The Americanization of Narcissism 9780674726147

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T h e A M E R I C A N I Z AT I O N o f N A RC I S S I S M

The

A M E R I C A N I Z AT I O N o f N A RC I S S I S M

Elizabeth Lunbeck

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2014

Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Lunbeck All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America L i b r a ry o f C o n g r e s s C a t a l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c a t i o n D a t a Lunbeck, Elizabeth. The Americanization of narcissism / Elizabeth Lunbeck. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72486-0 1. Narcissism—United States. 2. United States—Social conditions. 3. United States—Social life and customs. 4. Social values—United States. I. Title. BF575.N35L86 2014 158.2—dc23 2013034742

To the memory of John W. Cell 1935–2001 First and best teacher

CONTENTS

Introduction

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I. Narcissism in the Me Decade

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1. The Culture of Narcissism 11 2. Heinz Kohut’s American Freud 37 3. Otto Kernberg’s Narcissistic Dystopia II. Dimensions of Narcissism from Freud to the Me Decade and Beyond 81 4. Self-Love 83 5. Independence 113 6. Vanity 138 7. Gratification 165 8. Inaccessibility 202 9. Identity 224 Conclusion: Narcissism Today Abbreviations 273 Notes 276 Acknowledgments 352 Index 355

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INTRODUCTION

It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists. Greedy, selfish, and self-absorbed, we narcissists are thriving, the critics tell us, in the culture of abundance that is modern, latecapitalist America. The disciplined, patriarchal Victorianism under which our stalwart forebears were raised has purportedly given way to a culture that asks nothing of us while at the same time promising to satisfy our every desire. Plentitude reigns where privation was once the norm, and self-indulgence has displaced self-control. Reckless Wall Street bankers, philandering politicians, charismatic CEOs, talentless celebrity wannabes, shopaholic women and abs-obsessed men, the vacuous young and the Botox-dependent old: in this regularly invoked gallery of narcissists in our midst—spanning the spectrum from ruthless to pathetic—we can see the seeds of too much self-esteem and too little self-discipline come to warped fruition. Narcissism has proven the pundits’ favorite diagnosis, a morally freighted term with appealing classical resonances, a highfalutin name for the old-fashioned complaint that modernity means a loosening of restraint and that modern satisfaction is to be found in, as Philip Rieff put it nearly fifty years ago, nothing so much as a “plentitude of option.” Narcissism has figured importantly in psychoanalytic thinking from the appearance of Freud’s landmark essay, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in 1914, but it did not enter the popular lexicon until the 1970s. Then, as a shorthand for Me Decade

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excess, it was quickly grafted onto a narrative of decline that saw Americans as a people shifting from sturdy production to meaningless consumption, from small-town gemeinschaft to anonymous gesellschaft, from David Riesman’s introspective bourgeois to his superficial glad-hander, and from the self-denying hysteric of Freud’s day to the pampered and indulged narcissist of our own. This powerful narrative has informed a major tradition of American social criticism, from Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte Jr.’s The Organization Man in the 1950s, through Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism in the 1970s, to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, published in 2000. Collectively, the critics have painted a portrait of a culture in characterological freefall that valorizes mindless consumption and promotes the indulging, rather than the harnessing, of all sorts of impulses. Once they adopted the concept of narcissism, this portrayal coalesced around the figure of the narcissist, whose impoverished moral sensibility serves to vividly illustrate the depths to which we have fallen. It was the Age of Narcissism, the New York Times proclaimed in the early 1970s, and the term was suddenly everywhere, offering a beguiling new language in which to voice these venerable complaints. Cassandras of cultural decline, from both left and right, contended that a “new narcissism” was ascendant. Too many Americans, they charged, were bristling at tradition, seeking fulfillment at the feet of New Age gurus while spurning engagement with the common good. Among the Cassandras, no one was more influential than Christopher Lasch, a gifted polemicist who, throughout the decade, issued dire assessments of the nation’s fall in tandem with narcissism’s rise, culminating in the publication of his wildly popular 1978 jeremiad, The Culture of Narcissism. In the hands of Lasch and other critics, narcissism was both cause and effect of the rampant individualism, the spiritual questing, the preoccupation with self, and the flight from commitment that they argued were newly prevalent in American life. Lasch and other public intellectuals took stock of the social and political ferment of the Vietnam-era—assassinations, urban riots, Black power, student protests, nascent second-wave feminist agita-

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tion, and claims for gay liberation—to collectively warn of the unraveling of Western society and the undermining of its most cherished ideals. The countercultural young came under especially sharp scrutiny, cast by their elders as hedonists questing for self-realization and reveling in an Elysium of instantly gratified desires. What might be seen as their more ascetic impulses—their rejection of the house in the suburbs, the cars in the garage, and (for men) the secure niche in the corporate hierarchy—were altogether missing from this portrait of the American character gone amok. Also missing was that the capitalist system, aligned in the minds of the critics with the values of hard work, individual initiative, and entrepreneurial bravado, depended for its vitality on the ever-expanding consumer demand that these same critics deplored. The critics’ turn to narcissism was not simply a reaction to changes they perceived in American society, nor did it merely reflect the ever-increasing prevalence, noted by clinicians, of character disordered individuals. Critics might never have latched on to the term and its meanings if not for the appearance of pathbreaking works on narcissism, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the Viennese émigré analysts Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, which generated both excitement and fierce controversy among psychoanalysts. Celebrating what others condemned, Kohut boldly reframed narcissism as a desirable, even healthy, dimension of mature selfhood. He consistently underscored narcissism’s positive aspects, arguing that it fueled individuals’ ambitions, creativity, and fellow-feeling. He rejected the pejorative attitude toward narcissism he saw both in his disciplinary colleagues and in the culture more generally, going so far as to suggest that the emptiness and fragmentation critics saw as characteristic of modernity resulted not from too much narcissism but from too little. Kernberg’s stance could not have been more different. He focused on narcissism’s darker side, in precise and vivid prose describing narcissists’ destructiveness, rage, and aggression as well as the masterful ways in which they exploited and enslaved their hapless victims. Kernberg’s narcissists were charming and seductive, expert at eliciting admiration and tribute from those they would invariably

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devalue and discard. The most creative and intelligent of them enjoyed a level of worldly success that fueled the critics’ complaint that the culture not only tolerated but rewarded narcissistic traits, enabling those skilled at manipulating interpersonal relations and deft in sustaining the illusion of their own limitless possibilities to prevail within the drab conformism that was the bureaucratic world of business, politics, and government. Narcissism was thus both normalized and pathologized at the moment of its Americanization. Analysts had wrestled long and hard with the concept’s doubleness. Glancing back to Freud in the 1970s and beyond, they could argue that from the start he had conceived of narcissism as both normal (present in everyone and necessary to sustain life) and pathological (a state of self-love to be overcome in the course of development). In the half-century-long unfolding of narcissism’s post-Freudian history, however, it was narcissism’s pathologies that for the most part drew analysts’ attention, even as some of them made stabs at conceptualizing it more neutrally as a repository of self-feeling and others proposed that an inflated sense of self was inescapably part of the human condition. Kohut and Kernberg together broadened narcissism’s remit—in their wake it could refer to both destructiveness and self-preservation, and could be seen as expressive of both selfish entitlement and patently selfless altruism— and brought some clarity to a concept that analysts complained was ambiguous, baffling, and elusive. Delineating healthy narcissism, Kohut brought clearly into view a thread of analytic thinking that cast narcissism as a form of self-esteem. And, although analysts had long used narcissism and narcissistic in reference to feelings, traits, and behaviors someone might experience or display, the narcissist as a specific character type eluded their conceptual grasp. Pressing the newly coined diagnostic term “narcissistic personality disorder” into service, Kohut and Kernberg were able to provide a description of the narcissist as a type of person that was at once bracingly new and instantly recognizable. This move marked narcissism’s psychoanalytic coming of age and, beyond the discipline, endowed it with a concreteness and specificity appealing to critics. The narcissist was now an identifiable character open to attack.

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Social critics took note as narcissism assumed center stage within psychoanalysis. Discussing modernity’s deceitful and manipulative selves, they seized on Kernberg’s narcissists and got them right: grandiose, entitled, ruthless, filled with rage and lacking in empathy, beneath the seductive surface these narcissists were satisfyingly miserable. At the same time, Kohut’s healthy narcissism almost entirely escaped the critics’ notice. Kohut spoke to strivings for selfrealization, legitimized worldly ambition, and supported the pursuit of values, goals, and ideals expressive of the highest in human nature. The commitments of the critics were, in contrast, to asceticism and scarcity, and they disdained the language of possibility and selfdiscovery. None of this stopped them from invoking Kohut as an authority on cultural decline, unaware that he was not critiquing but, rather, endorsing narcissism. They turned him inside-out: the narcissism they mobilized to denounce their follow citizens resulted from precisely the sort of aspirations to self-fulfillment that he celebrated as healthy. Me Decade social critics made narcissism their own, Americanizing it as they shaped it into a distinctively American malady associated with affluence and abundance. The popular conversation about narcissism in the years since Kohut and Kernberg burst on the scene has been impoverished by this slighting of healthy narcissism, relentlessly focused on its Kernbergian malignancies or on the excesses that were the target of Me Decade critics: selfesteem, self-absorption, vanity, gratification, and bottomless need.

Appreciating Kohut’s and Kernberg’s achievements and understanding their galvanizing effect on psychoanalysis means reconstructing the story of narcissism from the moment of its analytic origins. The two analysts, outlining the new narcissism that captured the public’s attention, offered solutions to a range of issues with which their analytic forebears had grappled. What was the relationship between love of self and love of the other? Was independence the aim of development and the mark of maturity? Should analysts frustrate or gratify the needs of their severely disturbed patients? Were those patients even suitable subjects for the analyst’s couch? Were women

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fated to narcissism by virtue of anatomical lack? Practicing analysts today are aware, in differing degrees, of how divisive and fraught these issues have been in their discipline’s history. When they think, write, and talk about narcissism, analysts summon up in one form or another the rich cast of historical characters associated with narcissism, whether it is their contributions to the literature or the different perspectives and even animosities that divided them: the canonical figures of Freud, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Joan Riviere, D. W. Winnicott, Erik Erikson, Kohut, Kernberg, and many others continue to shape narcissism and to control its meanings. Likewise, Freud’s personality and his personal passions, long the focus of intense interest and speculation within the discipline, are not adjuncts to the analytic theoretical armamentarium but part and parcel of it, enshrined in print and passed down through highly personalized practices of apprenticeship, most notably the training analysis. Thus only by understanding the controversies around narcissism’s organizing concepts—self-love, independence, vanity, gratification, identity— that punctuated its century-long evolution, and only by appreciating how resonant with their own concerns social critics found these controversies can we account for how eagerly narcissism was embraced and how readily it found a home in a nation that Freud thought so inhospitable to his science of psychoanalysis. Generations of commentators, lamenting narcissism’s paradoxes and capaciousness, have tried to narrow its referents and settle, once and for all, its meaning. Narcissism’s protean nature, however, has proven as much a resource as a liability, and the concept has become too ubiquitous, and culturally and clinically useful, to submit to assiduous boundary policing. From the beginning, analysts used narcissism to account for the best and worst in us, to explain our capacities for creativity and idealism as well as for rage and cruelty, our strivings for perfection and our delight in destructiveness. They have turned to narcissism to characterize intimate relations, to theorize the workings of political power, and to make clear how our fantasies and illusions shape our ways of being in the day-to-day world. Narcissism has offered analysts a framework for understanding our experiences of ourselves and of all the others in our lives,

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and it has offered a way to bring needs and wants not rooted in biology into the analytic conversation. Within psychoanalysis, in the 1970s, narcissism was the occasion for full-scale revisionism if not revolution in its name. Beyond psychoanalysis, from the 1970s on it has offered a conceptual space in which irresolvable tensions in the human condition have been identified and negotiated: between love of self and love of others, between independence and dependence, between renunciation and gratification, and between asceticism and abundance. Narcissism has always been simultaneously pathological and normal, and debates over selfishness, hedonism, and vanity have not arisen out of the idea of narcissism but, rather, are among the oldest questions we have asked ourselves. Indeed, however various its meanings and applications, narcissism allows us to enter into a discussion of who we are and what we value both collectively and as individuals.

Pa r t i

Narcissism in the Me Decade

One T H E C U LT U R E O F N A RC I S S I S M

Narcissism, so apparently apt a diagnosis of the modern nation’s collective ills, first coalesced as a clinical phenomenon not in the relative abundance of Me Decade America but in the straitened circumstances of World War I–era Vienna and Budapest and of interwar London. The psychoanalyst’s narcissism, rooted in deprivation and unmet need, was a complex amalgam of grandiosity and fragile self-esteem, of fantasized omnipotence coupled with feelings of inferiority, of emotional self-sufficiency yoked to raging hunger for acclaim, admiration, and what were called “narcissistic supplies.” The narcissist’s interpersonal economy was characterized as much by renunciation as by gratification, as much by privation as plenty. The exemplary narcissists of the consulting room were not the hedonists of the social critics’ collective imagining but, rather, closet ascetics, glorying in their independence of everyone and everything. Freud had written in his essay “On Narcissism” of the blissfully selfcontented, psychologically inaccessible female narcissist, enigmatic in her self-sufficiency; what was at issue in clinical construals of narcissism was more the female narcissist’s self-possession than her worldly possessions. Yet in the 1970s narcissism was transformed from a clinical concept signaling emotional impoverishment to a very different cultural indictment of an unseemly material plentitude.

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Cultural commentators, foremost among them Christopher Lasch in his Culture of Narcissism, effected this transformation skillfully enough to obscure the conceptual shift it represented, a shift premised in large part on a slippage between inner experience, the analysts’ métier, and the social world, with which critics were concerned. Conscripted into a debate about the nation’s fate in the 1970s, narcissism was cast as a pathology associated with worldly affluence and abundance, and remained so for thirty years, obscuring its roots in deprivation and slighting the asceticism of need and the emotional impoverishment analysts saw in it. Critics traced a trajectory around narcissism that saw the country moving from scarcity to abundance, from restraint to release, and from renunciation to gratification. Their reading of narcissism was premised on the unstated assumption that middle-class affluence was as pressing a problem as poverty in the postwar United States. Psychoanalysis, from the critics’ perspective, offered not an account of the individual’s inevitable discomfort in civilization but, rather, a program promising gratification and release— with the narcissist an avatar of both. Narcissism, as both term and concept, became by any measure ubiquitous in the 1970s. Long of interest within psychoanalysis, it moved for the first time to the center of creative and contentious analytic debate. The critics, meanwhile, eagerly incorporated the term into their already refined critiques of American affluence and abundance. And a public, possessed of what one British critic noted was a puzzling “appetite for self-excoriating self-examination,” made bestsellers of the very books that condemned them as empty selves and mindless consumers. Narcissism was plastic enough to encompass the spectrum of usages from the most narrowly professional through the middle-brow social-scientific to the most expansively popular. In the orthodox Freudian’s idiom, it could serve as a technical term to characterize the distribution of libido in the subject. To the social critic, it denoted a lamentable excess of individualism at the expense of the imagined collective. Finally, in the popular press the term served as shorthand for an unseemly attention to the self—as in, for instance, solipsistically “getting your head together,” as a 1976 article in Newsweek was titled, in any of the literally thousands of ways to

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deepen one’s consciousness that the magazine claimed were currently on offer. In 1979, in a fitting capstone to the decade, President Jimmy Carter, following a crash course in sociology—ranging from selections on “the problems of affluence” drawn from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, first published in 1835, to Lasch’s just published jeremiad—took to the airwaves lamenting that the worship of “self-indulgence and consumption” had displaced Americans’ once-strong commitment to hard work, close-knit communities, and faith in God. “Owning things and consuming things,” Carter said, was inadequate to “fill the emptiness of lives” devoid of meaning. America was in the throes of a full-bore spiritual and cultural crisis. Identity, as Carter put it, “is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” Part cultural critic, part preacher-in-chief, Carter in this speech—dubbed the “malaise” speech—channeled an old charge with a new twist, placing narcissism front and center on the national agenda.1

The Culture of Narcissism Although journalists, cultural critics, and sociologists writing in the decade before Lasch published his landmark book had argued that American culture was becoming increasingly narcissistic, it was The Culture of Narcissism that made the concept a staple of popular debate. The term narcissism is now common coin, but until around 1970 it appeared only rarely in popular venues, at its simplest as a freighted synonym for self-love or self-absorption. The journalist Tom Wolfe, for instance, famously skewered what he saw as a newly emergent penchant for unceasing “analysis of the self” in an essay prophesying that the 1970s would “come to be known as the Me Decade.” Wolfe’s targets were new consciousness movements animated by the “new alchemical dream” of transforming one’s personality—“remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it.” Wolfe sent up the incessant “dwelling upon Me” that Americans were finding so irresistible, labeling it narcissistic and linking it to postwar prosperity. His indictment was echoed in Peter Marin’s widely cited analysis, published in 1975, of

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the solipsistic retreat into the self promoted by a new breed of popular therapeutic masters—Werner Erhard of EST, L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology, Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, among others—promising a “transformation of humanity” and portending the rise of a “new narcissism.”2 Others joined Wolfe and Marin. Articles in Time magazine chronicled the “collective narcissism” of the pot-smoking, self-absorbed young, of newly minted Californians in search of themselves, and of a generation of aging women—“in the golden twilight of their 30s”— inexplicably still attractive to men, “smarter, funnier, sexier, and more self-sufficient than before.” A popularizing sociologist saw invitations to self-absorption springing up all over, in courses such as “Understanding the Struggle to be ‘ME,’ ” in workshops on achieving self-realization, and in industries peddling various “awareness schemes.” Philip Slater, in his best-selling The Pursuit of Loneliness, a paean to the pleasures of gratification, celebrated the turn to the self and the satisfaction of its needs that others condemned, his argument documenting the cultural schism afoot. Lasch gathered all of this under the rubric of narcissism, arguing that the concept “holds the key to the consciousness movement” and, more expansively, “to the moral climate of contemporary society.” Along with his Culture of Narcissism, a host of books with titles such as Generation of Narcissus, The Narcissistic Condition: A Fact of Our Lives and Times, ME: The Narcissistic American, and The Self Seekers collectively made the case that narcissism was becoming endemic in the population— while at the same time their popularity testified to the allure of the obsessive self-scrutiny they patently condemned.3 In popular usage, narcissism often referred simply to selfishness. Wolfe and Marin used it in this way, describing a late 1960s and early 1970s therapeutic landscape awash in charlatans and poseurs appealing to people’s appetite for self-transformation. But the narcissism of popular parlance also referred to dimensions beyond the straightforwardly selfish and self-absorbed, over the course of the two decades becoming ever more closely intertwined with a critique of American consumerism. Prior to the 1970s, there had been scattered references to narcissism as signaling an indulgent, sensuous,

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and feminized consumption. Thus, for example, in 1948 a New York Times writer invoked narcissism to characterize the unseemly selfregard of American women, whipped into a frenzy of consuming greed by advertisers appealing to their vanity. And twenty years later another Times reporter bemoaned the “sensual self-absorption” advertisers promoted, which he found expressive of an ever-increasing “national narcissism.”4 Lasch wove together a critique of this sort of feminized, consumerist gratification and the idea of narcissism as selfishness. His exemplary narcissists want everything that the culture, with its sanctioning of “impulse gratification,” has on offer. Plagued by bottomless cravings and tormented by “perpetually unsatisfied desire,” they demand the immediate gratification of their wishes. Anxious consumers of capitalism’s goods, they live restlessly in the thrall of pseudoneeds stimulated by “the propaganda of commodities.” Their inner lives are impoverished and empty. The analyst’s understanding of the narcissist’s many refusals in the name of self-sufficiency is nowhere to be found. Lasch’s narcissists are bundles of outsized worldly wants—anxious, depressed, and discontented.5 The depth, power, and distinctiveness of Lasch’s vision were the result of his serious engagement with psychoanalysis. Exploiting the cultural cachet the discipline still enjoyed in the 1970s, he cloaked his own preoccupations in its idiom to deliver an account more convincing than those of Wolfe, Marin, and others. A layman, he nonetheless assumed the analyst’s mantle to sketch a clinical portrait of the new narcissist, highlighting the mix of grandiosity, rage, vacillating self-esteem, devaluing of others, seductiveness, and manipulativeness that analysts took note of, and asserted his own clinical bona fides in footnotes referencing the latest analytic journal literature. Lasch reproved his fellow critics for deploying narcissism prescriptively instead of clinically, for dressing up “moralistic platitudes in psychiatric garb,” and for interpreting narcissism in existential terms as “the metaphor of the human condition.” He intimated that he alone would attend to “clinical fact,” invoking in passing such arcane analytic terms as “normal primitive narcissism,” “parental introjects,” and “grandiose object images.”6 That his account drew

