The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal. (Paul Barrows, Trans.). Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. New York:  Norton, 1985,  154 pp.

In an original and provocative contribution to the psychoanalytic literature, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel has extended Freud's theory of primary narcissism to the ego ideal and traced its effect on perversion, groups, falling in love, religion, art, and illusion. She has several bold theories centered around the wish for reunion with the primary object: For example, it is at the base of all perversions, and it propels the child through normal development; it accounts for the mindlessness of cults and mass phenomena, for religion and mysticism, and it affects the quality of art.

She also thinks that male defenses prevented Freud from understanding the full nature of the oedipal drama: that there is really no object at all involved in falling in love, that it is almost impossible for any one individual to test reality by himself, and that any religion with God the Father is preferable to either mysticism or to any religion which enshrines Jesus the Son. She believes, too, that there is an innate timetable for psychosexual development just as there is one for biological maturity. And finally, an unexpected virtue of The Ego Ideal is a crystal-clear differentiation between sublimation and idealization, and between that often confused pair: the superego and the ego ideal.

Freud's theory of primary narcissism is the basis of all her theories. In Freud's view, the infant begins life with two illusions: The first is based on blissful union with the world, and the second is based on absolute self-sufficiency. These illusions make the infant complete in himself and able to take himself as his own ideal. The first illusion, the total bliss of perfect fusion, cannot persist, however, and the infant must detach himself from it. But separation from the mother confronts the infant with his own dependency-the yawning gap between ego and ego ideal—which he then spends the rest of his life trying to close.

From the time that perfect union ends, Freud says that we begin the wait for someth