Loneliness and Narcissism*

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was a German idealist philosopher who employed a “phenomenological” method to describe the primacy of consciousness, its activities, and its structures. Kant's famous Copernican Revolution had previously maintained that the external world must conform to the patterns of the mind (in this sense Kant reversed the entire history of philosophy, which had claimed that truth could only be found when concepts corresponded to external objects); however, Kant himself, in a significant way, assumed the validity of external experience and then “deduced,” or indirectly inferred, that certain a priori (transcendental) structures in the mind were constituted as conditioning factors for our knowledge or experience of the self, objects, and other selves.16

Fichte, by contrast, began directly and immediately (hence phenomenologically) with consciousness itself. And this will be exactly Freud's starting point later in his discussion of the “oceanic feeling.” Indeed, in general, after Leibniz, the Germans approached their analyses of reality by commencing with the structures of individual subjectivity; although it cannot be shown that Freud was directly influenced by these reflections, still it seems beyond doubt that he was aware of a specific idealist paradigm of consciousness.

In Fichte's view4—and subsequently in Hegel's13,14 and Freud's6 as well—the (absolute) ego first posits itself and then actively proliferates “outwardly” by distinguishing between itself (self-consciousness) and a realm of external objects and other egos. Consequently, Fichte adopts a paradigm of consciousness in order to account for the relation