We live in a time and culture predisposed toward life at the surface. Ours is a society that privileges eternal youth and beauty, consumer-driven instant gratification, and narcissistic preoccupation with self-centeredness, not self reflection. Like Narcissus we often look no deeper than the reflection in the mirror, seeing only skin-deep beauty, never daring to know our own—nor the other’s, inner depths.Contemporary thought has attempted to respond to this cultural climate that, in the words of Stephen Frosh, “[fights] against the deepening of relationships [and love], against feeling real.”2 Psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, and philosophy have addressed the contemporary individual’s crises of the heart, separation from authenticity, and repudiation of the other. They offer a variety of viewpoints on the problem of narcissism, from its ontological and healthy conformations to its pathological forms, and its grandiose illusions leading to growth or to defense. Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage helps us to understand the essential alienation inherent in narcissism and its search for perfection in an idealized image of another. Lacan describes a moment in infancy when the six-month-old child “recognizes” himself in the mirror and falsely identifies the reflection as an image of the unified wholeness and mastery he does not in fact possess. In that moment, the infant, with his smiling mother’s assent, is lured into an illusion of false certainty and omnipotence that splits him off from his fragmented body/self with its accompanying experiences of terror and uncertainty. Lacan’s conception of the mirror sequence describes the way a mental construction of a perfect, alienating identity can originate, separating the infant from his own insufficient self image. The I itself that takes form here is an artificial representation, a self split between its idealized mirror image and the raw truth of human existence.3 It is not difficult to imagine, then, how this narcissistic ideal can be later projected onto objects of desire who mirror this ideal. Narcissism is not limited to the psychology of individuals. American culture, politics, and its recent national wounding uncannily mirror these narcissistic phenomena. The Patriot Act and the War on Terror can be seen as unconscious fantasies enacted upon the world stage. In this post-September 11 world many individuals err on the side of security and rigid borders, thereby sacrificing freedom, relationality, and dimensionality. Nor is narcissism merely a contemporary phenomenon. Literature and history provide ample illustrations of the historical and cultural contexts underlying the problem of narcissism and the way it is transcended. The essence of narcissism is the repudiation of the other in its differences. Sometimes this takes the form of appropriating the other under the guise of romantic love, and sometimes it takes the form of casting out the other to protect the vulnerable self. In these pages I attempt to present a theory of the transcendence of narcissism, in which the humble capacity to love comes about through the surrender of the self to the shattering truth of the other. • • • • • Western culture’s most ancient tale of love, “Psyche and Amor,” which forms part of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, will introduce us to these dynamics. The story features a leading man—Amor, the very personification of Love—whose amorous desires are so embedded in narcissism that he never dares to reveal himself to the object of his passion. The couple, Psyche and Amor, remains suspended in a dark fusion removed from life until Psyche has finally had enough; the illusion is pierced and shattered, and loss ensues. Emerging from his state of wounding, Amor comes in a new way to the side of his beloved, the mortal human Psyche, his act signifying the inner “awakening of the sleeping soul through love,” as James Hillman puts it.4 How many hundreds of modern romantic dramas follow in the train of the Tale of Psyche and Amor, telling the story of the selfish or hardened man who uses everyone, then loses everything, but then finds a woman from whom he learns how to love? More than a millennium later, the tales of medieval courtly romances portray the fate of lovers whose longing for oneness can be realized not on earth but only in their sacrificial death and reunion in Heaven. These are tragedies portraying an idealized longing for true love that can never be sustained in our flawed human condition. The blissful fantasy of everlasting union merely conceals the face of narcissism. This romantic ideal privileges the allure of the lovers’ paradise over the enduring struggles in human relationships in all their vicissitudes. These are the romantic fantasies of a happily-ever-after ending, illusions ultimately deriving from childhood experiences. Time and again, lovers plunge blindly into brief enthrallments that are doomed to failure, yet hold fast to their unquestioned, cherished beliefs, and to a faith in an idyllic innocence that is inevitably shattered. Young lovers blindly enter marriage with the fantasy that romantic love will endure forever. But predictably, when the burning fires of first love’s desires have cooled to warm embers, many men devalue the apparently known quantity at home and look to a passionate love affair with a mysterious other, in which to be absorbed. For the narcissist this process signals the avoidance of human relationship in its fullness, rife with difficulties, limitations, and ethical responsibilities, in favor of the grandiose illusion of ecstatic oneness and freedom from all pain. Ultimately the narcissistic avoidance of the difficulties of life arises in response to a primal experience—the inevitable wounding and loss suffered in the earliest infant-mother relationship. Thus narcissistic dynamics are deeply impacted by the experience of trauma. Psychological wounds too devastating to bear are reflexively partitioned and buried, while simultaneously, reactionary wars of retaliation against one’s pain are staged in order to provide safeguards from disavowed shame and profound vulnerabilities. Throughout life grandiose fantasies in all their forms will magically supplant the experience of unbearable vulnerability, literally obliterating it. These clinical themes are richly amplified by cultural signifiers found in the myths and mysteries of antiquity and from the medieval Tales of Courtly Love through the literature of the mystics