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promiscuously from papers not only on narcissism but also on borderline personality and schizophrenia in support of his cultural analyses and that it glossed over important debates among the authorities on whom he relied did nothing to diminish its rhetorical persuasiveness. To the contrary: he was giving his audience what it wanted. Today, when psychoanalysis can be casually dismissed as an outdated or even fraudulent practice, it is perhaps hard to appreciate how central it was to mid-twentieth-century intellectual and cultural life. Analysis was the lingua franca of the educated middle class. Ego and id, instinct and drive, libido and repression, neurosis and the Oedipus complex appeared regularly in magazine and newspaper discussions of personal pathology and social relations. To be educated in the 1950s and 1960s was to bandy about Freudian terms and ideas, and to be understood in doing so. In 1955, Newsweek featured a Los Angelean saying that “everyone talks about his analysis or analyst” and that “conversation is pervaded by psychoanalytic jargon.” Lionel Trilling noted the same year that “there is scarcely a play on Broadway that does not make use of some version of some Freudian idea, which the audience can be counted on to comprehend.”7 The appeal of The Culture of Narcissism thus was based in part on readers’ aspirations to fluency in this most beguiling of idioms. The book was an immediate sensation, and talk of narcissism was suddenly everywhere. It cast a spell over the chattering classes and would soon stand alongside classics, like David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd, that were widely thought “to have captured the spirit of the age.” Readers today continue to be convinced of Lasch’s brilliance and prescience, pointing to the current signs of cultural disaster he prophesied more than thirty years ago and lauding him for his profound, penetrating, and “definitive indictment of American society.”8 Few books have enjoyed this sort of staying power, yet even when it appeared it seemed to certain readers outdated. The commentator who noted of Lasch, immediately following the book’s publication, that “he has preached back to us precisely what we already believed” and the one who maintained twenty years later that Lasch “says nothing that others haven’t said a million times” were ungenerous but surely on to something. “This is hardly original stuff,” sniffed

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Newsweek in 1979. Lasch imagined himself close kin to Richard Hofstadter, explaining that the latter’s work, in summing up “a way of looking at history that was already familiar,” enjoyed “some kind of mythic resonance.”9 Lasch was a more adept mythographer than his mentor Hofstadter, though, a gloomy, curmudgeonly Jeremiah delivering what one critic called “a civilized hellfire sermon” that defined a decade. As such, Lasch drew commentary more cutting than substantive about the newsworthiness of his argument. Critics complained, for instance, of his “penchant for sweeping generalizations,” of his relentlessly aggrieved tone, and of the many absurdities in the book. Psychoanalysts, meanwhile, faulted his “warmed-over Marxism and warmed-up Freudianism,” his nostalgic and sentimental view of the past, and his treatment of narcissism as an “explanatory portmanteau,” the source of every conceivable ill. More than a few observers pointed to the irony of Lasch conscripting for his own rhetorical purposes the psychoanalytic perspective he so roundly condemned in the book as evidence of the nation’s decline. The dour critic of celebrity culture, Lasch was, just as ironically, celebrated in the pages of People.10 None of this detracted from the book’s impact. It had, after all, struck familiar chords in the annals of American social criticism: the decline of the work ethic and the rise of the psychology of adjustment, the decline of patriarchy and the rise of matriarchy, parental permissiveness and the abdication of authority, and rampant consumerism replacing sturdy production. The Culture of Narcissism owes its enduring appeal in part to Lasch’s adroit summoning up of wellestablished and resonant critiques of American society. This is not to say the book offered nothing new. Contrary to the critics who saw nothing new in Lasch, his seamless combination of psychoanalysis and social criticism resulted in a highly distinctive argument that could not have appeared in any previous era of American history. His target was the exuberant self and his ideal was what he called “the imperial self of yesteryear,” the autonomous, independent Freudian self without needs. Lasch confidently linked the individual and the social in his contention that each epoch’s signal pathologies expressed “in exaggerated form its underlying character

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structure.” Immediately forgetting his qualifying “exaggerated,” he went on to argue that the modal American personality was basically narcissistic, a figure whose worldly success and manifest charm shielded an emotionally shallow and intensely needy inner core. Lasch’s narcissists are grandiose and manipulative. Their inner lives are utterly empty. They deploy their considerable charm in parasitical relation to others, whom they can experience only as sources of “approval and admiration.” Consumed with rage and envy, they entertain fantasies of “wealth, beauty, and omnipotence.” These narcissists are, Lasch argued, perfectly suited for success in the late-capitalist United States, whether in the corporate world, in politics, or in government bureaucracies, all of which reward their seductive superficiality and feed their deficient self-esteem.11

The Affluent Society The Culture of Narcissism joined a discussion of affluence, needs and wants, persons and possessions, and production and consumption at a particularly vexed point in the history of intellectuals’ engagement with modern consumer culture. This robust tradition was inaugurated by Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (published in 1899) and reached its twentieth-century apogee in two critiques, one from the right and one from the left: Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) and Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (1977), respectively. Lasch’s book was published at a time when the proposition that abundance results in the impoverishment of the self achieved near-axiomatic standing in popular commentary and professional social science. David Potter, in his 1954 People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character, held that from the start America was uniquely endowed with abundance. What it bequeathed to the world in its revolutionary moment was not democracy but the promise that man could “free himself of poverty” and “actually enjoy his existence.” To the rest of the world, Potter wrote, “America has symbolized plenty.” John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, published in 1958 and appearing soon thereafter as a mass-market paperback, documented the persis-

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tence of poverty and inequality in the midst of newfound plenty.12 It was, however, the book’s title more than its subtle analysis of needs and wants that proved memorable, sketching an image of American prosperity in a world still characterized by grim scarcity. Similarly, the skepticism toward abundance running through Potter’s work was overshadowed by his book’s celebration of the distinctively American democratic ethos with which it was intertwined. That Americans were an affluent people was the rarely disputed foundation of social criticism from the 1950s through the 1970s. In this literature, the bounties of the present were sharply divided from the scarcities of the past. Critics explained that an older social order premised on rationality, science, technological beneficence, and civilized restraint of impulse and need was now under assault. Scarcity of resources was this social order’s inescapable fact, self-denying striving for achievement its ethos, delay of gratifications its ruling imperative—in all, the Protestant ethic of thrift, independence, and competitive struggle that had long underwritten the American dream. David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte Jr. in The Organization Man argued in the 1950s that this ethic was already more historical artifact than sociological truth. Whyte, reported Time magazine, saw a new generation of whom more than half were without real ambition, “in love with the easeful life.”13 Postwar abundance, the consolidation of corporate and political power in large, centralized bureaucracies, and the simultaneous coalescence of a new social ethic that exalted the group over the individual were evidence of its unraveling. Comfortably ensconced in the corporate hierarchy, cheerfully submerging his individualism in the group, Riesman’s empty yet sociable other-directed figure and Whyte’s newly delineated “organization man” aspired to little more than a regular promotion, a house in the suburbs, a car in the garage, and a wife and children dependent upon him for material support. With heightened urgency in the 1960s and 1970s, popular commentators, sociologists, and journalists described a monumental conflict between the old social order and the new, amorphous, and still emerging “counterculture,” a term coined by Theodore Roszak in his best-selling 1969 book, The Making of a Counter Culture. Celebrants

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of this new order made for a motley crowd, ranging from beatniks and hippies to student radicals to black militants and New Age self-seekers. Like Riesman’s and Whyte’s exemplary figures, their immediate forebears, they championed release instead of the Protestant ethic’s restraint and immediate gratification instead of self-denial. Their enthusiastic embrace of hedonism and gratification was variously cast in accounts of the new culture as an addictive force, an inherent human passion, and a natural inclination offering impossible-to-resist instant gratification of every type and variety of passion.14 Gratification marked the divide between the old and new, with the old enjoining its postponement and the new its immediate fulfillment. Philip Slater saw the old order clamping down on gratification in every sense—sexual, emotional, material. He argued that in an age of abundance gratification was only artificially beyond reach, thwarted by an outdated ideology of scarcity. Lasch’s argument was the mirror image to Slater’s, a diatribe against the fraudulent promises of immediate gratification and an extended lament for lost virtues of selfrestraint. Lasch argued that the “whole cultural revolution” was a failure. He reduced it to hedonism and caustically remarked that the revolution was “a terrific thing for American capitalism,” which needed hedonists—consumers of culture, sex, and enjoyment—to sustain its new markets. And he moved easily from this “mass culture of hedonism” to the development of pathological narcissism.15 Where Slater attacked a lost individualism as but a fantasy covering a basic human interdependence, Lasch mourned its passing as cultural ideal. Their differences notwithstanding, on the sharp distinction between old and new they agreed. Arguing that the nation’s decline was linked to narcissism’s rise, Lasch cast narcissism’s threat to the body politic as external, a series of affronts to enduring American values of asceticism, restraint, and “serene self-possession.” Riesman, Whyte, and later Bell, in contrast, suggested that it was as much the erosion of the old order from within as it was assaults from without that could explain the displacement of repression by gratification. In 1960, Riesman was already seeing hedonism on the rise among precisely those who in an earlier age, enacting the prudential asceticism of the Protestant ethic,

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had marshaled their resources in pursuit of distant goals. It was not the hippie of the 1960s but the glad-handing, interpersonally adept conformist of the 1950s who was the original hedonist, the businessman trading the bank account for the expense account that must be regularly depleted—in lunches, golf, and conferences—as performative testimony to his hard work. And, as Whyte pointed out in The Organization Man, advertisers had long realized that capitalism’s vitality depended on promoting luxury over ideals of restraint. Businessmen who might invoke Benjamin Franklin on thriftiness knew they had to uncouple hedonism from the taint of immorality and reframe it as virtuous decades before the first hippie proclaimed the joys of ecstatic release. Whyte cited Ernest Dichter, the Freudian-influenced founder of motivational research, advising his business clients that prosperity depended on “permitting the average American to feel moral even when he is flirting, even when he spending.” Envisioning the gratifications women might derive in housewifery performed with an array of consumer products sold as “symbols of personal growth and creative self-expression,” Dichter offered puritanical Americans license to engage in the “animalistic, undesirable, dirty emotional business” of consumption. The goal of life was more enjoyment, he wrote in his brief for a new hedonism, The Strategy of Desire, published in 1960.16 The academic-turned-cultural-commentator Jules Henry came at the same issue from the opposite direction in his popular 1963 book, Culture against Man. Henry lamented that the “first commandment of the new era” was to stimulate consumer appetite and “CREATE MORE DESIRE,” as an advertisement in the New York Times put it, marking “the first phase of the psychic revolution of contemporary life.” Invoking the advertisers’ deliberate undermining of consumers’ “resistance to inner cravings” and consequent “unhinging the old impulse controls,” as well as their stimulating of their audience’s “ ‘urge’ to enjoyment,” Henry highlighted the slippage between the sexual and the pecuniary that advertisers exploited. Their deployment of female ecstasy to sell everything from men’s shavers to sanitary napkins— their “imaginative monetization of woman”—was to him a measure of how fraught and empty of meaning were contemporary relations

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between the sexes. Surveying the erosion of renunciation as both cultural ideal and practice, Henry, like Bell, lamented what Dichter promoted, the almost total “seduction of the consumer” by the adman pedaling a hedonistic morality of pleasure, play, and easy credit. Critics delighted in describing what were to their minds egregiously sexualized advertisements culled from newspapers and mass-market magazines to underscore just how far from Puritanism the country had strayed.17 To Riesman, Whyte, and Bell, capitalism itself, not a new, postwar hedonism, was the root cause of the displacement of renunciation by gratification. As framed by Bell, capitalism’s distinctive, originary dynamic was its “boundlessness,” its “restless Faustian drive” that aspired to nothing less than “the complete transformation of nature.” Bell’s capitalism had at one point had a moral component as well. It had historically counseled “self-control and delayed gratification” while at the same time enabling the individual’s self-realization in releasing him from the ties of family and birth “so that he could ‘make’ of himself what he willed.” The restraining balance between capitalism’s two impulses had in times past limited individuals’ consumption while enabling the accumulation of capital. But the balance was fated to be undermined, Bell noted, because “any tension creates its own dialectic.” In the twentieth century, the radical individualism at the heart of capitalist economic relations and the destruction of all inherited social forms in the name of a profitseeking freedom for capital and its masters transformed the realm of culture. The ascetic dimension of the bourgeois social compact faded in the face of a culturally celebrated, rampant individualism that enshrined self-realization and self-fulfillment as its guiding precepts.18 Bell was disdainful of the instant gratification championed everywhere in the 1970s. He was as caustic as Lasch on the counterculture, in his view an ephemeral if noisy movement that “produced little culture and countered nothing.” Yet he was consistent enough in his argument to allow that “bourgeois culture vanished long ago,” blaming its demise not on the counterculture or on psychoanalysis but on the free market that, in the eighteenth century, had first allowed its

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flowering. Bell more systematically and relentlessly than his fellow critics excavated the ideological, material, economic, and emotional dimensions of the defining paradox of his age—that, in his words, “the breakup of the traditional bourgeois value system, in fact, was brought about by the bourgeois economic system.” Or, alternately, that capitalism was propelled as much by the hedonistic acquisitiveness his contemporaries disdained as it was by the asceticism of which they approved. His history traced a familiar arc from scarcity to abundance, restraint to release, renunciation to gratification. And he, like others, mourned the demise of asceticism. But Bell realized that a purely ascetic capitalism could not have sustained itself and that the incitement to boundless accumulation was not a postwar phenomenon but had been associated with capitalism at least since the middle of the nineteenth century.19

Needs and Wants Although Freud, like the pioneering Austrian marginal economists of his day, spoke the language of needs and their satisfaction, and although psychoanalysis entertained a so-called economic hypothesis organized around the distribution of energy, its excitation and discharge, analysts were largely focused on the internal emotional economy, not the economist’s world of goods and the ways individuals chose among them to maximize their incremental satisfaction. Analysts were concerned with what were often called basic human needs: for food and sex; for security, nurturance, relationship, and love; and for autonomy, individuality, and transcendence. The needs of interest to the analyst were conceived of as satisfiable by the self or in relation to other persons, not in relation to things—with the gratified infant at the breast seen as the prototype of all need.20 The social critic’s needs, in contrast, were material, satisfiable only in the marketplace. Critics who mined psychoanalysis largely missed the asceticism underlying what they interpreted as Freud’s liberationist vision of the modern self. There are two notable exceptions. Riesman has given us an ascetic Freud whose economics of emotions is governed by the laws of a scarcity outdated even in his own time, a

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Freud who imposed “on a later generation a mortgage of reactionary and constricting ideas.” And Philip Rieff likewise could discern a genuine affinity between Freud’s psychology and that of the ancient Stoics.21 But theirs were singular, glancing dissents from an argument developing within American social criticism that focused primarily on the ways in which psychoanalysis loosened the restraints imposed on individuals by the Victorian social and sexual order. Even Rieff, his allegiance to the straitened Freud so manifestly clear, could not help but align Freud with the release he himself disdained. In his 1959 Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and then in his enormously influential 1966 polemic, TheTriumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff spelled out his vision of culture as a moral demand system organized to balance controls and release. The old culture imposed demands, while the emergent culture preached liberation, offering “an endless ambiance of fun and boredom.” The new culture had no theory, offering only opportunities. What concerned him in the ascendant therapeutic culture was the promise of plentitude without a corresponding constraint. In life and art, infinite abundance was everywhere supplanting scarcity, and demands for quantity were drowning out “more substantial doctrines of quality.” Nothing was prohibited anymore, and even the churches were embarrassed by the naive asceticism they had once preached. So impoverished was the reforming imagination that it could only parrot the vacuous “more is better” ethos of the postascetic moment, demanding “more goods, more housing, more leisure; in short, more life.” Rieff lamented the rise of a dominion of desire, characterized by “the mass production of endless ‘needs’ ” and the “gorgeous variety of satisfactions” on offer.22 The specter of insatiability—of wants without limit—haunted Rieff, Lasch, and like-minded critics, a number of whom worked with a model of economic behavior that sharply and confidently distinguished between needs and wants. Needs were straightforward, rooted in and supportive of individuals’ physicality—adequate food, shelter, clothing. John Kenneth Galbraith, harshly criticizing classical economics for its indifference to the distinction between needs and wants, set satiable needs against insatiable desires, the former rooted

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in the body and the latter in psychology. “When man has satisfied his physical needs, then psychologically grounded desires take over,” he wrote, adding that “these can never be satisfied.”23 Bell invoked Aristotle in support of his characterization of the ancient Greek household—the word economics, he explained, derived from oikos, the household—as a self-regulating and self-sufficient entity geared to meeting the biologically derived, “limited and satiable” needs of its inhabitants. Production was directed not at the market but at these inhabitants. Simple sharing ruled in this exemplary household, a veritable socialist paradise in which “each is given in accordance with his needs.” Bourgeois society, by contrast, entertained wants, which Bell explained, similarly to Galbraith, were psychological, not biological, by their nature unlimited and insatiable. Critics looked with nostalgia to the sumptuary laws, dating to medieval Europe, that had regulated the consuming habits of the poor and the rising bourgeoisie, restricting “vain and idle” expenditures on food, clothing, and luxury items to favored classes of aristocrats. The commercial revolution of the eighteenth century had rendered these laws obsolete, unleashing—as Bell saw it—the menace of insatiability that was part and parcel of the utilitarian, hedonistic calculus characteristic of bourgeois societies.24 Both Galbraith and Bell cast needs as absolute, knowable, and integral to the self while characterizing wants as exogamous, not natural but in the nature of a contrivance imposed on individuals from without. Wants were open to manipulation, to the psychological persuasion of advertisers eager to expand the market for the goods they hawked. Galbraith saw the postwar individual, awash in goods in the unprecedentedly affluent postwar United States, as putty in the adman’s hands, a stranger to his own desires. Lasch concurred, seeing the expansion of consumer desire abetted by “a vast effort of reeducation,” dating to the 1920s, that instilled in once-satisfied individuals a taste for the frivolous. Both envisioned a subject unconflicted by unmet need and free of superfluous wants, grinding poverty having become less an issue in the midst of postwar plenty. Wants—false, beguiling, sensuous, insatiable—assumed a feminine cast in this literature, aligned with elegance, eroticism, extravagance, and ostentatious

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aristocratic display against the sobriety of Galbraith’s “useful citizen” and “average guy.”25 We can see in these midcentury critiques of consumer culture a profound distrust of desire and fantasy, as well as of the capacity of the average guy to resist the blandishments of both. But, we may ask, were needs ever so readily separated from wants, limits so faithfully honored, and reason so reliably hegemonic in the realm of economic behavior as the critics imagined? Galbraith’s complaint was precisely that conventional economic wisdom, fixed as it was on production and output, failed to partition consumer demand between needs and wants, treating the sum of such demand—whether sated on necessary or frivolous goods—agnostically. Indeed, he argued that among economists this refusal to assess the legitimacy of one desire as opposed to another was considered a mark of scientific virtue. But with the increasing ubiquity of frivolous consumption, which he defined as that consumption propelled by individuals’ quest for psychic satisfactions, he argued, it was all the more imperative that economic theory be able to distinguish between what was necessary and what was not. Galbraith pointed to John Maynard Keynes, who in an essay from 1930 had bucked disciplinary norms in dividing needs between the absolute and the relative, the former capable of being met within a century and the latter possibly insatiable, in that “their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.” Keynes’s position was echoed by the London-based analyst Ian Suttie, who, writing in 1935, characterized all needs as relative and potentially insatiable. Suttie faulted Freud for failing to recognize social need, “over and above the sum of material, sensorial cravings and satisfaction,” in considerations of possessiveness, the wanting and having of property. It was not enough “to have what one needs,” Suttie explained, only “to have more than one needs whereas others have less than they need.”26 That is, needs were not readily quantified and absolute but nonrational and plastic, shaped by—here the analyst weighs in—the inevitable anxieties and scarcities of childhood and negotiated in the social competition of adulthood.

