Narcissism as A Defense Against object Loss: Stendhal and Proust

The term “narcissism” is taken from the name of the mythological figure who died because he was too absorbed in self-contemplation to do what was necessary to keep himself alive, and it is applied to individuals who seem more than normally caught up in themselves and limited in the scope and quality of their relations with others.

In certain persons who appear to meet the criteria of the narcissistic personality, however, appearances can be misleading, presenting only one aspect of the more complicated picture that appears after we have looked not only at their behavior, but also at what goes on more privately and intrapsychically. While on the level of appearances or lived out attachments there may be an absence of ongoing and intimate relationships marked by a sense of commitment and obligation and a capacity for guilt, the tendency to form such attachments may not have been altogether lost, but deflected inwards. The quality of the internalized attachments to be found in certain narcissistic personalities raises doubts about their assumed inability to experience a committed sense of attachment and obligation.

Proust and Stendhal, for example, outwardly meet the criteria of the narcissistic personality as described by Kernberg (1975), yet inwardly reveal attachments of remarkable emotional richness and complexity. They fit perhaps more easily under Kohut's (1971) account of narcissism and narcissistic relations. In such relations others become the objects of narcissistic attachments as self-objects or as part of an idealization, the purpose of which is to complement a precarious sense of self and to regulate self-esteem. According to Kohut, this is particularly likely to happen if there have been severe disappointments in an idealized parent.

Proust and Stendhal both made strenuous efforts not only to