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Elizabeth Lunbeck Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, pp. 384, $35.00 hardback, ISBN: 9780674724860
Julie Walsh Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2014, pp. 192, $95.00 hardback, ISBN: 978-1-137-33344-5
In a lecture to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society of 5th March 1913, Freud emphasised that ‘narcissism has to remain for us an irreducible phenomenon, the basis of the libido theory’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1974, p. 175). Returning home from this lecture, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote in her diary: ‘I had to give a lot of thought to these discussions insofar as they have to do with the concept of narcissism. It is certain that the concept is employed in two ways which could surely lead to extraordinarily disturbing misunderstandings’ (Andreas-Salomé, 1965, p. 109). In its first usage by Freud and his colleagues, the concept referred to a developmental stage in which the infant clings to a fantasy that it encompasses and enjoys sovereignty over the world, mistaking the support of the environment for personal omnipotence. In a second usage, however, the same term referred to the libidinal investment in the self as an object; such investment is not transitory, but the fundamental, creative and organising economy for self-other relations. Suggesting that Freud was aware of this troubling ambiguity in the concept, Andreas-Salomé reports that ‘Freud is perfectly right in speaking of it, as he does now, as a limiting concept, which serves as a receptacle for what remains unsolved and not a key to its solution…’ (p. 109). This is an extraordinary remark. In this perspective, the concept of narcissism would not offer a direct route through which the question of the meaning or organisation of the self could be solved. Instead, it would hold this question aloft, magnetising and holding together the concerns around this topic, thereby opening them for examination. Andreas-Salomé offers a beautiful image to capture this account.