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Objects and Things The straightforward relationship between people and possessions that is at the center of Lasch’s “culture of narcissism” argument has never been so simple in psychoanalysis. From its founding, psychoanalysis was more focused on pathologies of restraint and renunciation than on those of indulgence and gratification. Many of us are familiar with the notion that in Freud’s time neuroses were rooted in the culture of inhibited sexual expression that was the analyst’s Vienna and Berlin. Lives crabbed by restraint were the early analyst’s stock in trade, and among the aims of psychoanalytic treatment was the loosening of the inner bonds that inhibition imposed, in particular on hysterical women. Freud and his colleagues paid relatively little attention to what are now considered pathologies of excess and greed, and they wrote little that was directly concerned with monetary wealth and poverty.27 Yet psychoanalysts did produce a voluminous literature on the deformations that followed from the child’s failed negotiation of the early, developmentally mandated oral and anal stages in which, they proposed, individuals established patterns of relationships with possessions that would characterize them as adults. The oral stage was defined around incorporation (of the breast and its supplies), the anal stage around withholding and expelling (of feces, which Freud—to critics, notoriously—equated with money). Deformations of development at either stage were evident in the character disordered adult’s exaggerated avarice, acquisitiveness, and aggression, with the sense of deprivation and a craving for possession oftentimes especially strong in such persons. So-called oral characters might display excessive covetousness as well as persistent, unfulfilled longings, and anal characters could be miserly, parsimonious, and retentive, finding it hard to separate themselves from what they owned. Analysts were less interested in the “objects of all kinds” through which individuals expressed their inner oral and anal conflicts than they were in the symbolic value those objects carried. They were less interested in money as a medium of exchange than in the ways it

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served as a vehicle for hostile, sadistic, greedy, parsimonious, and erotic impulses.28 Early psychoanalysts effectively relegated the deformations of wealth and possession to the realm of developmental failure. They offered little on the ways individuals interacted day in and day out, nonpathologically, with the things they desired, procured, owned, used, and gave away and with the money that made ownership possible. Several of Freud’s Viennese colleagues attempted to shift the discussion of money from pathology to normality, from developmental stages to narcissistic needs, and from the realm of the symbolic to what Otto Fenichel called “social facts.” Fenichel maintained that of all the needs money could be deployed to satisfy, the narcissistic needs for power and self-esteem were the most conspicuous. Writing in 1938, he observed that his analytic peers were only beginning to explore the nature of people’s strivings to recapture their lost infantile omnipotence, seeing them engaged in a continuous, lifelong project of self-esteem regulation, a project to which the possession of money was central. Of course people wanted money, Fenichel wrote, for “the more money one possesses, the better one can satisfy one’s needs”—needs not only biological but also those having to do with attaining power, recognition, and high self-regard.29 Notably, Fenichel did not draw a sharp distinction between biological and narcissistic needs, casting the latter as essential to life as was mother’s milk—the prototype of what analysts were starting to call “narcissistic supplies.” The “narcissistic requirement” to maintain one’s positive self-feeling “plays a part in everything,” as he saw it, and shaped individuals as powerfully as did the better recognized drives of sexuality and aggression. In a social system in which wealth brought honor and respect, it was only natural that people would strive to amass it. Fenichel took aim at those analysts who could see only money’s symbolic meanings, not its “real significance” in enabling commerce and individuals’ comfort. One of his colleagues wrote along similar lines that anyone surveying the analytic conversation “would not conceive the idea that one eats because one is hungry and wants food for sustaining one’s life. But one would rather suppose that eating is a sly way of satisfying oral libido.” Psychoanalysts on the whole,

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Fenichel argued, had little to say about money, work, and the basics of existence: “eating, housing, clothing.”30 Fenichel’s call for a normalized analytic perspective on people and their possessions went largely unheeded within the discipline. He saw needs he called narcissistic as expected and unexceptionable in everyone, but the few analysts who wrote about individuals’ needs for things tended to conceptualize those needs in terms of psychic weakness and pathology. They reflexively saw acts of consumption as expressive of inner emotional states, most often as displaced expressions of hard-to-tolerate feelings that in their estimation brought only temporary relief. Analysts told of adults whose bids for feeling alive took the form of cravings for things that they mistakenly believed would bring them security and fulfillment, arguing that such persons were misrecognizing their desires and dooming themselves to loneliness and hopelessness. Exemplary of this line of argument is one analyst’s contrasting of medieval societies, in which “the production of goods met real needs,” with our own, in which attachments to possessions have become “more important than recognizing and fulfilling inner emotional and authentic needs and deeper longings.”31 The analytic literature documents a range of sometimes astonishingly freighted spending behaviors—stingy, punitive, guilty, compulsive, destructive, childish—and offers a gallery of types in whom the relationship to money is disturbed. Yet it was the upbeat advice to spend sensibly, flexibly, and even sometimes frivolously, to enjoy money while not exaggerating its significance, offered by the aptly named American analyst Smiley Blanton, that elicited visions of psychoanalysis at its nadir, an unwitting captive of “the consumer society” and its ideology. “To convert money into usefulness or pleasure, it is almost always necessary to spend it,” Blanton matter-of-factly wrote, with his observation that Americans were “good at making money, and there’s nothing wrong with that” drawing a fellow analyst’s opprobrium.32 The analytic tradition almost by default cast individuals’ desires for things as but paltry compensation for unmet, less objectionable, and more authentic emotional needs. This left analysts little conceptual space in which to consider ordinary, run-of-the-mill, and

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nonpathological relations between people and things. And by pathologizing all acts of consumption, they drained their critique of the excesses of consumption of much of its potential force.

Me and Mine Like Bell in the 1970s, Fenichel in the 1930s arrived at a sophisticated understanding of capitalism, writing that the “capitalist, under penalty of his own destruction,” had to accumulate.33 Among other analytic commentators there was some gesturing toward the notion that greed could be, if not good, conceived of as necessary when directed at the productive growth that sustained the economy, but Fenichel was the prime mover behind this idea in the discipline. Fenichel proposed an alternative to the straitened, censorious view of the relationship between persons and things espoused by many analysts of his time and that would be taken up by social critics in the coming decades. “Possessions are an expanded portion of the ego,” he wrote, explaining that the “psychic feeling of self” could encompass not only the body but also clothing and other like property, all of which could enhance one’s ego-feeling and contribute to the narcissistic pleasure of an enlarged self-compass. Fenichel was here—likely unwittingly—echoing William James, as well as prefiguring the postwar American adman. “It is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw,” wrote James in his monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. The boundaries of the self fluctuated, James suggested, with “the same object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again as if I had nothing to do with it at all.” A man’s self was the sum not only of his body and psychic powers but also of “his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his land and horses, his yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions.” Blind, instinctive impulse fueled the drive to possess, as James saw it, with a sense of nothingness, “a shrinkage of our personality,” following from the loss of things that had become part of ourselves. James had little truck with the stoicism that would

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be championed by Rieff as a solution to the problem of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate needs, seeing it as a recipe for a preemptively diminished, “narrow and unsympathetic,” even hateful self. To James, the expansive individuals who could be characterized by their positive outlook, magnanimity toward others, and enthusiastic embrace of life’s offerings were far more attractive and proved far more resourceful in the face of life’s many demands than the crabbed and disdainful stoic.34 Neither critics nor psychoanalysts showed much interest theorizing a fluid relationship between the self and its possessions. In the 1950s, the British analyst D. W. Winnicott explored the infant’s use of its first possession (for example, a blanket or teddy bear), arguing it did so in a transitional space between the me and the not-me. Winnicott observed that babies displayed “very rich patterns” in relating to such objects, over which they assumed the right of possession and through which they expressed creativity and developed capacities for symbolic thinking. The object was neither inside nor outside the infant, and pleasurable for being at once illusionary and real. Winnicott’s paper, subtitled “The First Not-Me Possession,” consistently ranks among the most popular of psychoanalytic journal articles and has been widely discussed and cited, and the object relations school of analysis of which he was a central figure was more focused than classical analysis on individuals’ materiality. However, psychoanalysts on the whole shied from what to the student of consumer behavior was abundantly clear—that “we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves” or, what to the critic might appear more crassly stated, “that we are what we have.” Research conducted by leading psychologists in the 1950s on the ways that people related to objects in their environment supported James’s contentions. Psychologists’ subjects readily and without difficulty ranked everything from parts of the body (skin, fingers, genitals) to abstract ideas (morals, democracy, the law) to other people (father, workmates, neighbors) to belongings (clothing, tools, cars) on hierarchical scales measuring “selfness” and located them on continuums ranging from “not-self to self.” Possessions were uniformly categorized within the borderline of the self, and in one study, subjects placed “my belongings”

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closer to the core of the self than “my friends.” In this and subsequent research, the line between what is me and what is mine is as porous as James asserted it was over a century ago.35 Research psychologists tell us, then, that not only do we assemble our identities in a Jamesian or Winnicottian in-between space, but we also confer identities on the objects with which we surround ourselves. Noting that psychology had largely overlooked “the real expressive powers objects have,” Dichter proclaimed in his 1960s treatise that “objects have a soul.” The materialism that critics decried was to Dichter simply a fact of life and the goods with which we surrounded ourselves were but the expression of an “only too human desire.” The problem to him was that we “steadfastly refuse to accept ourselves the way we actually are,” hypocritically condemning our desires as immoral while living day-to-day amid the very goods and possessions we profess to disdain. Both the findings of research psychologists and Dichter’s perspective—still roundly condemned by critics of advertising and its creation of frivolous wants—find updated expression in the writings of Bruno Latour, sociological provocateur par excellence, who turns the critics’ usual critique on its head, asserting that “things do not exist without being full of people.”36 Thus, the psychologist argues that “in claiming that something is ‘mine,’ we also come to believe that the object is ‘me.’ ” The adman’s focus groups demonstrate that the moment products appear in our lives, they—“furniture, houses, bread, cars, bicycles”—“are related to us, they are human.” And the contemporary theorist of things rejects the strict subject/object divide between the human and the inanimate, instead seeing the world “full of ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘quasisubjects.’ ” Persuasive or not, that these diverse outlooks converge on a century-old Jamesian perspective that sees our possessions, in varying “degrees of intimacy,” becoming “parts of our empirical selves,” suggests how impoverished the prevailing popular and analytic conversation centered on people and things has been.37 Lasch voiced analysts’ objects-as-compensatory line of argument, maintaining that consumption, sold as the antidote to the “age-old

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discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, [and] lack of sexual satisfaction,” offers the false hope it will “fill the aching void.” But like his critical brethren, Lasch found himself boxed in by the logic of his own argument. He could acknowledge that in the nineteenth century most people had been condemned to lives “of drudgery and mere subsistence,” but he could only censure the advent of mass production in the twentieth century, on the grounds that it extended “aristocratic habits to the masses” and undermined the work ethic. There was little room in the critics’ imaginatively impoverished world for consumption to express anything other than synthetic desire and execrable narcissistic need.38 Disdainful of needs and rejecting anything close to a Jamesian perspective that located subjectivity in objects, at their most outlandish such critics could only propose its reverse, that individuals in the grip of a consumer-driven narcissism understand themselves not as humans but as things. In their dystopian vision, relations among humans assume the tenor of market relations, with everyone defined by his or her utility value—what can you do for me?—and, as such, akin to commodities exchanged in the marketplace.

Narcissism in Freud denoted pathology and perversion. Yet at the same time it also referred to normality. In his developmental scheme, the sovereign infant was cast as the original narcissist, prompting one 1970s observer to remind readers that “we all began as narcissists.” And, in a short essay delineating normal personality types, Freud listed the narcissistic alongside the erotic and obsessive, describing the contours of a character fueled by ambition to make his mark on the world. Through the twentieth century, analysts fleshed out dimensions of narcissism Freud had mentioned but not explored, and they added new aspects of it to the mix. Freud had invoked grandiosity and omnipotence in his landmark 1914 essay, and analysts in the 1970s and beyond would theorize grandiosity and worldly efficacy under the rubric of narcissism, seeing both as critical to the healthy person’s functioning. But the critics took little note of this

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positively tinged narcissism; there was no gratifying and indulging of grandiose wishes in the Freud that Rieff valiantly tried to rescue for cultural criticism.39 The commonality of concern in analysts’ and critics’ parallel conversations about the modern self smoothed the way for easy acceptance of the latter’s seamless linking of social and individual pathology in the person of the narcissist. But the commonality obscured as much as it enabled, in particular that the emotional economy of the critic’s modal American and the analyst’s narcissist were not the same but, rather, mirror images of one another. Thus, Rieff’s hero was the vanished ascetic, the “enemy of his own needs, which is about as concise a characterization of the analyst’s narcissist as one might hope to find. Along similar lines, one might propose that there is no better carrier of the renunciatory symbolic that Rieff argued therapeutic culture had definitively stamped out than the narcissist, the figure who claims, like Rieff’s ascetic, to need nothing.40 The figure of the narcissist, in whom a largely hidden inner asceticism and a patent outer abandon are continually in tension, is as paradoxical as is Bell’s capitalism. The dialectic of renunciation and desire that analysts see in the inner world of the narcissist, with renunciation triumphant, the critic of consumer culture sees upside-down in the outer world of the marketplace, where desire has won out. The reproving critic readily construed narcissism as a tribute to the excesses of the time in its bringing together of gratification, hedonism, and selfishness. If critics got much about the analysts’ narcissist wrong, they also overstated the American tradition of self-restraint. Critics asserted that the ethos of self-realization was antithetical to the nation’s history of sturdy self-reliance, the sorry excrescence of a therapeutic ethos gone amok, but no less an authority than the historian of Puritanism Perry Miller located the quest for self-realization at the very heart of the American character. Miller saw the country engaged in a twohundred-plus-year history of remodeling its defining character, chiding those who would shoehorn the “personality of America in one eternal, unchangeable pattern.” It was the anxious and highly conscious questing itself that was descriptive of the national character, he argued in 1955: “Being an American is not something inherited

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but something to be achieved.” To be sure, Miller was writing at the moment when the modernist project of remaking the self in the interest of its actualization and fulfillment was shifting into high gear. The psychiatrist’s contemporaneous dictum that “the striving for self-realization is a fundamental human endeavor” may have been unwarrantedly universalizing. And the analyst’s precept that the problem was not “too much concern with self-actualization” but too little was perhaps too easily caricatured. But even Bell, who cast the freedom promised by modernity as the ransacking and engorging of the world’s storehouse of accumulated culture in the service of the self-realization, had to allow that the hedonic calculus to which critics objected originated within, not beyond, capitalism—in which, he explained, the self free of the inherited constraints of family and poised for growth and possibility was a central figure. Bell’s contemporary, the popularizing psychologist Abraham Maslow, held that “individuation, autonomy, self-development, productiveness, self-realization” were the achievements of the healthy personality.41 These were values to which no capitalist would have taken exception. By the end of the Me Decade, narcissism was a fact of social life and the focus of widespread concern. As was the case throughout the twentieth century, cultural crisis was afoot, this time captured under Lasch’s deft—if inherently problematic—rubric. Critics redefined old ills under its sign. “Narcissism: An Old Habit Comes Back,” read the headline of one newspaper article sounding the alarm. “I see a lot of the new narcissism,” said Riesman in 1978 of the college students he was studying, adding, “We used to call these children spoiled, but that no longer strictly applies.” Lacking “the internalized parental values of the inner-directed types,” these students were also “not as sensitive to peers as were the other-directed people.” Their selfimages inflated, they were “afraid to do badly because everything they write has to be absolutely great.” Riesman prescribed a mix of compassion and toughness to deal with these young people and their grandiose expectations of themselves.42 Social commentators like Rieff, Lasch, and Bell disdained need, dependence, and gratification as vehemently as the most orthodox

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of mid-twentieth-century American Freudians—and, as we have seen, as much as did the most ascetic of the analyst’s modern narcissists. Lasch’s imperial self of yesteryear was not mere fantasy but a clinical description of the analyst’s narcissist. Critics collapsed two opposed analytic traditions, organized respectively around privation and gratification, into one that celebrated release and abundance, miscasting Freud as an antagonist rather than the ally he might have been. Freud was no more a partisan of the expressive self that acknowledges the pleasures of gratification, dependence, and mutuality than were the critics who condemned him. On the contrary: one could plausibly argue that Freud and his severe vision underwrote the so-called autonomous self of Western culture, the self that celebrates renunciation, independence, and sovereign self-mastery.

Tw o H E I N Z KO H U T ’ S AMERICAN FREUD

The debut of the Americanized Freud of the Viennese-born, Chicago-based psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who burst onto the American analytic and cultural scene in the 1970s brandishing a positively tinged and appealingly normalized narcissism, captured the attention of social critics and sparked what many agreed was a revolution in the field. Kohut took on the straitened Freud he had been taught, proclaiming his death and fashioning himself midwife to the rebirth of analysis. He brilliantly situated his interventions at the crossroads where simmering dissatisfaction with foundational Freudian precepts, fortified at the hands of a clutch of prewar and wartime émigré European analysts, met long-standing cultural concerns about the shape of the modal American self. Kohut challenged the primacy Freud had assigned to the drives in understanding human behavior, brought provision and gratification back into discussions of analytic technique, and outlined a normal narcissism that was the wellspring of human ambition and creativity, values and ideals, empathy and fellow feeling. Social critics conscripted him into their condemnations of the American character, altogether oblivious to the fact that his narcissism was not theirs. Kohut’s was descriptive not only of pathology but also of normality: positively tinged, replete with possibility, and necessary to sustain life.

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In psychoanalysis, as in cultural criticism, the 1970s were the decade of the new narcissism. Over the decades since Freud had put narcissism on the analytic map, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists had noted a precipitous rise in the number of patients complaining of vaguely defined discontents—loneliness, emptiness, boredom—in place of the dramatic paralyses, anesthesias, and phobias exhibited by Freud’s hysterics. The number of papers and books on narcissism by psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologists rose just as quickly. By the 1970s, public interest in narcissism was running high. Kohut was regularly featured in newspaper and popular magazine articles. Dubbed the “modern day Freud” and “the Freud of today,” Kohut was putting “the world on the couch.” His followers hailed him as a charismatic genius, “the first truly American analyst,” while detractors derided him as a self-styled messiah, a guru at the center of a cult. Many of Kohut’s colleagues objected to his departures from the Freudian mainstream, even as they acknowledged the electrifying effect of his work. Some, surveying the analytic field, sensed revolution was in the air; others demurred, maintaining nothing had fundamentally changed since Freud’s time.1 Yet, even the most skeptical could see that the intellectual ferment around narcissism was reviving their discipline’s fortunes and ensuring its continuing cultural relevance. If, as many worried, psychoanalysis thirty years after Freud’s death was languishing, its creativity spent, then narcissism—for or against, it mattered little—was just what the doctor ordered.2

Narcissism Americanized In a series of analytic papers published in the 1960s and in two landmark books published in the 1970s, Heinz Kohut reframed narcissism as a desirable rather than pathological dimension of mature selfhood, establishing it in analytic and popular discussions as, in his words, “a very broad kind of concept” with a positive not pejorative valence “that deals with preoccupation with ourselves.” Alert to popular opportunities for psychoanalysis, especially for his version of it, Kohut joined the discussion of whether the American people

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were becoming more narcissistic. In a widely syndicated 1978 newspaper article, he adduced as evidence of narcissism’s rise one “Fred,” exemplary of a growing population of sufferers, a lonely man, plagued by feelings of abandonment and worthlessness, a man who felt his self was crumbling and falling apart. The “drugs, alcohol, and wild sexual flings” to which the Freds of the world typically resorted were no match for their despair, Kohut argued. “The emptiness of life troubles people,” he told People magazine the next year. Parental distraction or, worse, emotional rejection produced children fated to lifetimes of fruitless searching for the approval of which they would never get enough. To this point, Kohut and the critics were on the same page. But then he added, “Some say these people are narcissistic . . . but actually they are not narcissistic enough. They need food for their self-esteem all the time.”3 Not narcissistic enough? So singleminded were the critics that they barely registered that Kohut was not in fact their ally but, rather, an antagonist, as apt to champion narcissism as he was to worry about its prevalence. Kohut consistently sided with gratification over renunciation, emotional satisfaction over frustration. He decried the culturally mandated altruism that disparaged “concern for one’s self” and, through the 1960s and 1970s, amid the tumult convulsing Chicago, he sounded themes associated more with the young than with his own generation. He championed the potential of the self and the liberation of its energies in the service of the common good, and he celebrated the preoccupation with the self that social critics found intellectually bankrupt and morally suspect. He defended interiority against critics who lamented it as so much navel gazing, arguing that such “inwardlooking contemplation” could be the source of fulfilling gratification. And he applauded the rising generation’s search for intense inner experience, whether abetted by surrender to the intoxications of drugs and music or by immersion in the teachings of Eastern philosophy, maintaining that the countercultural young grasped better than their parents that the path to psychic health lay in responding “with a full range of emotions” to the challenges presented by a rapidly changing world.4 Kohut chose to celebrate the younger generation’s

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restless searching, showing little interest in the critic’s nostalgia for a lost American Eden. He traded in joy, gratification, liberation, and exhilaration, in aspirations rather than in Freud’s limitations. As an immigrant, Kohut was perhaps the unlikeliest of spokesmen for an Americanized narcissism. Steeped from an early age in the high culture of the Viennese bourgeoisie, he was nevertheless, like so many newcomers before him, an ardent student of American mores. He saw himself split, both irredeemably European and “a complete and true American,” but consistently narrated his life as a quintessentially American story of reinvention and limitless possibility. Born in 1913—the year that Freud drafted “On Narcissism”—to an assimilated Jewish family, he fled Vienna alone in March 1939, a mere five months before the outbreak of war, settling temporarily in a refugee camp in rural England before moving to London. Within a year, he landed on American shores, “a nobody” with barely twentyfive dollars to his name. He made his way to Chicago, where a childhood friend was living, and, a medical degree from the University of Vienna in hand, quickly secured an internship and then a prestigious residency in neurology there. Advancing to the rank of instructor, he switched his appointment to psychiatry and, in 1946, began to train as a psychoanalyst at the Chicago Institute. In analysis with Ruth Eissler, an exemplar of orthodox technique, and methodically plowing through Freud’s works, Kohut was very much in the analytic mainstream. He would brook no criticism of Freud, whom he idealized. By the 1950s, he was recognized as a brilliant and creative analyst, as well as an adept psychoanalytic politician, friend and correspondent to the stars in the analytic firmament, Anna Freud among them. He was, he explained, “beloved by everybody and on the right kind of handshaking terms. In every room I entered there were smiles.”5 Soon enough, everybody would be looking away. Kohut secured a position at the pinnacle of the analytic world through his fierce guardianship of orthodoxy, a latter-day psychoanalytic paladin who would—in the words of one he viciously attacked—wipe the floor with anyone daring to dishonor Freud’s genius. But he went on to launch a successful assault on the very foundations of Freudianism. Echoing themes of growth and possibility behind earlier attempts at

