The Narcissistic Contract

This is the name that Piera Aulagnier (2001) gives to the “asymmetrical” contract linking the child and the parental couple from birth. The narcissistic foundations of the new subject result from this contract. It sets limits on the narcissistic cathexis that the parents bring to bear on a child whom they expect unconsciously to fulfil their unsatisfied desires and to embody their ideal. If its terms are respected, this contract enables the child to find his place in the continuity of generations, a place freed from the desire of objects and “independent of the parental verdict alone”. For this to occur, the parental couple must be sufficiently engaged in the social field and respect its rules. Furthermore, society must be “sufficiently fair”. For there is a breach of the narcissistic contract in the case of serious social failure on the part of the parents, but also in situations involving dictatorships, persecutions and totalitarian regimes. On the other hand, when its terms are recognised and it is applied, it underlines the adherence of each person to the human community and to respect for its imperatives that ensure protection and otherness (see Soulié 2002).

In the context of love, a similar contract is established. Each member of the couple must repair the narcissistic wounds of the other person. The contract is asymmetrical, but reciprocal. In bad cases, when all spirit of exchange has been lost and the contract deviates towards narcissistic perversion, one of the two members becomes for the other the target of a projective identification by means of which he gets rid of the parts of himself that he hates and strives to deny or split off.

The analyst often wondered when she was listening to N. whether there was not something of a narcissistic perversion in her husband. At other moments, it was in N. that she perceived a perverse mode of functioning, consisting of provocations, intrusions and manipulations with predominant projective defences. This amounts to s