and Romantics, to Gothic horror stories and modern romances from contemporary popular culture. These provide the historical and cultural contexts for the contemporary problem of narcissism as well as its transcendence.As we will see, Levinas’s postmodern philosophy describes the way the encounter with the ineffable Face of the Other shocks and deconstructs the sameness and narcissism within eros, freeing the subject to assume an enduring responsibility for the other from which new and transcendent capacities to love may be envisioned. • • • • • My theory of the transcendence of narcissism is based on the work of two men: C. G. Jung and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Jung’s theory of the complexes (see the Glossary for italicized terms) illuminates two vital concepts that are threaded throughout this book: the ego’s primitive identification with the negative or overly positive aspects of the Mother, and the relationship of the puer aeternus, the eternal boy, with his split-off counterpart, the senex, the old man. We can see how these complexes come about by observing the characters in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, which contains the immortal “Tale of Psyche and Amor.” The path through which they are overcome leads from the romantic, narcissistic, predatory preoccupations of what I call the mother-bound man to the wound that shatters the isolation of his standpoint. Through the work of the transcendent function this shattering may culminate in the emergence of empathic dimensions of emotion and a humble yet still masculine standpoint.One of the ways this book contributes to the development of contemporary analytic psychology is through the cross-fertilization of Jungian and contemporary psychoanalytic ideas. For instance, I argue that narcissistic defenses arise not after the development of the complexes, but prior to them. The puer aeternus psychology described by Jung comes into being in reaction to the narcissistic defenses that have appropriated the infant’s most archaic, unsignifiable complex—the mother. These narcissistic defenses encapsulate the infant’s ego, protecting it from experiences reminiscent of its original loss of maternal containing. Another original area of contribution may be found in my analysis of the Grail Legend, where I view von Eschenbach’s Parzival through the lens of eros development in its dual guise, as both a narcissistic and wounding process and one that is relational and healing. The work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas provides the second major source for my theory of how narcissism may be transcended. A traumatic encounter with an utterly unknowable, transcendent Other5 —sometimes initiated by analytical work or psychotherapy—may violently shatter the narcissistic illusions that maintain, among other things, the individual’s endless, romantically driven projections and erotic fantasies. There is therefore a painful, even violent, yet redemptive potential to the wounding. Levinas’s postmodern philosophy is essential to an understanding of this kind of encounter with the Other by a subject; he too emphasizes its capacity to decenter the ego’s “solipsism”— the belief that the self is the only reality and the only thing that we can be certain of. Levinas attempts to describe this shift from an ego-centered view of the universe as something that defies understanding or category. All religious experience perhaps stems from such a primordial awareness. His ethical philosophy, informed by the Holocaust in which his entire family was murdered, centers upon the “relation of infinite responsibility to the other person.”6 Levinas provides a profound insight into the dangers of how individuals can be so easily subsumed in the vision of a tyrannical utopia which he often refers to as a “totality.” To Levinas, the Other is unknowable, ineffable, ungraspable, tormenting, enigmatic, infinite, irreducible, sacred. Its mere trace can only be glimpsed interpersonally or intersubjectively—a term defining a psychological experience created between individuals. The Other does not originate in the psyche. It is infinite, already there, before subject or object exists, and our subjective awareness of it comes through the primacy of its impact upon us. It transcends subjective being, defies our concepts or categories, and cannot be engulfed or appropriated by ego consciousness.7 As Levinas would say, the trace of the Other is glimpsed in the irreducible “face of the human other,” who is revealed in (her) vulnerability, sacredness, and nakedness.8 In Levinas’s ethical view, one’s responsibility emerges from the trauma he feels for the useless suffering and destitution of the one now standing before him. He is taken hostage to the guilt of surviving when the other is stricken. He is even compelled to wish to substitute himself for the other, to put himself in (her) place—but it is too late. This is the torment of which Levinas speaks—the unavoidable responsibility to the other invoked by the shattering Other. It is impossible to evade this summons, which accuses one and even leads him to wonder just how much truth he can bear. In moving from the ethics of human justice and compassion to personal psychology, one can observe how the traumatic impact of the Other destabilizes and shatters the ego’s narcissism, awakening the subject from his slumber. Such a violent blow often appears to the ego in forms that are dark and shadowy, or that threaten to obliterate its fixed orientation and need for certainty, its wish for everything to remain the same. For Levinas, the ego’s need to appropriate alterity—the other’s difference—and to reduce it to sameness is the origin of all violence: narcissism is violence. In those cases where the shattering encounter is successfully navigated, a restructuring of a man’s core of being occurs. An inner cohesion develops that enables him as an ethical subject to bear love’s separations, uncertainties, longing, as well as its closeness. Here I propose a significant revisioning of Jung’s concept of the enigmatic Self, conceptualizing it as an idea akin to Levinas’s unknowable Other, where both, I contend, transcend subjective being and the boundaries of the psyche. I argue that this revised understanding of the Self provides the basis for what I have previously described as a unifying theory of the transcendence of narcissism (...)
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 18:43:04 +0000
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