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analytic revisionism in America, he formulated an optimistic alternative to Freudianism’s bleak pessimism in language his detractors dismissed as sentimental and mawkish. Kohut understood what he called “the basic cultural value systems” that supported American psychoanalysis, with its ties to psychiatry and its distinctive if diluted “emphasis on interpersonal healing, helping, and reforming,” which he found utterly foreign to the weltanschauung of the refugee European analysts. Adapting psychoanalysis to American culture, he reinvented himself as a trailblazing analytic pioneer, inhabiting one of the most venerable of his adopted nation’s archetypical personas. Bold where others had proven timid and self-satisfied, he would chart “daring new paths into new territories.”6 In the space of three decades, then, Kohut—known by many as “Mr. Psychoanalysis”—moved from high priest to excommunicated heretic to founder of the new church of “self psychology”; from president of the resolutely orthodox American Psychoanalytic Association in the 1960s to banished deviant to widely celebrated spokesman for what many deemed the field’s new scientific paradigm in the 1970s. The precise moment when Kohut’s apostasy became evident is a matter of some dispute. Some see it as early as his 1959 paper on introspection and empathy as modes of observation in psychoanalysis, which, in proposing that the Freudian’s “drive” was not an observable entity but an abstraction derived from introspection, occasioned more than a few angry responses from analytic colleagues. Others see him struggling, with varying degrees of success, to negotiate between Freud and his own evolving new perspective through the period that eventuated in The Analysis of the Self, published in 1971. Most agree that with the 1977 appearance of The Restoration of the Self, the rupture with Freud’s drive-based metapsychology was complete and irreparable. In making his journey, Kohut broke not only with the American keepers of the Freudian faith, among them his training analyst and important mentors, but also with what he argued was the Freud living on in the analyst’s breast as a constraining and curbing force. The death of this archaic and idealized Freud—and, more important, the deaths of those analysts who were charismatically tied to him by virtue of having known him

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personally—was to Kohut an opportunity, an open door portending “a surge of independent initiative.” Admitting that his need of the Freud within had lessened over the years, Kohut gradually consigned his Freud to the status of admired historical figure, respected but no longer idealized. Where Freud was in Kohut’s estimation clearly a man of the nineteenth century, Kohut fashioned himself a child of the twentieth, looking to the future rather than fixated on the past, however comfortable and familiar it might have been.7 Kohut never actually met Freud, yet he yoked his destiny to Freud’s in a story that he was known for telling old friends and new acquaintances alike. The year was 1938 and Vienna was crumbling; the anschluss had just occurred, and the city was no longer safe for Jews. Freud, persuaded by Ernest Jones’s entreaties and more so by the Gestapo’s seizure and daylong interrogation of his daughter Anna, was in the process of leaving the city with his family for London. Kohut, a twenty-five-year-old medical student, told in confidence by his analyst August Aichorn the day and time Freud’s train would be leaving, arranged to be at the station with a friend to see Freud off. “It was a beautiful, sunshiny day,” Kohut would later tell it. A woman whom they assumed was the family maid was crying on the platform, but otherwise there were few people to be seen. Walking alongside the train, Kohut and his companion spotted Freud sitting calmly in his compartment. As the train pulled away, they caught Freud’s eye and tipped their hats to him. He returned the gesture, and a psychoanalytic genealogy was forged.8 Or retrospectively constructed: By 1975, Kohut was referring to this story as a “personal myth,” characterizing it variously as a symbolic event, a pivotal moment, and “the wellspring of the most important commitments of my future”—a heavy burden for a mere tip of the hat. Having earlier narrated the encounter in fine detail as a contribution to the Freud Archives, Kohut was now hedging, maintaining he could not tell the story, “because there is no story to be told.” Memory or myth, Kohut’s story of the encounter, which implied the psychoanalytic torch had been passed, achieved iconic status. It was commented upon by his colleagues, repeated in appraisals of his

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work, and showcased in the obituary that ran in the New York Times upon his death in 1981.9 More significant than Freud’s departure from Kohut on that day in 1938, however, was Kohut’s monumental departure several decades later from Freud and Freudian psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Freed of his inner need for Freud as a father figure on whom he could lean for “self-confirmation or support,” Kohut spelled out what was at stake in his abandonment of classicism. In papers published and in interviews granted before his death, he spiritedly took on, among other targets, orthodoxy’s closed system thinking, its covert moralism, and its developmental telos. Kohut proclaimed that the orthodox’s vaunted independence was chimerical and that becoming an independent self was a wrong-headed, impossible aim. He dismissively referred to the unconscious, a centerpiece of Freudianism, as a “fancy idea.” He questioned the centrality of the Oedipus complex, that other analytic mainstay, reminding his colleagues that Oedipus was in the first instance a “rejected child” who “was abandoned in the wilderness to die.”And he combatively suggested that psychoanalysis— still “in its childhood”—needed to grow up, to internalize Freud in the way a growing child would internalize a parent, and to “turn from the study of Freud to the study of man.”10 Kohut, explaining that Freud was not “exuberant enough” for his tastes, crafted a psychoanalysis that was organized around the development of a cohesive self capable of articulating its ideals, pursuing its ambitions, and relating to others around it. A good part of his achievement consisted in recasting narcissism as a desirable, even necessary, dimension of personhood. The Freud who had conceived of narcissism as in part normal was quickly overshadowed by the Freud who had conceived of it as an early stage in a developmental sequence that began in infantile solipsism and culminated, ideally, in the sovereign self. Within this framework, narcissism, once abandoned, was a fallback position to which one might revert under threat. Freud and his followers generally argued that the infant’s narcissism was optimally displaced by object-love, setting up an opposition between immature love of oneself and mature love of another. Freud held

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that individuals were endowed with fixed quantities of psychic energy that they distributed between self and other, such that love of oneself precluded love of the other and, conversely, love of another depleted the capacity for self-love. This is exemplary of what Kohut deemed Freud’s closed system thinking; Kohut objected not only to it but also more generally to analysts’ preference for object-love over self-love. However much analysts might maintain their stance on narcissism was morally neutral, “psychoanalytic locker-room chitchat” assigned it a negative valence. To brand someone a narcissist was, he argued, to say “down with him”; to envision someone capable of object-love meant “up with him.”11 Against Freudian orthodoxy, Kohut argued that object-love, as well as “any other intense experience,” strengthened the self, which in turn could then experience love more intensely. Kohut maintained that Freud’s model could not account for the fact that reciprocated passionate love did not diminish but, rather, enhanced self-esteem. Where Freud had seen childish narcissism superseded by mature object-love, Kohut argued it was instead transformed—that archaic forms of it, such as grandiosity, were “remobilized and reintegrated” in the service of ideals, self-esteem, creativity, and other useful attributes of a healthy personality. Object-love did not replace narcissism, as Freud had argued; rather, narcissism followed its own “line of development, from the primitive to the most mature, adaptive, and culturally valuable,” assuming different forms at different points in the curve of life. Complex forms of it provided the very basis for civilized life.12 To start with the most primitive, infantile forms: Kohut admired Freud’s analytic colleague Sándor Ferenczi’s portrayal of infantile grandiosity, and his infant was as much a fantasist as was Ferenczi’s. Both were cared for, in ideal circumstances, by an empathic maternal figure who accepted the child’s idealization of her as perfect and allpowerful while mirroring the child’s grandiosity, enabling the child to delight in his own feelings of omnipotence and to revel in his exhibitionism. This empathic figure smoothed the child’s confrontation with the inevitable frustrations of reality, allowing him to maintain pleasurably narcissistic feelings of power and fullness where he might

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otherwise, absent her actual and internalized presence, feel powerless and empty. Kohut maintained that the child experienced this figure as part of itself, as a sustaining “selfobject”—part self, part internalized other. As the child grew, he gradually took on more of the self-esteem– regulating and tension-reducing functions that the internalized selfobject had performed, and a sense of self, cohesive and not fragmented, was achieved. The child’s grandiosity—its “grandiose self”—was gradually tamed but not wholly expunged, transformed and available to the adult, acting as “instinctual fuel” for ambitions and selfesteem.13 The point was not to deny or to eradicate the child’s narcissistic grandiosity and pleasurable exhibitionism but, rather, to see the child at once frustrated and lovingly supported. Kohut’s mature, transformed narcissism provided critical support to the adult personality, to its creative capacities, its wisdom, and even its humor. It was when the child’s strivings were not supported that the feelings of emptiness, aimlessness, and fragmentation symptomatic of pathological narcissism arose. Almost from the start of his musings on narcissism and a full decade before social commentators made it their favored diagnosis, Kohut characterized it as “the social pathology of our age.” Disorders of the self were not new but newly prevalent, he argued, explaining that the bustling Victorian households in which Freud’s patients had been raised offered children too much sexual and other stimulation, whether from servants or from members of extended families living under the same roof, and that by contrast the modern household offered them too little. In Freud’s time, children had been overinvolved with their parents. Now, isolated in homes with but one or two parents and no other adults to take on the parental role, children were far too underinvolved. Children needed warmth, acceptance, and affection from their parents. They needed to see “the gleam in the mother’s eye,” he explained. “Someone has to say, ‘Bravo, you are here and it is worthwhile that you are!’ ”14 Children raised by loving parents, empathically attuned to their needs, grew into adults secure in their self-worth and capable of mobilizing their narcissism to embrace life exuberantly, to love themselves and others too. Those raised by preoccupied or cold and unempathic parents could grow up to be pathological narcissists,

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fated to desperately seek from others the admiration—the mirroring and feeding of their grandiosity—that their upbringing had failed to provide. Narcissism for Kohut was rooted in emotional deprivation, largely unrelated to material circumstances. In proposing that healthy societies were premised on the capacities of parents to nurture children’s grandiosity and feed their selfesteem, Kohut challenged the dogma not only of analysts but also of social critics. Arguing that what could easily be construed as solipsistic self-absorption would enhance rather than imperil the public good, Kohut was scrambling the critics’ categories. If they would mourn the demise of the nineteenth century’s purportedly unified culture, in which disciplined restraint governed society and shaped social character, he would contend that the social environment had changed since then, calling forth new characterological constellations more suited to today than to “the world of yesterday.” If they would condemn the newly ubiquitous narcissism of the present as pathological, he would contend that, in “his groping toward the enlargement and intensification of his inner life,” the narcissist might be seen as responding more creatively and courageously to the possibilities offered by the world around him than the purportedly healthy person. The new psychic forms that drew the censure of professionals and laity alike were best conceptualized not within the framework of disease and illness but, rather, “as a way station on the road of man’s search for a new psychological equilibrium.” Narcissism was “just as necessary for the upkeep of life, for happiness, for living with other people, for being successful and appropriate in the world” as was altruism; self-love was as critical as was love of others. New times called for a new psychology. Kohut charged the cultural arbiters who would wish narcissism out of existence with hypocrisy akin to that of the Victorians who had wished the same for sex—they were all denying the existence of what was everywhere evident. Moreover, history, and in particular two thousand years of Christianity, had shown that suppression of human drives, “the meek acceptance of an ascetic existence,” was neither possible nor advisable.15 Kohut’s brief for the prerogatives of the newly expansive self smacked of what Daniel Bell would call “the debasement of

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modernity,” and it might easily be construed as exemplary of what Christopher Lasch saw as contemporary culture’s defining selfabsorption. But Kohut was no simple-minded prophet of liberation. To the end, he was enough the Freudian to hold that humanity’s abandoning itself to lust and aggression would lead only to disaster. Further, the untrammeled self that was to Bell a specter of modernity at its worst was to Kohut an impossibility, so ubiquitous were the forces of cultural control that tempered this self’s yearnings at every turn. The point for Kohut was to acknowledge what lay within, not to deny it in the name of an impossible-to-honor ascetic ideal. Like Bell and other critics, Kohut saw humanity at a critical cultural turning point, in Bell’s words “a watershed in Western society” that would herald the end of the bourgeois character type. Yet where Bell saw the end of creativity, Kohut saw its renaissance, and while Bell denounced modernism’s “idolatry of the self,” Kohut embraced it.16 Kohut conceived of narcissism as a necessary component of a self robustly engaged with its environment, holding it was to be not suppressed but transformed into something culturally useful. In his hands narcissism was not the antithesis of ambition but the condition of its flourishing. Lasch marshaled the Kohut who was theorist of the empty self’s fragmentation in support of his own dour prophecies of imminent cultural disaster while all but ignoring the Kohut who was celebrant of the self’s rich potentialities. It is not clear that Lasch even realized that Kohut was ideologically opposed to his own stance. Harkening back to an imagined past of fullness and plentitude, Lasch bemoaned the displacement of “the imperial self” by the minimal self that, he argued from the vantage point of 1984, was decreed viable by the austerity that followed on the excesses of the 1970s.17 Kohut, by contrast, welcomed the debut of the imperial self, and he celebrated the expressiveness and liveliness Lasch condemned. Kohut identified himself as a modern, striving against all manner of obstacles to plumb what lay within. His prose could be dense and ponderous. It was peppered with neologisms and awkward phrases—selfobject, transmuting internalization—that some critics found objectionable. All this notwithstanding, there is no underestimating the extent to which Kohut’s writings, with their invocations of joy, creativity, affection,

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growth, and adjustment, and their focus on the self’s potentials instead of its pathologies, marked a break with the austerity of analytic orthodoxy and a reorientation of the analytic field. The “cult of personal relations” and “the ideology of personal growth” that drew the withering criticism of Lasch and his confreres were the stuff and substance of Kohut’s self psychology. Kohut’s questioning of whether the world of the present was really worse than the one in which he’d grown up set him apart from the critics who were disposed to see decline everywhere. He historicized the conflicts between man and civilization that Freud had cast as timeless. For all their professed disdain for the therapeutic ethos and psychological man, social critics were insistently drawn to the Freudian notion that civilization was built on the repression of human drives and was, as such, antithetical to the fulfillment of human desire. In Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which was translated by Freud himself as “Man’s Discomfort in Civilization” but famously rendered in English as Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argued that the demands of society were antagonistic to the individual’s claim to personal gratifications, in particular to sexuality but also to the expression of aggression. Civilization imposed sacrifices on man such that it was difficult for him to find happiness in it. In fact, Freud suggested, though “primitive man” enjoyed little security, he “was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct.” Adopting Freud’s rough economic calculus, critics would follow him in arguing that civilization rested on renunciation and inhibition, an imperative that in Philip Rieff’s words was “the price of entry into every real satisfaction”—“real” here referring to the Freudian dialectic that held there were no “pleasures unpaid for in parallel pains.” Culture ruled over man not by sublimation but by a more draconian repression. If Western civilization was premised on what Philip Slater called the “control release dialectic,” then liberation was at best only apparent, at worst a means to more efficient manipulation of the populace. This line of argument was developed by Frankfurt school theorists and adopted by Herbert Marcuse and Lasch, among others.18 From this perspective, increased liberties in the sexual and other spheres were procured at the price of intensified societal domination and bureaucratic control.

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Social critics brandished the sociological Freud to excoriate student radicals for their utopianism, holding that to bridle against limits was to protest the very essence of humanity. Kohut would have none of this. “Where is the Unbehagen?” he asked. Maintaining that culture had to be thought of as more than drive taming, he argued that discomfort resulted not from civilization itself but from situations in which people were not supported in civilization—for example, when they were bereft of the sustaining comforts provided by language, music, and art or by familiar voices and the endearing habits of friends. Freud’s model of homo natura at war with his surroundings, if marvelously consistent—“lovely to behold . . . an esthetic pleasure”—was at bottom mechanistic: “There is a certain tension, and when the tension rises you put the lid on.” Kohut argued that the murderous, drive-fueled man of Freud’s theorizing—“man wants to kill, man wants to fuck, man wants to eat ravenously,” and then he has restrictions slapped on him—was not the norm but the exception, explaining as perhaps only a lapsed Freudian could that Freud had seen the essence of man in what was in fact the breakdown of civilized relations. Only when the self was not supported did the lust and hate that Freud took as foundational come to the fore. Oedipal conflicts were not universal but arose only when the child’s caretakers failed to meet his exhibitionism and assertiveness with pride and joyful acceptance and responded to his gropings for affection with sexual stimulation. The “intergenerational strife, mutual killing wishes” of Freud’s theorizing represented, to Kohut, a deformation of a normality that in idealized form was characterized by parental pride in their offsprings’ growth and development as well as joyous mirroring of their ambitions and grandiosity.19

Revolution in Chicago Throughout the 1970s, Kohut was widely celebrated as a luminary purveyor of an optimistic creed that would humanize Freud’s severe science of man. Kohut relished his status as public psychoanalyst, regularly granting interviews to major publications while at the same time complaining that his work was sensationalized and

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distorted—turned “topsy-turvy”—by the mass media and misunderstood by a public that thought of narcissism as synonymous with selfishness. Kohut could be at once annoyed and pleased by the popularity of psychoanalysis. Though “every Tom, Dick, and Harry” was tossing around psychoanalytic terminology and, playing “analytic parlor games,” subjecting friends to ill-informed and often malicious interpretations of their behavior, this was nonetheless evident to Kohut that psychoanalysis would prove more than a “passing fashion,” more even than the “persisting cultural style” he thought it already was. Kohut’s aims for psychoanalysis were ambitious. He wanted to establish it as nothing less than a new investigative science of subjective experience, a science in the service of expanding “man’s consciousness” and nurturing human creativity.20 Kohut had the political skills to do so. By the mid-1970s, he had established a thoroughgoing alternative to Freud’s drive-based theory. Called “self psychology,” it had a new toolkit in introspective empathy and a new metapsychology organized around developmental deficits. It had an institutional apparatus to rival orthodoxy’s, with journals, regular meetings and conferences as well as foundational texts. It had a charismatic leader in Kohut and an entourage of followers to spread the word. Kohut by his own telling shook up the American analytic establishment, advancing what was widely hailed as a new psychoanalysis powerful enough to rival that of Freud and his acolytes.21 One of the most striking aspects of Kohut’s analytic career is that he managed to attack the fundamentals of Freudianism while escaping both the banishment from the analytic mainstream and the marginalization that was the fate of so many of his dissenting forebears, among them Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Sándor Ferenczi. Despite the audacity and fierceness of his attacks on Freud and Freudian analysis, Kohut and self psychology are very much part of a pluralistic analytic mainstream today. Kohut in fact ensured the survival of “Freud” both externally, in making psychoanalysis newly relevant to the culture at large, and internally, nourishing, even healing, the analytic field as he laid the groundwork for the reincorporation in

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the 1980s and 1990s of once-vilified analytic forebears and marginalized perspectives. He fashioned himself a revolutionary while at the same time channeling spectral presences that had long haunted the discipline of psychoanalysis. Kohut only gradually warmed to the role of revolutionary leader. He made his theoretical moves deliberately, always attentive to what was at stake in his dissensions. Aware of his outsider status as a culturally advantaged and educated European analyst, he felt that understanding America was central to his vision. He thought it significant that, as he saw it, the country had but little past, that it had “no mythology, hardly any fairytales.” Surveying the American analytic scene in the 1960s, he concluded that its animating values were a distinctive mix of the psychiatric and the social reformist: the former the province of the East European Jews only recently arrived from the ghetto, who found in medicine “a whole new world of freedom,” and the latter the contribution of progressively minded Protestants, with their emphasis on “healing through love” and interpersonal support. In that decade, he was little inclined to rock the American boat, content to busy himself performing “non-revolutionary daily spade work.”22 Within the space of a few years, however, rebellion, if not revolution, was afoot. The analytic orthodoxy that serves as foil to Kohut’s heresy was itself a moving target in these years. Although the notion of orthodoxy was bandied about in the early days of psychoanalysis, analysts only began to talk about “classical” analysis and technique in the 1950s and, with even greater frequency, the 1960s. Freud and his colleagues had invoked orthodoxy to police the boundaries of their discipline, but it was in reaction to the revisionism of the midcentury period that the twin concepts of classicism and orthodoxy gained in urgency, with the publication of the twenty-four volume Standard Edition of Freud’s works from 1953 through 1974. The translation, undertaken in 1946, under the direction of the English analyst James Strachey, is a monument to the positivist orientation of postwar Anglo-American psychoanalysis. Strachey and his team jargonized Freud’s fluid Viennese-German prose with the coining of

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such neologisms as “cathexis” and “parapraxis” and flattened out his metaphorical and philosophically resonant everyday usages and colloquialisms in the service of systemization. A number of émigré Viennese analysts closely tied to Freud, among them Heinz Hartmann, Kurt and Ruth Eissler, Edith Jacobson, and Robert Waelder, also contributed to the consolidation of the classical viewpoint in the United States. Through the 1940s and 1950s, American theoretical eclecticism squared off against the reinvigorated European doctrinal orthodoxy of these émigrés, so-called egopsychologists who rose quickly to leadership positions with the American analytic establishment. They aspired to transform psychoanalysis into a general psychology, envisioning it as a “modern natural science”—as Kohut would as well—useful to the larger world of medicine and psychiatry. And they treated Freud’s inheritance, as one trained in the orthodox tradition put it, as “a precious gift, handed down to be preserved and protected from dilution” by other analytic schools, among them the “superficial” British object relations school and the “speculative” Kleinians.23 Psychoanalysts reflexively characterized Freud as a creature of the nineteenth century. Yet the authoritative “Freud” whose presence animated the discipline was every bit a mid-twentieth-century creation. “I don’t want to use the word ‘paradigm,’ particularly in analysis,” Kohut told an interviewer shortly before he died, distancing himself from the term’s associations with what he called “geniushood.” A new vantage point, yes, a new set of ideas, even one—the charge of heresy on the table—akin to “the reformation in Christianity, as it were,” but not a new paradigm. Kohut’s demurrals notwithstanding, in any discussion of his place in the development of psychoanalysis there is no avoiding the term, which in the literature is associated more frequently with his name than with any other except Freud’s. By the 1970s, Kohut was no longer shying away from emphasizing the differences between his outlook and classicism. He did just that in a speech, delivered in 1973 at a sixtieth-birthday celebration. Abjuring what he called the cheap pessimism of the aged Jeremiahs who proclaim “the decline and fall of everything,” he argued that analysis, soon to be freed from its obeisance to an

