Tolstoy, Narcissism, and the Psychology of the Self: A Self-Psychology Approach to Prince Andrei in War and Peace*

Pour moi, Dieu, c'est à quoi j'aspire, et cette aspiration est toute ma vie

Leo Tolstoy, whose work is unsurpassed in its depth and acuity of perception of the human psychological condition, has eluded the purview of psychoanalytic thought. Kiell's (1963) bibliography of psychoanalysis and literature lists very few references to Tolstoy in English, compared to a very extensive listing of, for example, studies on Dostoievski. Tolstoy's work does not yield readily to classical psychoanalytic literary analysis. His subject, particularly in his novels, was the articulation of the experience of the self. Recent psychoanalytic advances in self psychology make it now possible to bring Tolstoy's insights into psychological perspective as well as to reap the richness of Tolstoy's phenomenological awareness for a deeper understanding of self pathology outside of the psychoanalytic situation.

Tolstoy's concern2 was with what Kohut has called “Tragic Man” (Kohut, 1977), a counterpoint to “Guilty Man,” the classical psychoanalytic model of man battling his impulses. To Kohut, “Tragic Man seeks to express the pattern of his nuclear self; his endeavors lie beyond the pleasure principle [in] the realization, through his actions, of the blueprint for his life that has been laid down in his nuclear self” (Kohut, 1977, p. 133). In War and Peace, Tolstoy directs his attention to just