is all we can know about:

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us… At any rate the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-cathexes. (Freud, 1923, p. 368)

When the desired aspects of the external world are beyond reach, as they always are in the end, they are absorbed into the psyche, they become part of the structure of the mind. The history of the ego is that it is ‘a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes’ — a collection of bits and pieces. Moreover, it prostitutes itself to save the fragile whole from complete dissolution in the face of the id's anger at its loss:

When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so

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to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id's loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too — I am so like the object’. (p. 369)

Freud sees this ‘transformation of object libido into narcissistic libido’ as ‘a kind of sublimation’, perhaps ‘the universal road to sublimation’, and goes on to consider the implications of such a view for understanding the processes of identification, and the superego in particular. But the phrase with most resonance here is ‘Look, you can love me too — I am so like the object’. Look, you can love me too: I am so desperate; my ‘I’, my ego, is so needy, I can be like the loved thing, I can be anything yo