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idealized Freud, was at a crossroads. It could either continue “its careful codification and systemization of the already explored”— which to Kohut led to disciplinary death—or it could thrive by questioning its past and exploring new territories. “Status-preserving professionalism” was a precursor to extinction. “The liberators of yesterday,” Kohut argued, had become the “oppressors of tomorrow,” their once revolutionary values “the rationalizations of a new tyranny.”24 If Kohut appears to have been reading from the Kuhnian playbook here, that may not have been altogether fortuitous. Kohut was familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. So too were many of his colleagues, who were quick to see the heuristic and rhetorical utility of Kuhn’s signature concept of the paradigm. Kuhn challenged conventional accounts of scientific progress that were organized around the gradual stockpiling of new and better knowledge. He argued instead that the history of science was episodic. Periods when practitioners worked within paradigms that defined their discipline’s legitimate field of inquiry and problems and contained their disagreements were punctuated by crises, dramatic reshufflings that saw the adoption of new paradigms. Thus, “normal science” was disrupted by scientific revolution. By the 1970s, Kuhn was psychoanalysts’ favorite modern philosopher, his signature concept regularly invoked as a litmus test of the discipline’s scientificity: sciences had paradigms; psychoanalysis had paradigms; therefore, psychoanalysis was a science, or so the argument often went. Kohut himself was fond of pointing to the parallel trajectories of Kuhn’s discipline of physics and psychoanalysis, suggesting that just as quantum theory had displaced Newtonian theory, self psychology had displaced Freudian drive theory.25 Less tendentiously, analysts invoked the paradigm to organize and interpret their discipline’s confusing array of perspectives, especially as they incorporated Kohut’s innovative work into day-to-day clinical practice and organizational life. Analysts were in agreement that Kohut had reoriented psychoanalysis, but many also agreed that he borrowed and appropriated without acknowledgment from his disciplinary forebears. A reviewer

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of his first book backhandedly mentioned the “welcome absence of obsessive attribution” characterizing it, minimizing its originality in claiming Kohut’s material was “already public knowledge.” Kohut was charged on the appearance of his second book with being “strangely unable to acknowledge” his debts and with failing to situate his findings in the discipline’s rich heritage. Attempts to account for Kohut’s failures to properly credit his analytic forebears condemn either the purportedly lax disciplinary norms that underwrote promiscuous borrowing (e.g., “plagiarism is endemic in psychoanalysis”) or Kohut’s propensity to embellish and conceal. Friends recall that even as a gymnasium student he was accused of plagiarizing his honors thesis. Kohut was certainly well aware of what was considered plagiarism. With the German edition of Analysis of the Self in press, he frantically attempted to locate the German-language source from which he might have first derived the concept of “optimal frustration,” convinced that he had come across it somewhere in his readings and eager, now, to acknowledge his debt in print. And he vigorously defended himself whenever the charge arose, even pointing out that a similar charge of borrowing from forebears had been leveled against Freud. He argued that none of his analytic predecessors had, as had he, developed their ideas into a systematic and comprehensive whole and, more to the point, that once he had brought their isolated observations together, he had made it easy for critics retrospectively to locate his ideas in others.26 Still, the charge that Kohut’s self psychology bears an uncanny resemblance to the work of earlier dissident analytic thinkers stuck. From a Kuhnian perspective, the fact that the insights of Kohut’s dissident forebears were deemed retrospectively visible once self psychology had taken shape serves only to underscore how anomalous they had been within the classical paradigm. Kuhn’s observation that, historically, research outcomes outside the narrow range of what can be assimilated are deemed failures that reflect “not on nature but on the scientist” is particularly apt in the case of Ferenczi, who, in questioning Freudian fundamentals, was castigated as psychotic, his work censored and suppressed by Ernest Jones and others who felt he posed too great a danger to the psychoanalytic move-

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ment. Kohut, writing to a younger Ferenczi enthusiast in 1966, allowed that Ferenczi’s “gifts were second only to Freud.” This young analyst’s “retrospective discovery of hints (and more than hints) in Ferenczi’s work of what later came to fruition in the development of analysis” was valuable, Kohut wrote, a perspective that resonates with Kuhn’s statement that “only in retrospect,” with a new paradigm in place, can scientists appreciate and interpret the importance of the anomalous results. Here the forgiving stance of Heinz Hartmann backs up Kohut with a commonsense position on the issue. Defending the work of a popularizing historian of psychoanalysis to whom Jones had objected, Hartmann maintained that what happened to the historian “has happened to other historians before: looking at even the greatest work from the angle of ‘precursors’ only, one cannot help finding similar ideas in the history of human thought.”27 New Freudian or post-Freudian, dangerous apostate or brilliant visionary, destructive radical or deliberate meliorist: contemporaneous appraisals of Kohut run the gamut. Half a century later, the passions of that moment having cooled, the magnitude of Kohut’s achievement can be assessed. Without attempting to settle the oncecharged question of whether his work constituted a new paradigm, we can appreciate the many ways in which he expanded the discipline’s scope and shifted its emphases. His conviction that self psychology’s overthrow of classicism was necessitated “not primarily in order to explain this or that clinical observation” but by the ambition to encompass “a whole dimension of man” that psychoanalysis had yet to address captured something of the grandiosity fueling his vision. In his hands, narcissism referred not only to pathology but to ambition, creativity, and, most expansively, one’s feelings about oneself as a person. It provided a framework within which subjective inner experience could be described at a deep “gut level,” for example in reference to the sense of emptiness and fragmentation of which some patients complained.28 Analysts in Kohut’s wake increasingly used narcissism to discuss salutary aspects of individuals’ capacities and their relationships with others, issues slighted in the orthodox tradition.

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Just as significant was that through narcissism Kohut offered solutions to a range of problems internal to psychoanalysis. He provided a resolution to the contentious issue of the relationship between narcissistic love of self and love of others that had occasioned dispute within psychoanalysis since the publication of Freud’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci in 1910. He pulled together the strands of an alternate tradition within the discipline that had long questioned the valorization of independence as the aim of development, proposing instead that dependency was neither necessarily infantile nor shameful but a natural fact of life. He revived and expanded upon Ferenczi’s explorations of empathy, bringing the banished analyst back into the analytic fold while at the same time taking on the asceticism of the orthodox analytic setting, imbuing once-suspect gratification with a positive valance.29 Together with Otto Kernberg, he delineated the narcissist as a type of person who was not hopelessly defective but, rather, who could be helped. A theorist of internal plentitude and abundance, he brought into view positive, life-sustaining, and even enjoyable aspects of narcissism, knitting together a range of disparate analytic threads supportive of its delights. And, while objecting to his fellow immigrant analyst Erik Erikson’s notion of “identity,” Kohut incorporated something of the exuberance and vitality that Erikson associated with it—so at odds with ego psychology— into his own conceptualization of the positive dimensions of narcissism. Some of his solutions have proven provisional and, to be sure, not all were accepted. Yet, that the analyst’s narcissism at the end of the Me Decade was a different entity than it had been a mere twenty years earlier was due in large part to him. By the end of the Me Decade, social critics were united in contending that narcissism as they defined it was dangerously on the increase. Some analysts—Kohut most vocally among them—joined the popular conversation, appearing as authorities in newspaper and magazine articles chronicling the rise of narcissism apparent in everything from disco dancing—“a singularly narcissistic activity”—to women’s enjoyment of fashion. Newspaper headlines across the country at once exploited and editorialized against narcissism’s ascent, their warnings—“Narcissism on Upswing, According to Ex-

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perts,” “ ‘Me First’—It’s the Rule More People Are Living By,” and “Too Many of Us Are Looking Out for No. 1”—supported by analysts’ quotable but often more tempered appraisals of the issue. Kohut’s statement that narcissism “is the leading illness of our times” was widely cited. But few social critics recognized that his remedies differed from theirs, entailing positive support of individuals’ strivings for specialness and of their shaky self-esteem. And few realized he was as apt to argue for more narcissism as he was to condemn the deficiencies of the modern self. Further, for his professional colleagues, Kohut hedged his pronouncements, cautioning in his Restoration of the Self that what appeared to be an increase in narcissistic disorders, in absolute numbers or proportional to the growing population, might be an artifact of clinicians’ shifting interests. It was possible, he allowed, that the narcissists of Freud’s day were now visible, either having declined to seek treatment or having sought it from clinicians who did not recognize their pathology as narcissistic, so focused were the early analysts on the neuroses. Kohut was adamant, however, that it was ludicrous to assume that the narcissistic disorders had “arisen de novo since Freud formulated the basic theories of psychoanalysis”—which is precisely what the overheated headlines were suggesting.30 It is hardly surprising that Kohut’s fragmented, malaise-ridden narcissists and Kernberg’s destructive, malignant narcissists were featured in the popular media as exemplary of the deficiencies of the present while Kohut’s healthy narcissist was completely ignored. To journalists, decline-and-fall jeremiads made for good copy. They made for good books, too. But there is a more basic reason the critics did not see normal narcissism: they simply did not want to. Kohut— consistently making the case for vitality, hopefulness, and buoyancy— celebrated precisely what they condemned. Here we might turn once again to Kuhn. Kohut was able to effect a paradigm shift within psychoanalysis but not within the social criticism of his time. Philip Rieff, Daniel Bell, and Christopher Lasch were, it might be said, members of a discipline. Kohut’s ideas could not be squared with their orthodoxy—an orthodoxy that reflexively considered the past a purer, more moral time than the present. Policing the boundaries

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of American social criticism just as Ernest Jones had once policed the boundaries of psychoanalysis, the critics invoked Kohut’s name but ignored his message, making him, within their discipline at least, the same kind of forgotten innovator who had proved so influential in his life’s work.

Three OTTO KERNBERG’S N A RC I S S I S T I C DY S T O P I A

Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg defined the field of analytic debate about narcissism in the 1970s. The work of both was critical to establishing the concept’s newfound visibility, within and beyond psychoanalysis. While Kohut focused for the most part on the positive, generative dimensions of narcissism, Kernberg brought its malignant dimensions into clear view. Like Sándor Ferenczi, Kohut was committed to a model that stressed the deprivations narcissistic patients had experienced, and he advocated empathically meeting their needs and supporting their strivings, however grandiose, in the analytic encounter. Kernberg, criticizing Kohut for abandoning drive theory and for downplaying the centrality of oedipal conflict, advocated not empathy but confrontation in dealing with the narcissist in treatment. Kernberg precisely mapped the malignant narcissist’s inner landscape, arguing it was not characterized by lack and a literal emptiness but, rather, was a terrifying space through which coursed intense emotions. Kernberg appeared to be the natural ally of the social critics, as stern and reproving with respect to narcissistic pathology as the most censorious among them. Christopher Lasch cited him repeatedly, especially in his own portrayal of the narcissist’s disturbed inner self and toxic relations with

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others. And the popular press turned to him for pithy quotes that, set beside Kohut’s optimism, could appear judgmental and reproving. Yet Kernberg would not be so easily conscripted into the culturalist critique around narcissism. He hedged on the relationship between narcissism and the “culture of our time” and, while allowing that there might be interesting correlations between narcissistic pathologies and social trends, declined to offer any explanations for them.1 Critics may have imagined themselves channeling the rigorous spirit of Kernberg as they condemned their fellow citizens and slighted narcissism’s positive aspects, but it was often more on their own predispositions than his on which they drew.

Hell Is Other People The world Kohut envisioned was in its ideal form a utopia of ambitions realized, of individual destinies fulfilled, of creativity expressed, of sustaining wholeness and serenity in the face of society’s demands, and of narcissism supporting the sovereign self. Kernberg’s narcissistic world, by contrast, was shot through with aggression and rage, characterized by scarcity, and riven by conflict over the most basic human needs—hunger perhaps foremost among them. Kohut’s healthy narcissists were a satisfied, creative lot. Kernberg’s malignant narcissists were unsatisfied and unsatisfiable, a contradictory mix of superficial but seductive sociability, glittery fascination, and high self-regard on the one hand and of restless emptiness, unempathic ruthlessness, and fragile self-esteem on the other. Beneath their smooth, effective, and engaging surface—which enabled them to enlist others, who were idealized as long as they could supply the narcissist a steady stream of adulation—was an impoverished inner world roiled by anger, resentment, and envy, and animated by grandiose fantasies of triumph and revenge. Kernberg’s clinical writing chronicles the deformations of human relatedness, presenting readers with an astonishing range of ways we as humans have devised to mistreat, exploit, and destroy one another—and ourselves. Kernberg’s narcissists are existentially alone. They are manifestly dependent on others for tribute but they cannot

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in fact depend on anyone, experiencing others as utterly unreliable. Their emotional lives are shallow. They contemptuously devalue everyone and everything and are incapable of treating others as individuals in their own right. They see themselves as entitled to misuse others and delight in exercising control over them, making them suffer, and abusing their “trust and confidence and love to exploit them and destroy them.” Exceptionally self-centered and grandiose, Kernberg’s narcissists entice others into relationships, extracting everything of worth from them before brutally turning on them, as if, in one patient’s vivid imagery, “squeezing a lemon and then dropping the remains.”2 Kernberg’s narcissists routinely enact the strife and murderousness that Kohut argued represented a deviation from the essence of man, which he saw expressed in the self’s joyful unfolding. Kernberg’s interest from the start was in what he began to call internalized object relations, the ways in which individuals experienced other persons—and representations of others—in their own inner lives. In narcissistic personalities, Kernberg argued, both these inner relations and the ways in which such persons interacted with others were deeply disturbed. His portrait of the narcissistic personality, which appeared in print for the first time in 1970, was vivid and concise, bringing within one compass a medley of observations from all corners of the analytic field and his own clinical work. This portrait has endured, evidenced by the many websites offering the solace of Kernbergian clinical understanding to those left devastated in the narcissist’s wake. Kernberg’s pathological narcissists inhabit a landscape without laws, in which brutality, aggression, and predation reign. By his telling, envy, sadism, and corruption, all forms of “rationalized aggression,” course through social and organizational life. Relations among individuals constitute an unending contest for supremacy; better to sadistically exploit, the narcissist thinks, than to risk exploitation and the humiliation of defeat. Most other people are but “lifeless shadows,” unreliable and crooked, ready at all times to attack and enforce submission. Those few whom narcissists admire are but idealized extensions of themselves, devalued and “dethroned” if they disappoint in any way. Those whom narcissists enlist to admire them are

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but “slaves” to be casually tossed aside and mercilessly mistreated but not freed. Weakness—financial, social, sexual—is to be callously exploited. The narcissist hungers for tribute and, more elementally, for narcissistic supplies that can literally take the form of “food.” Other people are envisioned as having food inside that the narcissist can devour. Analysts worked this theme of desperate omnivorousness in explaining narcissism to the public. One suggested that for narcissists, other people “exist only ‘the way a hamburger exists for them—to make them feel good,’ ” and another maintained along similar lines that other people were so many candy machines to narcissists: “If there’s no candy left, the narcissist starts kicking the machine.”3 Nothing about the high-functioning narcissist is quite what it seems. Beneath the enticing self-confidence, independence, and apparent plentitude that enable this narcissist’s worldly success is, in Kernberg’s words, “a hungry, enraged, empty self, full of impotent anger at being frustrated, and fearful of a world which seems as hateful and revengeful as the patient himself.” High self-esteem may be a cover for low self-esteem and a desperate need for admiration. Omnipotence may turn to “feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.” Beneath the surface charm one finds “coldness and ruthlessness.” The most successful of Kernberg’s narcissists are characterized not by the levels of this or that trait they display but by the paradoxical relationship between what is visible and what is not.4 Kernberg’s gallery of pathologically narcissistic types and his catalog of the ways that we as humans make one another miserable resonate powerfully with Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known dictum that “hell is other people.” The anthropologist Ernest Gellner, who optimistically saw nature tamed by growing affluence and good government, suggested in his 1985 book The Psychoanalytic Movement that the wars, famine, hunger, and plagues that were the stuff of inexplicable but expectable human misfortune for our premodern counterparts had been supplanted for us moderns by the miseries of dealing with other people. Whereas formerly “nature contributed to our hell,” now, he wrote, we are “alone with each other. People, unaided by nature, suffice to make a hell.” In Gellner’s view, people’s chances

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for fulfillment in life turned not on their intelligence or accomplishments but, rather, on their relations with their fellow humans—how they managed to get along with others at home, at work, and in society. Gellner maintained that in his time relations with other people stimulated anxieties akin to those that nature had visited on our ancestors. Over the long sweep of history, our natural environment had been proven “subject to intelligible and impersonal laws” while our social environment seemed ever more precarious and uncontrollable, due to incomprehensibility of other people’s attitudes, feelings, and actions.5 In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud characterized these relations as shot through with aggression and hostility that were of necessity disavowed, posing as they did a constant threat to civilized life. Freud’s human beings were not, in his words, “gentle creatures who want to be loved” but savage beasts easily tempted to sate their aggression in exploiting another’s “capacity for work without compensation” and prepared “to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.” Strife, competition, and enmity were to be expected among men, Freud believed, and civilization relied on laws to temper “the crudest excesses of brutal violence” of which humans were capable. What he called “the more cautious and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness” were lamentably beyond the law’s reach. As Freud saw it, each of us, in the course of our lives, had to abandon youthful optimism about our fellows and confront “how much difficulty and pain” the ill will of others caused us.6 Freud argued that unleashing aggression brought individuals satisfaction but was at odds with civilization’s demands for stability and security. Humans had long ago traded the anarchy of unchecked aggression for the stability of authoritarian rule, and Freud proposed that in submitting to a charismatic leader offering to love and rule them, harmonious relations—love, even—among men and women would supervene. In this Freudian historical fantasy, mutual enmity was at a stroke displaced by mutual love, competition among individuals by cohesion. At the same time, Freud envisioned humans constrained from within, their drives for pleasure and destruction

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ideally held in check by a reasonable and moderate ego but more often, in actuality, curtailed by the harsh demands of the superego, which harasses, abuses, threatens, and humiliates them into submission to society’s moral demands. In effect, Freud theorized domination and tyranny, whether external in the person of the leader or internal in the guise of the superego, as the solution to the problem of what he called “the primary mutual hostility of human beings.” But he had little interest in theorizing the nature and tenor of relations among the masses of men and women who constituted society beyond his broad-stroke invocation of hate turned to love with submission to the leader. The “cautious and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness” that he saw beyond the law’s ken were equally beyond his.7 These were the stuff and substance of Kernberg’s narcissistic dystopia.

The Façade of Normality Otto Kernberg was born in Vienna in 1928, fleeing with his family in 1939, in the wake of the anschluss and “at the last moment”— much like Kohut but fifteen years younger than him. Kernberg’s family went to Italy and then Chile, where he trained as a psychiatrist, first learning a mix of “classic descriptive German psychiatry” and psychoanalytic and psychodynamic perspectives, and later, postFreudian ego psychology and the work of Melanie Klein. A fellowship at Rockefeller University, followed by work at Johns Hopkins and a long stint at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, exposed him to other corners of the analytic universe, from the American culturalists and Sullivanians, on the one hand, to the British object relations and “middle group” theorists, on the other. As he saw it, his wide and eclectic exposure to the discipline nurtured his attempt to synthesize ego psychological and object relational approaches in his own developing theoretical stance.8 Kernberg accounts for his interest in personality disorders by pointing to his fortuitous encounters with severe personality pathology early in his career, crediting luck and chance with introducing him to his life’s work. At Menninger, he was part of a large-scale psycho-

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therapy research project in which fully half of the patient-subjects were eventually diagnosed as suffering from borderline personality disorder. He had access not only to the patients themselves but also to the “big fat books” in which the typed-up details of their treatments were recorded—“a gold mine!” as he put it. There he also saw patients similar to a Chilean he had been unable to help while in analytic training. Memories of his failure tortured him. Told by an especially insightful colleague that “these are narcissistic personalities,” Kernberg began working with another patient of this sort, this time successfully developing a way of diagnosing and treating the pathology that had earlier resisted his efforts.9 Kernberg’s favoring of rapprochement over revolution has to some extent obscured the magnitude of his theoretical achievement. While Kohut broke definitively and noisily with Freud and Freudian drive theory, Kernberg continued to maintain that the drives—both libido, or the sexual drive, and aggression, cornerstones of Freudianism— were fundamental to analytic theory and understanding of human motivation. In the estimation of two prominent colleagues, Kernberg’s professions of fealty to Freudian theory were largely political, deflecting attention from his own break, more muted than Kohut’s, with classicism. That Kernberg starts from the premise of human sociability and connectedness, critiquing Freud for assuming a “primary autism” or self-sufficient lack of relatedness in the infant, supports their contention.10 Kernberg is an object relations theorist, focused on the ways patients experience the internalized others they carry around in their heads. He was drawn early on to the pathologies his disturbed patients displayed on this score, the ways that their explosively unstable relationships to him as analyst—rapidly cycling between idealization and contempt—replicated their early experience of their parents and offered a window into their inner lives. For example, Kernberg told of one patient’s violent verbal attacks on him that gave way several weeks later in the treatment to expressions of intense admiration and longing, only to be displaced once again by angry, sadistic, and hateful outbursts. Socially and at work this patient’s behavior was appropriate, emotionally controlled, and stable. To Kernberg, the

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patient manifested a “lack of impulse control” derived not only from a weakness of the ego, as a classical Freudian might have seen it, but also from a splitting between two irreconcilable inner states.11 In Kernberg’s understanding, the patient’s construal of him as the harsh and haughty analyst was an expression of the mental image the man had of the rejecting mother within and of himself as an attacked child, while the patient’s construal of him as the loving and understanding analyst corresponded to the man’s internal image of his own weak but protective father. The pathology of the patient’s early object relations were thus made accessible to Kernberg through the transference and the countertransference, the feelings stirred in the analyst in his dealings with the patient. This patient’s early object relations—his experiences of his parents as they were internalized and held in mind—were deeply pathological. In normal or less disturbed individuals, “loved and admired” inner objects brought emotional fullness and satisfaction. The internal world of psychically healthy people, Kernberg explained, was one in which “we feel surrounded by our friends and the people whom we love and who love us,” images and representations of important others well integrated into our sense of self. Patients displaying character pathology by contrast were plagued by the persistence of objects not well integrated into their self-image. The ways that such patients, who “always seem to have to bite the hand that feeds them,” undermine and devalue the analytic process served as a critical diagnostic tool in classifying them as narcissistic.12 The façade of normality that narcissists can maintain in superficial relations with others socially and at work—where they are characteristically “in the center of things”—thus crumbles in the analytic setting. Kernberg’s precise accounts of the texture of his subjects’ characteristic modes of relating to others is premised on his use of himself in the countertransference—asking, for example, do I feel devalued and impotent in the presence of this patient—as well as on his sharp, unforgiving observations of patients’ behaviors. He will have nothing of narcissists’ deceptive normality. Nor will he be flattered by the adulation and flattery they direct at him, for he knows that rage and devaluation are the other side of the coin of narcissis-

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tic idealization. Alert to the tragedy of such patients’ lives, the emptiness and loneliness they experience as a consequence of their incapacity for relationships, he will refrain from moral exhortation and offer instead sustained, neutral interpretation. What he called “the transitory nature of human life” was in his clinical experience an affront to narcissists. As he saw it, the limitations and loss that accompanied normal aging forced narcissists into catastrophic confrontations with their lonely, empty inner selves. They are empty because, caught in binds of their own making, they are plagued by their immense needs but devalue as worthless whatever they receive from others to avoid feeling envious of what others had to give; in consequence, Kernberg wrote, “they always wind up empty.”13 The tyranny to which they subject others is replicated within, as they experience themselves as subject to the control of frightening, tormenting internalized others and, in the analytic setting, of the tormenting analyst.

