This book offers readers a wonderful invitation to re-explore two of Freud's most significant papers, On Narcissism: an Introduction (1914) and Mourning and Melancholia (1917 [1915]). The book's chapters provide diverse pathways which weave us both back into an intimacy with the texts, and out and beyond the theoretical sphere – into the social – society, or, rather the Community of the book's title, before returning us once again to metapsychology. It is in this spiraling movement that the book's form enacts its content – in turn evoking and collapsing the variable and unstable boundaries described between self and other, between the intrapsychic and the social.
In their beautifully crafted and meticulously argued introductory chapter, Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh bring Freud's two papers into dialogue with one another, demonstrating how, fundamentally, both papers return us to “the intricacies and insecurities of ego-formation”, and outlining, not only the convergences of the terms melancholic and narcissistic, but how they can, in fact, be “productively confused”.
The editors go on to survey the ways in which these Freudian constructs have been put to use in scholarship far beyond the psychoanalytic domain; in disciplines such as cultural criticism and critical theory, including critical-post colonial and race studies, feminism and queer theory.
The book itself emerged from a symposium held at the University of Warwick in 2015, an event at which the late John Forrester apparently posed the question, “What might a community of narcissists look like?” thus inspiring (provoking?), say the editors, the parameters of the book. The question animates how, in mainstream discourse, the term narcissist has come reductively to symbolize simply an anti-social or self-absorbed subject, thus ignoring the “pleasures of narcissistic seduction” and the
“possibility of narcissistic sociability”, both of which were acknowledged by Freud.
In fact, asserts the introduction, far from the clichéd closedness, rigidity and self-sufficiency which usually characterize the narcissist and the melancholic, on the contrary, here, for example in Butler's queer melancholia, the process of incorporating alterity into self-definition – the drawing of an ambivalent other into the ego as a formative mechanism for the ego itself – this very mechanism signals a move to “modes of openness and not-knowing” and thus establishes the subject as a reflexive being.
The emphasis on the notion of ‘community’, as it is opposed to ‘society’, highlights not only a nostalgic melancholia for the mythical lost object of community, but also, alongside other ideas developed in the chapters which follow, the editors' useful recovery of the idea of community as both an “interstitial and intermittent” space of (not-)belonging – as such evoking once again the in-betweenness in both space and time of those creatively unstable boundaries at the heart of identification.
The chapters themselves draw on different psychoanalytic traditions, from the contrasting of Kleinian and Freudian approaches to the social in Michael Rustin's chapter, to a Lacanian take in Jay Watts' attempt to resurrect and redeem the figure of the narcissist from its ‘neo-Laschian’ treatment (referring above all to Christopher Lasch's well-known 1979 publication, The Culture of Narcissism), including a memorable mobilizing of Lacan's mirror stage in relation to selfie culture.
The reader is invited to explore the themes via literature and films – including David Fincher's 1999 film, Fight Club in Lynn Layton's chapter and John Krakauer's 1996 book, Into the Wild in Derek Hook's chapter – as well as through clinical case studies. For example, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz's powerful evocation of ‘the clinic of melancholia’ brings into focus the challenging clinical phenomena faced here by both analyst and analysand – a picture enriched by the author's intricate discussion of metapsychological formulations including primary narcissism, the death drive and maternal omnipotence, explored also via the Oedipus and Medusa myths.
The political scene is foregrounded in other sections, including Barry Watt's chapter which brings into a compelling dialogue his twin investments of psychoanalytic therapy and political protest, to offer “analytical tools” for making sense of the often destabilizing and destructive psychodynamics at play within contemporary activism, as well as proposing a theory for taking activism beyond the ‘community of one’; whilst Stephen Frosh considers the politics of indifference in his chapter on ‘Neurotic and Paranoid Citizens’.
And in the final chapter, Anastasios Gaitanidis offers a critical engagement with Judith Butler's proposal for new kinds of community based not on a unifying identity but instead on a common experience of loss. Gaitanidis challenges the assertion that melancholia might form a strong basis for such a community, and Butler's apparent attachment to a never-ending mourning: he says, “she is trying to convince herself, that if nothing else lasts, mourning can.”
The chapters offer interactions with Freud's papers in multiple different registers, reflecting the varied backgrounds of their authors: the contributors include psychoanalysts, psychologists, social and critical theorists. And the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis is gloriously over-represented – a third of the authors being Site members, including, of course, the volume's co-editor and organizer of the original 2015 symposium, Julie Walsh.
As a relative newcomer to psychosocial modes of thinking, reading this book was a pleasingly horizon-expanding experience for me, but also a challenging one – I highly recommend the experience to others.