Chapter 7 Narcissism as Prison, Narcissism as Springboard: A Reading of Sophocles' Ajax

Narcissism is one of the more complicated and confusing ideas in psychoanalytic theory. In his landmark paper introducing the concept Freud linked it to psychosis, which he thought was characterised by the withdrawal of libido from external reality into a narcissistic cathexis of the ego (Freud, 1914c: 74f).1 A year later, he classified schizophrenia as a ‘narcissistic psychoneurosis’ (Freud, 1915a: 124). Not surprising then that narcissism has tended to be discussed in terms of pathology. When Ronald Britton (2003: 145ff), for example, set out to clarify the concept, he found it used in three ways: as an observable lack of interest in others and preoccupation with oneself; as a force or tendency in the personality that opposes relationships with others; and in reference to a group of conditions known as the ‘narcissistic disorders’. Britton’s discussion centres largely on these latter cases, and the part played in them by libidinal and destructive narcissism. This focus on pathological aspects of narcissism typifies much of the literature on the subject. So it is important to remember that the statements by Freud just mentioned are balanced, in his writings, by other passages such as these:

All through the subject’s life his ego remains the great reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent out and into which the libido can stream back again from the objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido and vice versa.

In rare cases one can observe that the ego has taken itself as an object and is behaving as though it were in love with itself. Hence the term ‘narcissism’, borrowed from the Greek myth. But that is only an extreme exaggeration of a normal state of affairs. We came to understand that the ego is always the main reservoir of libido, from which libidinal cathexes of objects go out and into which they return

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again, while the major part of this libido remains permanently in the ego. Thus eg