Narcissists All? Arguing there was “real evil” in the world, Kernberg insisted on distinguishing between narcissism—which in his mind the critics wrongly condemned—and abnormal, pathological, or, in his terminology, malignant narcissism. He objected to construals of narcissism as a “phony pathology for wealthy patients that have nothing to do but to go to a psychoanalyst.” Kernberg’s malignant narcissists were severely impaired, unable to maintain both professional and intimate relations. Their pathology ruined their own lives and wreaked havoc on those around them. They were not everywhere, as Lasch claimed, but rather formed a discrete group. Kernberg thus resisted easy answers to questions such as the one put to him in 1978 by an interviewer: “Aren’t we all narcissists? Don’t we all, secretly or not so secretly, love ourselves, take our own lives more seriously than the lives of those around us, enjoy feeding and grooming ourselves, and spend a great deal of effort at soliciting the admiration and approval of others?” We do, Kernberg replied, but only if one’s self-esteem needed constant feeding in the form of tributes from others is there

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a problem. When your internal mental structures tell you that “you are doing all right” and that “you deserve to think well about yourself, you can be proud of yourself,” when you in consequence are able to operate effectively in the world, pursuing your “tasks, ambitions and ideals,” you are displaying normal narcissism—everything is in order.14 Seeming to echo Kohut, Kernberg argued that it was normal through the course of life to experience pleasure in “self-fulfillment and creativity” as well as in dedicating oneself to loved ones and “to the ideals for which one stands.” The issue as Kernberg saw it was not whether individuals appeared self-absorbed or felt inordinately good about themselves. Rather, it was the nature of their internal object relations and the ways these found expression in the interpersonal realm that mattered. “Normal narcissism and normal object relations tend to go hand in hand,” he argued. To assert that contemporary culture was narcissistic—however tempting it might be to declaim and condemn—was to simplify a relationship between the individual and society that he believed was “indirect and complex.” Were the roots of the narcissist’s subjective experience of “futility and emptiness” to be found in the widely decried breakdown of cultural values and changing sexual mores? Were contemporary Americans really less capable than their forebears of establishing and maintaining deep, intimate relationships with others? Or were the perennial deformations of early childhood development to blame, then as now?15 Lasch invoked Kernberg’s skepticism as typical of the clinician’s objections to the notion that changes in cultural patterns could affect individuals’ internal object relations. Yet this proved no impediment to his instrumental marshaling of Kernberg’s clinical portrait of the pathological narcissist—grandiose, exploitative, parasitic, shallow, empty—to support the framing premise of The Culture of Narcissism: that individual pathology was an exaggerated expression of the “underlying character structure” of the age. Lasch explained that psychoanalysis “tells us most about society when it is least determined to do so”—an intriguing if debatable proposition that underwrote his book’s argument. Where Lasch was confident and

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polemical in his social diagnoses, Kernberg was cautious, arguing that the term “narcissistic” was “both abused and overused” while allowing, from the vantage of 2001, that Lasch’s work had “contributed enormously” to popularizing the concept. To grasp the differences in their approaches, consider consumption. Lasch claimed that the narcissist was the “quintessential consumer” and that “by his nature the narcissist has an insatiable craving for consumption.” Therefore, Lasch concluded, “in a real sense, the narcissist is what he buys.” Kernberg, meanwhile, proposed that contemporary culture might stimulate individuals’ “narcissistic needs” in the same manner it fostered “superficial ways of being accepted and admired.” It would do so by “emphasizing the accumulation of material goods” that would visibly testify to individuals’ “personal value” while at the same time stimulating envy and greed—core symptoms of narcissism. And he was willing to hazard that societies less competitive than his own, organized to support individuals’ mutuality and shared responsibilities, might conversely foster the altruism associated with normal narcissism.16 But Kernberg rejected the Laschian notion that society could produce narcissism either normal or pathological. A society in which mutuality was valued might force the already pathologically narcissistic “to go underground,” and a society that celebrated selfishness might “smoke out” the same characters. Kernberg’s position was that narcissistic predispositions were nurtured early in life, at the hands of cold, callous, and indifferent parents, an etiology upon which he and Kohut agreed. Estimating that perhaps 30 percent of those with serious character disorders were pathological narcissists, Kernberg was not persuaded by the sociologists’ argument that narcissism’s prevalence was attributable to permissive culture, to “a social goahead” conferred after the earliest years of childhood. One of Kohut’s closest associates agreed, explaining that material abundance and other of the critics’ bogeymen—“the self-help ethic, discotheques or fashion”—provided an outlet for narcissism but did not foster it, just “like brothels” did not create the needs they satisfied but simply allowed for some “to indulge freely.” According to Kernberg, narcissism in childhood was normal; adults who “feel good if

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they are beautiful, admired, have shining clothes, bright cars” and not “because they live up to adult values of maturity, intelligence, depth, compassion, friendliness, tact, and concern invested in others” have not outgrown their “normal infantile narcissism.” Their ideals are those of the child. Consumer culture may exploit their “narcissistic needs” but it did not follow from this that the culture was necessarily narcissistic. The most Kernberg was willing to grant was that social norms could render serious pathology “superficially appropriate” and provide “cultural rationalizations” for the narcissist’s experience of emptiness and dissatisfaction. But social patterns would inevitably change and narcissists, unhappy and unfulfilled, would remain.17 The Kernbergian subject ideally sought satisfaction, even transcendence, through deep relationships with others. It mattered little what society prescribed—humans would seek connection and find fulfillment in “the sense of extending beyond oneself and feeling a sense of unity with all others who lived and loved and suffered before.” The socially sanctioned sexual permissiveness that was among Lasch’s bêtes noires, in offering “a cultural rationalization” for sexual freedom over lifelong monogamy, might shield pathological narcissists unable to form relationships with others from “the emptiness and meaningless of their lives,” but not indefinitely. Social mores would eventually change, and a human nature seeking satisfaction in deep relatedness to others would assert itself. The danger of which Lasch and other critics warned—that narcissists would overwhelm society—was to Kernberg’s mind overblown; whatever society mandated, he wrote, “individuals will simply continue to choose the patterns that fulfill them.” Like Kohut, he saw normal narcissism as essential to the self’s functioning and defended the love of self and self-esteem with which it was popularly identified as consonant with psychic health and social citizenship. And, like Kohut, at times he could sound every bit the countercultural mystic—for example, in his invocations of a human striving toward union “with people throughout history”—and appear to invoke cultural values, condemned by Lasch, as exemplary of the narcissistic moment. Lasch faulted Americans for the superficiality of their desires,

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for wanting “to get in touch with their feelings” and for wanting to  “learn how to relate.”18 This, however, was but psychoanalysis 101—and Kernberg, known as among the sternest, the least indulgent, and the most exacting when it came to handling narcissists in the analytic setting, would not have done other than to have assented to the validity, even the necessity, of the quest for self-knowledge Lasch censured.

Histories of Sex and Violence Kohut’s world was suffused with optimism, where in ideal cases individuals’ ambitions and creativity found both internal—in the form of healthy narcissism—and external support. It was a world populated by idealized others, absent the hateful, devaluing, aggressive, and simply “bad” internal objects of Kernberg’s theorizing and clinical experience. Children in this world were better overindulged than understimulated; better to feed their self-esteem than to starve it. The Kohutian self had a destiny, “a program in it that it wants to fulfill, a life curve, a destiny”; youthful narcissism transformed over the course of life into ideals and ambitions endowed individuals with a “sense of supraindividual participation in the world.” The narcissist in analytic treatment needed not analytic aloofness but, rather, “to feel appreciated, admired and understood.”19 Kohut and Kernberg were in agreement on more aspects of narcissism and the narcissist than has generally been assumed. Kernberg could sound every bit the Kohutian when discussing what he called “normal narcissism,” maintaining like his colleague that the analyst’s “narcissism” referred to “normal self-esteem or self-regard.” There was nothing objectionable about this normal narcissism; it was, he argued, “a source of pleasure in living, of enjoyment of self, enjoyment of healthy self-affirmation, healthy aggression, enjoyment of sexuality, eroticism, love, intimacy.” Creativity, dedication to one’s ideals, and self-fulfillment were premised on individuals’ narcissism. It was not narcissism but pathological narcissism in its most severe form that was the problem. And Kohut could sound Kernbergian in characterizing the tyranny and oppression to which “narcissistic

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individuals” could subject others, treating them as extensions of themselves and demanding submission. “They basically expect,” Kohut said, “that you will do what they say.” Kernberg and Kohut agreed that psychoanalysis was best suited among the mental therapies to treating narcissistic personalities. But, sparring throughout the 1970s, they differed on the shape of the narcissist’s internal worlds and on the mix of support and confrontation the analyst should deploy in the treatment setting. The most significant of Kernberg’s specific charges against Kohut were that his approach ended up supporting rather than undermining patients’ grandiosity and that he downplayed aggression.20 Kernberg objected to Kohut’s notion that the narcissist’s grandiose self, rooted in infancy, represented an arrest in development and that it could be transformed into the higher, more socially useful form of adult ambition and strivings. Instead, he argued that grandiosity was pathological and had to be confronted in the course of analysis. Kohut’s patient is far more the victim than is Kernberg’s. Kohut’s aim was to allow patients’ grandiose self to flower in the treatment setting, where, treated empathically, it would serve as a window into their younger, damaged selves. Eventually, he explained, patients would abandon their grandiose illusions and, putting past disappointments behind them, “thus move on to a fuller life.” If in the process they idealized the analyst that was an expected part of the treatment. Kernberg, by contrast, wanted patients to recognize their grandiosity and to own up to the contemptuous, devaluing treatment of the analyst that resulted from it. It was only when grandiosity’s comforting illusions—of “eternal youth, beauty, power, wealth and the unending availability of supplies of confirmation, admiration, and security”—were shattered that patients would come faceto-face with the empty, lonely self within. Kohut blamed modern parents more interested in “doing their own thing” than in being responsive to their children’s needs for producing narcissists, in 1979 going so far as to partially fault the women’s movement. While Kernberg saw narcissists more actively determining their own fate, he too saw cold and indifferent parents—and in many cases superfi-

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cially well-functioning but callous, “spitefully aggressive” mothers or mother surrogates—in their histories.21 Kohut was by his own telling more focused on the self’s “inner program” than on the resentments and frustrations everyone experienced in having to abandon hopes of fulfilling their prohibited wishes and in having to tame their aggression. Kernberg, however, homed right in on these sorts of conflicts, seeing individuals’ emotional health and depth dependent on successful and ongoing negotiation of them. A person’s sense of aliveness was dependent in his estimation on the capacity to love but just as much “to hate well,” and to negotiate strongly felt commitments and convictions while tolerating “varying combinations of loving and hateful feelings.” It was normal to enjoy one’s healthy aggression, sometimes manifest as assertiveness. Confusingly to untrained observers, narcissistic patients, while roiled by aggression within, could appear bland and uninvolved in social and work settings, terrified of their own rageful feelings.22 It was not only aggression but its apparent lack, then, that could be symptomatic of narcissism. Kernberg was known in the analytic world, as one colleague jokingly put it to him, as “concerned only with aggression,” yet his view of human nature is not nearly as dark as was Lasch’s. What Lasch called “the trivialization of personal relations” figured centrally in his condemnation of his fellow citizens as narcissists, especially as those relations took shape around sex.23 Next to Lasch, Kernberg appears the sunny optimist on this score, unperturbed by what he observed and refusing to join Lasch’s indictment. Perhaps sparked by his colleague’s remark, Kernberg made himself into a theorist of love in the 1980s and beyond. Notably, in his conception, aggression is not opposed to love and eroticism but folded into both. Aggression against the other was part of what made sex gratifying, Kernberg explained, describing the scene of sex in terms of transgression, appropriation, penetration or being penetrated, invasion or being invaded, and in terms of forcefully overcoming barriers between self and other and violating social prohibitions—all this between loving, committed partners. Kernberg located sexual outlawry

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in the committed couple, not in the promiscuous or rebellious, telling, for example, of his hospitalized adolescent patients’ puzzlement at his failure to condemn “sexual behavior they had expected to be forbidden.” Indeed, defiant but discreet seeking of sexual intimacy among such patients was a sign of health to Kernberg. It was the mature, loving couple that was at odds with society, a “combat zone” marking the divide between the sides. Kernberg described conventional morality’s constant pressure on the couple, its “ritualization of love, commitment, marriage, and family tradition,” as so much “static warfare” against them. The richness of their private experience was, to him, a rebuke to the “flatness of all conventionally tolerable sexuality.”24 Lasch, too, saw sex as a battlefield, but where Kernberg saw the committed couple at war with society and barely affected by shifts in sexual mores, Lasch saw, variously, “all-out war,” “escalating war,” and intensifying “sexual combat” newly prevalent between men and women. Lasch argued that the comity between the sexes that “courtly convention” had ensured in times past had been crumbling since the 1920s in the face of women’s “increasingly insistent demand for sexual fulfillment” and their brandishing of “sexual ‘performance’ ” as a weapon of warfare—a war in which women, endowed with what the sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson had shown in the 1960s was an inexhaustible capacity for orgasm, were destined to prevail. As Lasch told it, chivalry’s vaunted but long dead male gallantry traded in illusions, promising women protection against men’s “wildness and savagery” while at the same time tolerating and even institutionalizing brutally predatory treatment of them, evidenced by the ubiquity of rape and seduction and by the exploitative custom of droit du seigneur. A façade of mutual obligation, institutionalized in rituals of gender deference and conventions of politesse, usefully obscured men’s monopolistic and organized political, economic, and sexual oppression of women, which, Lasch offered consolingly, “if nothing else made exploitation easier to bear.” Patriarchy lived on even as the “last foundations of feudalism” that supported this sexual regime were ultimately destroyed by the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in the eighteenth and

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nineteenth centuries, during which women finally rejected their sentimental but confining exaltation “on the pedestal of masculine adoration” and noisily demanded that female sexuality be demystified. Sexual antagonism sharpened once the veil of courtly comity was stripped from women’s subordination. It was now “more difficult than before” for men and women “to confront each other as friends and lovers, let alone as equals,” Lasch proclaimed, adding that men were now free to assert “their domination more directly, in fantasies and occasionally in acts of raw violence”—a history of violence that strangely construes the chivalrous sexual order whose ruling conventions he has just eviscerated as a prelapsarian Elysium of gender harmony and female dominion. The gist of the problem, Lasch— ever the gallant—proclaimed, was that “men no longer treat women as ladies.”25 Lasch was most of the time adamant about the necessity of distinguishing between illusion and reality, seeing the inability to do so symptomatic of narcissism. But, given the choice, he strongly preferred the illusions of gallantry—which in his own telling barely contain men’s “animal strength” and barely disguise brutality, savagery, and rape—to those of the present. He dismissed as illusory the “new intimacy” between the sexes registered by sociologists and feminists alike and, if the experts’ “strenuous propaganda” was to be believed, fervently desired by his contemporaries. This intimacy was premised, in short, on the reconceptualization over the course of the twentieth century of marriage as more an emotional than legal bond, as well as on the severing of sex from procreation— unexceptionable enough in light of the deceptions and miseries of the past. Yet the possibilities this intimacy opened for couples’ mutual emotional exploration, as well as for valuing the erotic “for its own sake,” for conceiving of “sexual pleasure as an end in itself,” drew from Lasch only withering scorn.26 His argument here is worth spelling out, in part because it captures something of the confusions of the moment when second-wave feminism began to call into question the many dimensions of what he called “masculine ascendancy.” Faced with women tactically advantaged by their orgasmic capacities, women who would lay claim

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to—or, as he put it, exploit—their sexuality, Lasch retreated to illusion and fantasy. At the same time, he took up the cudgel of world-weary cynicism to attack women and men for imagining they might escape what he saw as the trivialization, the solipsism, and the manipulation of the other that the new “cult of personal relations” offered them. Lasch’s reporting from the front lines of the 1970s sexual “revolution”—the scare quotes are his—is incisive, nimbly capturing the zeitgeist in highlighting the experts’ advocacy of sex for its own sake; “a ‘total experience’ instead of a mechanical performance”; “a ‘healthy,’ ‘normal’ part of life”; a fleeting but deep expression of needs shorn of “romantic illusions.” There is no denying the appeal— that Lasch finds so objectionable—to legions of countercultural young of sex free of binding commitments and “emotional entanglements,” nor is there any minimizing the cultural ferment it sparked. Mass market paperbacks with provocative titles like Group Sex, Combat in the Erogenous Zone, Open Marriage: A New Lifestyle for Couples, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Beyond Monogamy, and Hot and Cool Sex, as well as Dr. Alex Comfort’s wildly popular, illustrated sex manual The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, offered the curious a titillating anthropology of free love as practiced by hippie youth and suburban swingers and the adventuresome a lively chronicle of their own experimentation.27 Lasch’s account of the moment of the final repeal of the reticence that had long surrounded sex is keen if hostile to feminism and its achievements. Everywhere he looks he sees his contemporaries in despair. In flight, escape, and withdrawal from emotional entanglements, they repudiate relationship and are revolted by closeness—a tendentious but not necessarily unfair reading of the literature of sexual revolution. But in suggesting this massive “flight from feeling” is defensive, that experts’ extolling of the imperative to “get in touch with” one’s feelings is fatally at odds with intimacy, and that interpersonal relations are in consequence at once irredeemably trivial, and, lacking the “assurance of permanence,” embittered and “increasingly risky,” Lasch finds himself boxed in by his own historical narrative. His are beguiling propositions. But they rely for their rhetorical force on a summoning up of an imagined past of

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reciprocity, romance, passion, tenderness, and sexual fulfillment between men and women for which not only does he lack evidence but which is also utterly at odds with the scripted emptiness, even the brutality, of the sexual arrangements—again, by his own telling— against which they were a reaction.28 The Laschian sexual landscape looked in some ways like a Kernbergian nightmare, an ungovernable dystopia of emotional manipulation, bottomless need, intense hunger, feral calculation, “intolerably menacing” desire, and the “blind and impotent rage” of one sex against the other. Women, no longer averse to sex and tactically advantaged in intimate combat by their orgasmic capacities, taunt and intimidate men. Men, while in actuality still on top, irrationally fear the castrating, sexually voracious women who, modeled on the overwhelming preoedipal mother, would “eat them alive.” Narcissists— here figured as male—traverse this landscape patently free of needs and connection, their cynical detachment and indifference linked paradoxically to an inordinate demandingness. Such were the wages of freeing sex from its moorings in patriarchy.29 Kernberg, by contrast, was unperturbed in surveying the same landscape of sexual revolution. His own readings in history convinced him there was little if anything novel in the “new lifestyles” that so unsettled Lasch, lifestyles that to his mind bore “a striking resemblance to the sexual mores of the past.” Eighteenth-century aristocratic and bourgeois cultures cast marital fidelity as outdated and sexual jealousy as an awkward complication, considered “the search for permanence” a spoiler of erotic passion, and supported the mutually agreed upon sharing of partners as a “graceful” enactment of modernity. The “so-called sexual revolution” of the present represented but one oscillation in a long saga of shifts in sexual regimes between the puritanical and the libertine, in Kernberg’s words “a mere swing of the pendulum.” Kernberg was as skeptical as was Lasch of the “how-to” genre of sexual enlightenment and the sexual utopianism of “new lifestyles,” but not like Lasch because they drained sex of emotion and meaning. Rather, the problem was that emotional and sexual intimacy was fatefully at odds with conventionality of any sort, including the militantly nonconventional. For example,

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Kernberg argued that the sexual experimentation of countercultural adolescents in fact represented adherence to conventional values, in this case the values of their peer group, and that severe psychopathology—“hysterical, masochistic, and narcissistic”—was often to be found beneath their “apparent freedom and casual sexual behavior.” Kernberg counterposed the poverty of socially sanctioned sexuality against the gratifications couples privately achieved, the latter immune to the dictums of moralists who attempted to “manipulate sexual customs”—deploying “rules and regulations” and partitioning out “the forbidden but thrilling” from the “reluctantly tolerated” and acceptable. Aggression, even hate, necessarily infiltrated mature love. A loving sexual partner at times used the other “as a ‘pure sexual object,’ ” and sexual excitement might be enhanced in doing so—a far cry from Lasch’s vision of tenderness yoked to emotional complexity.30 “Instinctual desires” were in Lasch’s view dangerous, inalterably at odds with individuals’ “psychic equilibrium.” In times past, he held, repressive authorities in alliance with robust superegos usefully kept these destabilizing impulses under control. Now unleashed at a time of weakened external and internal prohibitions, they were wreaking havoc in intimate relations. From the psychoanalyst’s point of view, however, psychic equilibrium was not opposed to but, rather, dependent upon the opportunity to fully experience love and hate, tenderness and aggression.31 Kernberg, secure in his belief that there was nothing new in human nature, was largely inattentive to the ways that feminism changed the balance of intimate power between men and women, and the menacing female voraciousness that so vexed Lasch was absent from his work. The animality that Lasch’s women must constantly endure and may occasionally domesticate in their men is, in Kernberg’s vision, a given in both sexes, at the core of what makes us human. Kernberg’s portrayal of the conditions under which mature love might be achieved can appear normative and prescriptive, the words normal and normality appearing regularly in his writings on intimacy. Yet his tone is optimistic, not embittered, celebratory of the transcendence that a sexuality expressive

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of the full range of emotions offers those able to risk it, a transcendence Lasch yearns for but can locate only in some unspecified, mythical past.

