Le Narcissisme: Que sais-je? by Paul Denis

Any contextualization or appreciation of Paul Denis’ exposition of Freud’s notion of narcissism and its current usage must take into account the originality of Denis’ drive theory. Following in the footsteps of “Drives and Drive Destinies” or Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Paul Denis defines the drive as the “the measure of work demanded of psychic life as a result of its union with the corporal”. But we know that he posits the breaking-down of the psychic force that is the drive into two components – the two formants of the drive – a cathexis through mastery stream and a libidinal force of satisfaction cathexis (Denis 1997). To understand the concept of narcissism, we must connect these two formants with the love objects of the drive: oneself and the other. Before 1914, Paul Denis reminds us, Freud had introduced narcissism in the Schreber case as an intermediate stage between auto-eroticism (the cathexis of the erogenous zones and the partial drives) and object love, the stage where one’s own body is taken as a love object. Parallel to this unification of the body, it is also the self which constitutes itself. With the 1914 text, “a sea change in theory” (p. 19), emphasis is now placed upon the original psychic conflict: ego-libido/object-libido, with Freud holding to the hypothesis of the “intercommunicating vessels” (a constant quantity of energy would mean that, as one of the components increases, so the other decreases). Narcissism is a correlate of the libidinal cathexis of the self. Freud, however, means to distance himself from the Jungian unification of libido and must therefore maintain – even accentuate – the opposition between the two libidinal currents. The other aspect of the revolution precipitated by the introduction of narcissism is the central place it occupies in the psychic development and constitution of every individual. As a result, narcissism has little in common with the perversion described by Havelock Ellis in 1898 – even if thi