It seemed to many who reflected on the passing of the 1970s that the word narcissism best captured the decade’s confusions and paradoxes. Writing its epitaph, the noted Time magazine journalist Lance Morrow pointed to the “cold Splenglerian apprehension” that had enveloped the nation between the 1973 Arab oil boycott and the dawn of the 1980s. Dark prophecies of decline, diminution, deterioration, and limits imposed by vanishing resources had challenged Americans’ traditional optimism. One could, he wrote, “construct a kind of ‘worst-case scenario’ to prove that the U.S., along with the rest of the West, has fallen into dangerous decline.” The work ethic dead and hedonism ascendant, religion having ceded its customary ground to “narcissistic self-improvement cults,” American society—or so the pundits claimed—had lost it moral compass. Yet from the vantage of the decade’s end Morrow could suggest the indictment had been overblown. A mere ten years earlier things had looked much worse, with “the Viet Nam War, the ghetto riots, the assassinations, the orgasmic romanticism of the counterculture” fueling a palpable national rage. The country and its institutions were now healing, and many of its citizens had never been as well off as they were at the moment. The country was still wealthy, the economy was booming, and incomes were rising at a rapid clip. Still, the national mood was suffused with an unsettling contradictoriness.32 To Morrow, it was the widespread preoccupation with the self and its fulfillment, evident in self-awareness movements that counseled “fumigating, refurnishing and redecorating the inner space of the American psyche,” that defined the decade more than anything else. The narcissism of popular commentary reflexively conjured up this landscape of “dreamily obsessive self-regard,” in the words of Tom Wolfe. And yet, after what critics decried as a decade-long orgy of self-indulgence, abetted by therapists promoting self-realization

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and human potentials, only 17 percent of Americans told pollsters in 1980 that they considered self-fulfillment their principal life goal— with 20 percent still subscribing to “traditional values of hard work, family loyalty and sacrifice.”33 Looking at Kohut and Kernberg together, we can better appreciate why the concept of narcissism has proven so confusing in the popular and professional realms since the 1970s. Their writings on narcissism encompass a broad swath of the human experience, with the term used to refer to capacities both generative, such as creativity and ambition, and destructive, such as aggression and hate. Both clinicians, for all of their differences, are less interested in the big questions that drove the public discussion of narcissism than in the texture of relationships among individuals, in the ways that individuals experienced others internally, and in ways that inner experiences limited or enhanced persons’ capacities to get along with others. Both were concerned less with the widely registered decline of paternal authority or, in analytic terms, the waning of the Oedipus complex, than with the quality and closeness of relationships individuals could sustain with one another—less with the grand historical narratives of decline than with the day-to-day issue of getting along with our fellows. One analyst has noted of Kohut’s work that it directs attention to the “general import people have for each other,” and the same might be said of Kernberg, though in Kohut’s work the focus is on what people want from one another, and in Kernberg’s on what they cannot abide.34 Narcissism offered critics a frame within which to declaim on the big issues of the day, but they missed the opportunities it offered for enriching their thinking on the more prosaic concerns that these two groundbreaking analysts explored.

Pa r t i i

Dimensions of Narcissism from Freud to the Me Decade and Beyond

Four S E L F - L OV E

Among the many characterological traits associated with narcissism, none has proven more central and enduring than self-love. The Narcissus of classical mythology, whose name the first psychoanalysts appropriated, died of what the English philosopher Francis Bacon called “rapturous admiration of himself.” Fatally transfixed by his own image, Narcissus had long served in the Western tradition as an object lesson in the dangers of excessive love of self, and it is thus not surprising that analysts’ narcissism connoted an all-enveloping vanity and admiration of self. The sexologist Havelock Ellis, who is usually credited with having coined the term in 1898, used it in reference to a state of absorbed contemplation and sometimes-erotic self-admiration, invoking as exemplary of this “exquisite” mental state the words of two nineteenthcentury women, narcissists avant la lettre: “I love myself; I am my God” and “this unique and marvelous me, by which I am enchanted, and which I adore like Narcissus.” Other nineteenth-century observers described similar states of erotic reverie in men, involving mirrors, masturbation, and “voluptuous emotions.” Freud, in perhaps the first recorded analytic discussion of narcissism, in 1909 explained to his Viennese colleagues that “being enamoured of oneself,” and, he added parenthetically, “of one’s own genitals,” was “not an isolated phenomenon.” Narcissism was “a necessary developmental stage in the transition from autoerotism to object love,” he added, part of “the regular constitution of all men.”1

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In his 1914 essay “On Narcissism,” Freud maintained that narcissism was not a perversion but normal, a form of self-interested egoism found in “every living creature.” Some early analysts wrestled with this and followed suit. Freud’s colleague Isidor Sadger emphasized that self-love was at work in all love, proposing that everyone, both homosexual and heterosexual, sought aspects of themselves in others “in addition to the characteristics of the individuals who are loved.” As he explained, “everyone is in some degree in love with himself.” Early analysts also linked narcissism in men to homosexuality, which they considered a sexual deviation. As one of them proclaimed to his assenting colleagues, everyone knew “that intensive autoerotism must lead to homosexuality.”2 Freud, discussing narcissism in print for the first time, in his 1910 book Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, argued that Leonardo’s homosexuality was rooted in a narcissistic love of self and that a disabling incapacity for relationship followed from this. Leonardo sealed the deal. Narcissism and homosexuality were fatefully intertwined. Not all of the narcissistically inclined were homosexual, but it quickly became an analytic commonplace that all homosexuals were narcissistic. Analysts labored for decades to free narcissism from the developmental telos that cast it as a stage to be transcended and, in cases of developmental arrest, as an impediment to mature object love. That Freud himself never resolved the tension between his contradictory understandings of narcissism as both normal and pathological, as a disposition both found in everyone and seen only in developmentally arrested homosexuals, made this all the more difficult. A number of analysts working in Freud’s wake pointed to the unsettled nature of his legacy around narcissism to authorize their theoretical forays beyond the bounds of orthodoxy; some conceptualized narcissism in terms of normal self-esteem regulation. Heinz Kohut’s reorientation of the analytic field in the 1960s and 1970s brought their efforts into focus and eventually into the mainstream of psychoanalysis. He attacked the Freudian developmental model that saw narcissism superseded by object-love, arguing instead that narcissism followed its own developmental course from the primitive to the adaptive and mature.

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The classicists’ vaunted object love could be seen in narcissists and nonnarcissistic persons alike; narcissism, he proposed, “can lead to very strong interpersonal relationships.”3 Kohut’s normalization of self-love under the rubric of “healthy narcissism” undermined the axiomatic association of narcissism and homosexuality: it was only when narcissism became healthy that homosexuals were no longer considered de facto narcissists. And he contributed to the transformation of the heavily freighted self-love into the more neutral selfesteem, setting the stage for a spirited and sometimes fractious public debate about the point at which positive self feeling shaded into pathology.

All Leonardo Freud first described the opposition between love of self and love of the other in Leonardo. In Freud’s account, which figured centrally in analytic discussions of male homosexuality for more than half a century following its publication, homosexuals were characterized by a preference for sameness over difference in their choice of love object. Freud located the psychic roots of this preference in a surfeit of maternal attention combined with a deficient paternal presence. The growing boy’s “very intense erotic attachment” to his mother, first nurtured by too much tenderness and then of necessity repressed, survived in his identification with her. Putting “himself in her place,” he was fated to seek love objects modeled on himself, whom he could love as his mother had once loved him. Unable to make the “correct decision,” to love “someone of the opposite sex,” the boy, Freud wrote, “has become a homosexual.” Choosing autoeroticism over object-love, from that point on he traveled “the path of narcissism.”4 Freud had long been interested in Leonardo and, notably, in Leonardo’s homosexuality. He read widely in the Leonardo literature, poring over biographies; the Russian novelist Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s biographical study appeared in 1907 on a list of books he had most enjoyed reading. By the autumn of 1909, the subject was by his own telling an obsession, and soon after he embarked on his

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study with an intensity that Ernest Jones thought exceptional. A lecture on the topic in December to his Viennese colleagues left him exasperated and dissatisfied, unhappy with his grasp of the issues despite the fulsome praise it elicited. Dry spells alternating with frenzied bouts of productivity ensued. There were patients to see and professional disputes to manage, but, Freud wrote to Carl Jung in early March, “otherwise I am all Leonardo.” Within several more weeks, it was in press, published in May 1910. The first “psychoanalytic pathography”—the encomium is Sándor Ferenczi’s, who predicted in an idealizing flourish that it would “serve as a model for all time”—the work would prove Freud’s favorite, in his words “the only truly beautiful thing I have ever written.”5 It was also, in Jones’s estimation, in many respects an autobiography, informed by issues that had arisen in Freud’s self-analysis and, as such, offering a window onto his personality. Jones found it suggestive that Freud’s Leonardo exhibited a “passion for natural knowledge” and even more so that his essay “illuminated the inner nature of that great man” by tracing the source of Leonardo’s conflicts, which Jones framed as between a passion for artistic creation and a passion for science, to “the events of his earliest childhood.” Missing from Jones’s construal of Leonardo as thinly veiled autobiography, however, is any account of Freud’s contemporaneous struggles with, and panicked disavowal of, his own homosexual currents. As Freud stressed in the book, infantile sexuality held the key to the artist’s character; the “riddle” of it identified, its constitutive threads—the child’s stymied quest for knowledge, homosexuality, mother love, and artistic creation—were opened to analysis. Leonardo, Freud wrote to Jung as he embarked on his study, was a man who “converted his sexuality into an urge for knowledge” and was from that point on never able to bring any project to completion. He was, Freud argued, “sexually inactive or homosexual.”6 Freud’s simmering conflict over what he called “my homosexuality”—and over mutuality and dependence, which he consistently cast as feminine—would reach a crisis after the publication of Leonardo, in a dramatic confrontation with Ferenczi that occurred while the two were on holiday together in Palermo, on the

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island of Sicily. Freud interpreted his own psychology at this point in terms of triumph and mastery of the homosexual feelings he had struggled with since the end of his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess, the Berlin ear, nose, and throat physician with whom he had carried on an intensely intimate correspondence in the 1890s. Analysts and historians have seen aspects of Freud’s self-understanding mirrored in his presentation of Leonardo, but they have for the most part focused on his identification with the artist as scientific genius. Peter Gay, characterizing Freud as “always prepared to translate private turmoil into analytic theory,” focused attention elsewhere, arguing that the “secret energy” animating Freud’s obsession with Leonardo lay in his “unconscious homoerotic feelings” toward Fliess.7 In this respect, too, Leonardo was autobiography. What little was known to Freud of the historical Leonardo’s childhood may be briefly stated. The artist was born the illegitimate son of a notary and a poor peasant girl, Caterina, in the town of Vinci, near Florence in 1452. The same year, his father married Donna Albieri, “a lady of good birth” who would bear no children of her own. Sometime before the age of five, the boy was moved to his father’s household, remaining there until he was apprenticed to the painter Andrea del Verrocchio. Caterina would marry a local man, and all traces of her would vanish from the record of Leonardo’s life; his father would twice again marry. Most tantalizing to Freud, Leonardo would later note that one of his earliest memories was of being in his cradle when a kite—mistakenly rendered as a vulture in the translation Freud consulted—swooped down on him and, he wrote, “opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.” Admitting this was meager evidence, Freud nevertheless constructed an imaginative and, in the estimation of many, persuasive account of Leonardo’s perplexing personality—chiefly, of his homosexuality, which in the days of his apprenticeship had been the grounds for a charge of forbidden practices brought against him, of which he was acquitted, and which was later evident in his surrounding himself “with handsome boys and youths whom he took as pupils.” Inhibited and repressed, Leonardo never enjoyed what Freud called “a real sexual life.” He was, rather, “emotionally homosexual.”8

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Freud explained why this was so in a virtuosic if highly speculative reading of the childhood memory of the vulture—a memory he saw as a passive homosexual fantasy of taking the penis in the mouth and sucking on it—that took readers on a wild ride from Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis to a discussion of the vulture-headed Mother Goddess in Egyptian mythology. Of everything Freud gathered from his varied sources, the most significant as he saw it was that in ancient natural histories the vulture was a female creature, impregnated only by the wind. Freud confidently concluded that Leonardo, taken from his mother to join his father and Donna Albieri, had transformed pleasurable memories of being nursed by his mother into the unmistakably homosexual fantasy of taking the vulture’s penis-tail in his mouth and sucking on it—in this reminiscence substituting the vulture for the mother who had suckled him. Writing that he was “completely ignorant” of the age at which Leonardo actually exchanged “his poor, forsaken, real mother” for life with “a parental couple,” Freud argued that “it fits in best with the interpretation of the vulture phantasy” if that age were to be set at three at the least, at five at most. That early experiences were determinative of lifelong patterns underwrote Freud’s favoring the later age, which rendered Leonardo fatherless longer; paternal absence figured centrally in the histories of his and his colleagues’ homosexual patients. Further, contended Freud, surely only “years of disappointment” would have persuaded the barren Donna Albieri to accept the illegitimately born boy into her household as her own; it would have been highly unusual for her to have adopted him earlier. To put Freud’s account in its simplest terms: Leonardo was raised by his “real” mother, and—like legions of homosexuals subjected to analytic scrutiny—deformed by her attentions, in Freud’s words robbed “of a part of his masculinity.”9 In Freud’s theorizing, the “bliss and rapture” enjoyed mutually by mother and infant was “in the nature of a completely satisfying love-relation,” fulfilling at once a mental wish and physical need. So satisfying is this love that even in happy families fathers see their sons as rivals for womanly attentions, calling forth a deep-rooted antagonism against their male offspring and suggesting it was not only the

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boy who had to master his oedipal feelings. The suckling child at the maternal breast, Freud had written five years before Leonardo appeared, was “the prototype of every relation of love.” The mutually enjoyed “erotic bliss” on display in this “first and most significant of all sexual relations” between mother and son was, in the normal developmental sequence, inevitably succeeded by loss in the process of weaning and separation, culminating in the oedipal moment of renunciation of childish things.10 It was a species of satisfaction that in Freud’s view would never again be attained. Freud held that men, both those who would turn out homosexual and their heterosexual brethren, eventually repressed their mother attachments. The latter, subjected to paternal authority and oedipal terror, identified with their fathers and entered the company of civilized men. The former, prompted by motive forces Freud argued were not yet understood, narcissistically identified with their mothers and put themselves in her place, fated forever to love boys as their mothers had loved them, forever faithful to their mothers in running away from erotic engagements with other women. Maternal attention, in the Freud of these years, was a doubleedged sword. He conceived of it in his other writings as blissfully erotic and completely satisfying, a foundation for worldly success in later life. Those fortunate enough to grow up as their mother’s favorites, he wrote, often exhibited an enviable if “peculiar self-reliance and an unshakeable optimism” that could appear as indubitably masculinist “heroic attributes.” But in Leonardo he focused on the “violence” of the maternal caress, the menace of the single mother’s “tender seductions,” the “excessive tenderness” visited on the hapless son by the unsatisfied mother-without-a-mate. Starved for a husband’s caresses, the “poor forsaken” Caterina, “like all unsatisfied mothers, . . . took her little son in place of her husband,” with this move determining “his destiny and the privations that were in store for him.”11 Attempting to satisfy her own unmet longings, she awakened Leonardo’s eroticism too early. Freud’s construal of mother love as menace here is striking, especially because it coincided with his normalization of paternal aggression in the Oedipus complex. In Leonardo Freud cast the mother,

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not the father, as the real threat to the boy. Freud positioned Woman in opposition to civilization, a masculine enterprise held together by “social feelings . . . of a homosexual nature,” arguing in a presentation to his colleagues in 1912 that she rendered man asocial, representing both unbridled nature and what he later specified as the “retarding and restraining” interests of the family and sexual life. The menacing, seductive, and unsatisfied mother of Leonardo—a masculine woman, “able to push the father out of his proper place”—stands here in sharp contrast to the pure and tender mother found elsewhere in Freud’s writings.12 The germ of the overbearing Mom of midcentury American analysis and popular criticism, who in her ministrations spawned a generation of homosexual sissies, can be glimpsed in the predatory preoedipal Caterina.

Sitting Pretty Concurrent with the writing of Leonardo, the seeds were being sown of a fateful confrontation between Freud and his epistolary intimate Ferenczi, a confrontation in which self-sovereignty and mastery, dependency and homosexuality figured centrally. Freud would emerge from the clash proclaiming his independence and mastery, while Ferenczi would agonize over the rupture that followed until the day he died. By the time the two embarked on their Italian journey at the end of the summer of 1910, the dynamic that would characterize their relationship for the next twenty years had already been established. Freud would repeatedly offer himself up as the plenitudinous father to Ferenczi’s needy baby, exacting from Ferenczi a constant stream of idealizations, and would then castigate him for the same, claiming to have no need of them. “Let’s go to Sicily together, then,” Freud wrote to Ferenczi in the spring of 1910, finding himself “correcting Leonardo and otherwise doing nothing.” They had met two years earlier when Ferenczi traveled to Freud’s consulting room in Vienna from his home in Budapest, where he had been lecturing on psychoanalytic topics and treating patients for years. They immediately entered into an easy and increas-

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ingly intimate correspondence—playful, engaged, and, for a pen-andink age, remarkably contemporary in its urgent, rapid-fire feel. Freud was fifty-two, Ferenczi thirty-five. By the time Freud proposed the Sicilian trip, 150 letters had passed between the two, and Ferenczi had sailed with Freud and Jung to the United States—the occasion of Freud’s lectures at Clark University—in September 1909. As was so often the case in Freud’s life, however, with intimacy came conflict, notwithstanding his expressed desire on the eve of their travels for a  companion “between whom and myself not a hint of discord is possible.”13 The month before the trip to Sicily, Freud and Ferenczi wrote each other almost daily in excited anticipation of camaraderie and friendship. The holiday loomed importantly in Freud’s mind, he wrote, especially in its promise of “the fairy-tale feeling of living in freedom and beauty.” Ferenczi, for his part, was counting the days, daydreaming about the trip “during some of the more monotonous analyses.”14 Talk of anticipation, yearning, and longing to be together on the beautiful island is scattered through the letters Freud and Ferenczi exchanged. The men were together four weeks, setting out from Leyden, where Freud’s family was on holiday, stopping first in Paris for a “minute examination” of the Leonardos in the Louvre, and then in Florence, Rome, and Naples before sailing on to Palermo. The city is “an incredible feast,” Freud wrote to his wife, Martha: “Such a wealth of color, such views, such fragrant smells, and such a sensation of wellbeing I have never experienced all at once.” They spent two weeks in Sicily, by day visiting ruins and exulting in the beauty of the surroundings. The evenings were another matter. Ferenczi expected they would continue discussing the matters of mutual concern that had filled their letters, but Freud acted otherwise. He had brought along Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a book Jung had recommended, which provided ample material to fuel Freud’s developing speculations on the connections between homosexuality and paranoia. He and Ferenczi had apparently talked about the book at some length while traveling. One evening in Palermo, Freud invited

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Ferenczi to serve as his amanuensis and lashed out angrily when Ferenczi declined to play the part. Ferenczi recounted the incident in a letter to the psychoanalyst Georg Groddeck in 1921, explaining that Freud had expected too much “deferential respect” from him. He “was too big for me, there was too much of the father”: “On our first working evening together in Palermo, when he wanted to work with me on the famous paranoia text (Schreber), and started to dictate something, I jumped up in a sudden rebellious outburst, exclaiming that this was no working together, dictating to me. ‘So this is what you are like?’ he said, taken aback. ‘You obviously want to do the whole thing yourself.’ ” Ferenczi, hoping for a mutuality that from his perspective was repeatedly promised but never realized, was “left out in the cold” for the rest of the holiday while Freud spent the evenings working by himself. From Rome, where they stopped for a day on their return journey, Freud wrote to Jung complaining of Ferenczi’s infantile attitude and dreamy disposition. “He never stops admiring me, which I don’t like,” he added.15 Freud quickly put the incident behind him, returning to Vienna satisfied with the progress he had made in penetrating what he called “the riddle of paranoia.” He would spend the autumn following their travels writing up the case of Schreber, which he finished midDecember and saw published the next year. Ferenczi, by contrast, was haunted by the confrontation. Twenty years later, he wrote Freud reminding him how severe his punishment “in the matter of the Schreber book” had been, asking “would not leniency and consideration on the part of the bearer of authority have been more correct?” Shortly before dying, Ferenczi ruefully invoked the incident as exemplary of their relationship, castigating himself for having been “a blindly dependent son” and observing that in any case Freud had tolerated him as such “only until the moment when I contradicted him for the first time. (Palermo.)”16 In a flurry of letters following the Sicilian journey, Ferenczi assured Freud of his own “good intentions” and expressed his hope that what he referred to as “the events of our living together” would not diminish the intensity of their personal and professional rela-

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tionship. In reply, Freud seized on Ferenczi’s abjection, writing that he “often felt sorry for” him on account of his disappointment, linking it to Ferenczi’s expectation that he would, on the holiday, “wallow in constant intellectual stimulation”—a distortion of what had been mutually expressed desires for companionship. Freud reproved Ferenczi for not tearing himself “away from the infantile role”— echoing what he had written to Jung of his travelling companion— and faulted Ferenczi for not responding to his own educational efforts. “So I was probably mostly quite an ordinary old gentleman, and you, in astonishment, realized the distance from your fantasy ideal,” Freud wrote, disingenuously disavowing his own role in constructing this fantasy.17 Ferenczi replied to Freud with a long, self-lacerating letter, detailing his errors and admitting to his longings, which elicited from Freud the dismissive comment that nothing Ferenczi had so painfully put in writing was new to him. “I am also not that ψα [psychoanalytic] superman whom we have constructed,” Freud added, acknowledging his role in Ferenczi’s idealization of him: the construction of Freud’s omnipotence was indeed a joint project. Within the month, Freud was reproving Ferenczi for his readiness to admire him and returning to the claim that he had done nothing to encourage it: “I naturally gave no cause for admiration.”18 If Ferenczi idealized Freud, Freud used Ferenczi to recuperate from his break with Fliess. Freud had tried, since the end of their relationship, to master his lingering homosexual feelings for the Berlin doctor, who was, in the estimation of many, the great love of Freud’s life. The two met in 1887, when Fliess, twenty-nine at the time, began attending Freud’s lectures at the University of Vienna. They quickly struck up a friendship that Freud, for his part, expected would be “mutually gratifying.” Regular correspondents, within several years they were arranging the first of their many two- and three-day special meetings—which they called “Congresses”—in various cities and Alpine resort towns that were to the professionally and emotionally isolated Freud, in Jones’s estimation, as so many “oases in the desert of loneliness.” Freud once wrote to Fliess that he looked forward

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to a planned meeting “as to the slaking of hunger and thirst” and promised he would bring “nothing but two open ears and one temporal lobe lubricated for reception”—a striking formulation that even the most dogged of Freud’s defenders might want to read in the register of homosexual desire. Following a congress in Prague, for which he had yearned for weeks, Freud was “in a continual euphoria.” Desolation followed when congresses were postponed. Following one meeting, Freud wrote Fliess that he felt “strengthened anew for weeks.” In the same letter he admitted “no one can replace for me the relationship with the friend which a special—possibly feminine— side demands.”19 Fliess’s supportive epistolary presence and receptive critical faculties sustained Freud as he carried out the self-analysis that Jones saw as a heroic but solitary venture. Through the 1890s, the newly married Freud was by his own account acutely lonely, even as his family grew to include six children, all born between 1887 and 1895. Freud could tell Fliess just about everything, writing to him of his fears of death by heart attack, of the sexual state of his marriage, of Martha’s periods, of his own bodily symptoms and moods. Fliess was Freud’s physician and his dealer, operating on his nose and for a time in the early 1890s prescribing him cocaine. The intimacy between the two was palpable; as the Freud biographer Louis Breger notes, throughout the letters one can see expressed “a caring interest in each other’s bodies” that was perhaps authorized by their both being physicians. “I cannot write entirely without an audience, but do not mind writing entirely for you,” Freud on one occasion wrote to Fliess. “Your praise is nectar and ambrosia for me,” he wrote on another.20 Freud’s love for a man roundly condemned as an inferior thinker at best, a charismatic charlatan at worst, has long caused consternation, even embarrassment, among psychoanalysts. However much Jones attempted to ascribe what he called “the undeniable personal attraction” between the two men to “objective bonds of serious interest,” he could not help but portray their relationship as homoerotic. Perhaps picking up on the same, a contemporary of Jones cautioned readers

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that Freud’s letters to Fliess, published in bowdlerized form in 1954, constituted “a document for scientists and not a roman à clef.” An uncensored edition of the correspondence supports Freud’s characterization of it as “the most intimate you can imagine.” Gay, portraying Freud as intellectually and emotionally isolated in the midst of a bustling household run by the domestically skilled if “slightly drab” middle-aged Martha, declared that so emotionally barren was his marriage that “his wife virtually made Fliess necessary.”21 Freud was hardly so skittish about his love for Fliess, writing him repeatedly of his need for him, whether to serve as “a new impetus” to counter “intellectual stagnation” or as a receptive, reinvigorating audience to the personal and intellectual journey that culminated in the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. New Year’s Day 1896 saw Freud putting pen to paper to register how much he owed his dear friend, citing the “solace, understanding, stimulation in my loneliness, meaning to my life” that he had gained from him. “Your kind should not die out,” Freud added in an idealizing flourish; “the rest of us need people like you too much.” In a moment of unbridled enthusiasm, Freud could even declare his love of Fliess, writing in 1898 that he had long “realized that it was necessary for me to love you in order to enrich my life.” Years after the two finally broke, Freud was characterizing Fliess to a colleague about to meet him as “a highly remarkable, indeed fascinating man” whom he’d “once loved . . . very much.” It was a relationship to which his wife had assented, at least as Freud told it to his friend and analysand Marie Bonaparte, holding that Martha understood “very well that Fliess was able to give her husband something beyond what she could.” Fliess’s wife was by contrast jealous, a “malicious skirt” whom Freud some ten years after his final break with Fliess was still castigating as “wittily stupid, malicious, a positive hysteric” who had done “everything possible to sow discord between the two.”22 Freud’s passion for Fliess was sustained by a side of himself he termed feminine, and one may well imagine that Ida Fliess’s objections to the relationship were fueled by her intuiting that Freud more adroitly than she occupied the position of woman in her husband’s inner life.

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Jones assures us, however, that “in spite of all that,” self-control triumphed over desire. Freud’s thirteen-year-long relationship with Fliess came to an acrimonious end in 1904. But Freud could not claim to be free of Fliess until after his Italian journey with Ferenczi, during which he had in effect finished his incomplete self-analysis. He conscripted the willing Ferenczi—whose most pleasant memories of the trip were the ones, he wrote to Freud, “in which you divulged to me something of your personality and your life”—into the role of analyst. Freud related his dreams, which were “entirely concerned with the Fliess matter,” to his traveling companion, adding, in a devaluing flourish, that “owing to the nature of the thing, it was difficult to get you to sympathize.” Three months after the conclusion of the trip, Freud wrote to Ferenczi, “I have now overcome Fliess.” Ferenczi readily admitted to what he termed the “homosexual drive components” in his longing for “personal, uninhibited, cheerful companionship” with Freud, in his “longing for absolute mutual openness,” but Freud no longer had the need to open his personality to the other. That need had been extinguished in him, he wrote, “since Fliess’s case,” with the remnants of which he had been struggling to overcome—successfully, he claimed to Ferenczi. “A piece of homosexual investment has been withdrawn and utilized for the enlargement of my own ego. I have succeeded where the paranoiac fails.” Freud, that is, had overcome his homosexuality, “with the result being greater independence.”23 But Freud’s claim to mastery was premature. For at least two more years, to his dismay, traces of Fliess, repressed feelings for him—what Freud called “some piece of unruly homosexual feeling”—kept bubbling to the surface. Freud’s proclamation to be homosex-free notwithstanding, Fliess was still everywhere in Freud’s life, “incorporated in others”—Jung, Ferenczi, and Alfred Adler, with whom he was engaged in battle, “a little Fliess redivivus, just as paranoid.” So, too, homosexuality, homosexual fantasy, and homosexual panic were not banished but were sites of continuing struggle. Freud interpreted what he argued were the passive Ferenczi’s exorbitant, excessive needs for intimacy as homosexual, and in the wake of the confrontation in Palermo he was gripped by a species of homosexual panic,

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of horror and confusion in the face of his desires for homoerotic intimacy. As he proclaimed in the Schreber case, “a homosexual wishful phantasy of loving a man” was the core of the conflict found in paranoid males.24 Thus, even as Freud was collapsing homosexual desire and paranoia, he was engaged in struggle with his own homosexual attachment to Fliess and attempting to ward off the psychosis that his developing theory told him attended it. Freud rejected Ferenczi at the moment when he felt he had mastered his need for Fliess. Was Ferenczi’s need for Freud intolerably reminiscent of his own need for Fliess? Through the years, Freud drew one after another of his colleagues— Fliess, Jung, Ferenczi—into the blissfully exciting orbit of his personality, luring them with fantasies of complete emotional and intellectual merger. Each of these relationships followed a scenario of enchantment, mutual admiration, and dependency followed by brutal disappointment, ending in mixtures of disillusionment, recrimination, devaluing, murderous rage, or banishment from the analytic fold—and as such served as object lessons for generations of analysts in the perils of dissent. Analysts from Jung and Ferenczi on complained bitterly of Freud’s authoritarianism even as in varying degrees they submitted to it as the price of intimacy. It would take the once-loyal and supremely idealizing Kohut to call attention to the ways in which his own contemporaries replicated this submissive posture vis-à-vis Freud’s life and work, overestimating the master and longing to participate in his greatness much as their analytic forebears had.

Decried as a Homosexual Accounting for the origins of homosexuality and identifying the laws that governed its emergence were major preoccupations of Freud and his colleagues. Leonardo notwithstanding, Freud was famously known to be tolerant of homosexuals, holding they were not sick persons and that homosexuality was, as he wrote in 1935 to an American mother concerned about her son’s sexuality, neither vice nor degradation. In 1921, Freud opposed Jones, backing a “manifest

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homosexual” for admittance to the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and he was throughout his career opposed to the legal prosecution of homosexuals, signing a petition in 1930 favoring the decriminalization of homosexual activity. Freud and his colleagues believed that, as one put it, “homosexual ideas are to be found in everyone,” or as Freud himself wrote in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual objectchoice and have in fact made one in their unconscious.” Analysts’ offhanded comments on homosexuals—noting, for example, that they could be “extremely happy”—evince a broad curiosity. Some of their comments verge on the comic, for example, the observation that homosexuality was so prevalent in Berlin “because the Prussian woman is very prudish and therefore unattractive; the men are more dashing.” And, to be sure, they could see a homosexual component in just about anything or anyone: in alcoholism and in suicide (“the last attempt to perform a masculine deed”), in philosophers and in philologists, and in a taste for all things ancient, from art to historical costumes. Homosexuals, as one analyst saw it, singly “as well as in groups . . . have accomplished great things,” a line of argument consonant with his colleagues’ conviction that homosexuals were to be found in the ranks of the greatest of men: “Leonardo, Michelangelo and so on.”25 Freud’s manifest statements on homosexuality were evenhanded, and his writings more than any others transformed heterosexuality from a given into a precarious achievement. Yet the relationship between psychoanalysis and homosexuality, until quite recently, has been characterized by acrimony and enmity, with analytic pronouncements regularly mobilized in support of discriminatory policies and with some analysts attacking homosexuals outright. The impact of psychoanalysis on policy and popular attitudes is especially salient in the case of the homosexual narcissist. Freud’s association of homosexuality and narcissism in Leonardo is premised on an ambiguity in the text. Freud construes the homosexual-in-the-making as at once capable and incapable of object-love: capable in his choice of those other boys, “objects of his love”; utterly incapable in that his choice was but evidence of his slipping “back to auto-

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erotism,” which Freud explained earlier was a term he used “when there is no object.” Despite analysts’ interest in the social landscape of homosexuality, both ancient and contemporary, and despite their interest in probing the inner landscapes of historical and fictional homosexuals—despite, that is, their knowledge of the vast array of homosexual practices and personalities—they, like Freud, could theorize only sameness, not difference, when it came to homosexual object choice. As Kohut later explained, classical analytic theory valued choosing a person different from oneself “in functions and physical equipment.” Morphological likeness trumped any possible differences among men—of personality, of appearance, of class, of upbringing—such that the improbable hypothesis that homosexual love for another was but love of self, like masturbation literally autoerotic, found easy acceptance. As Freud’s American translator Abraham Brill summed up the association in 1913, giving voice to an emerging analytic consensus, “The road to homosexuality always passes over narcissism, that is, love for one’s self.”26 Freud had been testing variations on this theme of the homosexual incapacity for relationship in conversations with his colleagues for two years before he wrote Leonardo. Reporting to them on a case of latent homosexuality in 1908, Freud highlighted the boy’s suppression of mother love but did not mention the compensatory identification with her that he would later hypothesize followed in its wake. Rather, his complex narrative started with the patient, who had “always preferred boys,” turning against them in “jealousy and hate” because his mother, toward whom he harbored tender feelings, praised the others in his presence “for their physical and mental superiority.” Liking boys turned to rage against them, which was then, Freud argued, transformed—apparently redundantly, given the subject’s lifelong preferences—into “a liking for them.” A year later, Freud brought identification with the mother into the same scenario, which still turned on the same improbable transformation of hate into homosexual love.27 Conflict with actual others, not retreat into solipsistic self-absorption, characterizes the mechanism of homosexual character formation adumbrated in these instances, in which liking—even love of—other boys or men figures centrally.

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Freud’s texts and statements in fact oscillate between characterizations of the homosexual as capable of—indeed, defined by— loving others of his sex on the one hand and on the other as utterly incapacitated for love by solipsistic devotion to the former self his mother had once loved. Freud observed homosexuals attempting to relate to others, pursuing boys and seeking to be lovers, but the logic of his argument ensured that he would theorize—and make literal— only the sameness (the qualities shared between self and other) in such relations despite his observations and his consistently allowing that there were many types of homosexuality. Freud’s argument that homosexuality consists in a relation to oneself instead of to another was at odds with the developing analytic truism that homosexuality lay at the root of social life. Psychoanalysts spoke with one voice on this issue, with Jung, for example, seeing tremendous advantages in homosexuality, suited as it was to “large agglomerations of males (businesses, universities, etc.),” and Ferenczi seeing it “in friendship leagues, in club life, etc.” Freud even suggested that homosexuals were perhaps better suited than heterosexuals to social life, for while the latter competed with their peers for women, the former had early on overcome their rivalrous impulses toward their fellows. A colleague, for example, might be thought “agreeable” on account of “his well-sublimated homosexuality.” Exclusive and private interests fueled heterosexuality, while public and communal interests were consonant with homosexuality. Invoking what was apparently common wisdom among his fellow analysts, Freud observed that highly developed “social instinctual impulses” were to be found in many homosexuals, characterized by “their devotion to the interests of the community.” He later elaborated on this idea, arguing that as “love for women” disrupted the bonds of race, nationality, and social class, homosexual love was “far more compatible with group ties, even when it takes the shape of uninhibited sexual impulsions”—which he himself thought a “remarkable fact.” Freud’s argument was that social feeling was premised on sublimated homosexuality, which made for good collegial relations.28 Woman, more than the homosexual, was the disruptive force in social life.

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One year after his and Freud’s Sicilian trip, Ferenczi was theorizing homoerotism, a term he preferred to homosexuality in its foregrounding of the psychical over the biological, taking the measure of how much had been lost in men’s avoidance of “mutual affection and amiability,” the enthusiasms of male friendship that the ancients had so unselfconsciously enjoyed. Ferenczi could see around him but slight vestigial traces of what had once been a robust mode of male relations, in its positive instantiations in “club and party life” and in its negative in the “barbarous duels of the German students”—none of which could compensate men “for losing the love of friends.” Instead, as he saw it, men displaced their unappeased homoerotism onto women. “Obsessively heterosexual,” these men became “the slaves of women”—unnaturally chivalrous and idolatrous toward them—as the price of freeing themselves from their fellows. Ferenczi, perhaps the first theorist of heteronormativity, argued that repression of homoerotism, of men’s natural affection for one another, produced “obsessive reinforcement of hetero-erotism.” He saw the same dynamic at work in his own person. Probing what he called his “homosexual fixation,” he explained to Freud that there was in him “a woman and only behind her [is] the real man,” his own heterosexuality “a reaction formation against homosexuality.”29 The ubiquity and even the necessity of homosexuality were thus common coin among early analysts. From the perspective of the London-based analyst J. C. Flügel, who introduced the terms homosocial and heterosocial in a 1927 publication, this was common sense. “A man who falls in love” with a woman, he argued, was “obviously less gregarious” with his friends than was the single man. The exigencies of sexual love—characterized by “private, secretive and absorbing affection”—were at odds with society’s demands. As an analytic colleague summarized Flügel’s argument: that “sexuality and sociality are antagonistic made social relationship [sic] between members of the same sex easier than between members of the opposite sex.” Yet homosexuality was from the start routinely cast in the analytic literature as an objectless, even autistic or masturbatory, form of sexual expression. By the middle of the twentieth century,

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the figure of the homosexual as linchpin of social life had been definitively occluded by the figure of the narcissistic homosexual who is altogether incapable of sustaining relationships with others—who, in technical language, is characterized by his “inability to cathect objects” and by a corresponding “hypercathexis of the self.”30 That is, homosexuality had become pure love of self. There are a few homosexual men who love others in the postFreudian analytic literature of homosexuality. A paper by Otto Fenichel from 1933 gives us a gentle, feminine homosexual narcissist, who, like Leonardo, was over-identified with his mother and who surrounded himself with friends who tellingly resembled himself. And a paper by Herman Nunberg published five years later features a man whose taste in lovers ran to the “tall, strong and handsome.” But the developing consensus was that the homosexual related only to partial, not true, objects; that his characteristically “passionate and evanescent” relations with others did not qualify as object relations proper; and that in any case he did not in fact exhibit object strivings. Rather, because many homosexuals could not relate to sexual partners as total personalities, such partners were not really persons to them but, rather, vehicles “for instantaneous instinctual discharge.” Their sexuality defined by its “strikingly compulsive” quality, they pursued fleeting gratifications not lasting connections. The “incredible ease” with which they substituted “one partner for another” was replicated in the analytic situation, in which they connected deeply to analysts before abandoning them.31 Narcissistic to the core, such men could not be induced to become fully loving persons. A fantasy of perfectly realized heterosexual object relating serves as a foil to this damning portrait of homosexual deficiency. This fantasized heterosexuality is all the more striking in light of Freud’s consistent underscoring of the fraught nature of heterosexual attraction in men, which he saw as difficult to achieve and maintain due to the male proclivity for dividing women into virgins and whores and civilization’s curbing of sexual satisfaction. Moreover, Freud would argue in “On Narcissism” that the “complete object-love” characteristic of men was itself premised on a “marked sexual overvaluation”

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of the loved one deriving from the subject’s childhood narcissism, now transferred onto the object of his love; the loved one, that is, is loved at least in part narcissistically in the register of self-love.32 Other analysts argued that homosexuals were uniquely drawn to sameness while acknowledging that heterosexual love was at base similarly narcissistic. Such testimony to the fundamentally ambiguous nature of all love notwithstanding, in the analytic literature on male homosexuality, the impediments to love—to healthy and fully realized object relating—that in other contexts were cast as universal were seen as peculiar to homosexuals. For all of analysts’ emphasis on the narcissistic bases of all love, they were adamant in arguing that identification—which has a spectral quality about it in the literature, opposed to an embrace of “real objects”—was far more important a factor in homosexual than in heterosexual attraction. We are left here with a paradox. The same analysts who argued that homosexuals were unable to establish proper relationships and that one of the defining disabilities of homosexuality was an incapacity for relating to others argued at the same time that the social relations constitutive of society were premised on homosexuallytinged relationships among men. And the same analysts who could see nothing of love in the homosexual’s objectless mode of relating could themselves trade easily—and sometimes painfully—in love among men. Was homosexuality best reserved for heterosexuals, idealized on the condition it would never be realized?

Healthy Narcissism That narcissistic, developmentally arrested love of self was opposed to mature love of the other quickly became analytic wisdom in the wake of Freud’s Leonardo. Yet from the start this straitened view of narcissism elicited objections—at least when love among heterosexuals was at issue. Immediately upon reading a draft of “On Narcissism,” Ferenczi questioned Freud’s suggestion that self-love and objectlove made competing claims on individuals. The person in love, Freud wrote in the essay, “seems to give up his own personality” in favor

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of investing his libido in the other; put more technically, the subject’s ego-libido and object-libido in Freud’s view formed a closed system, as “the more of the one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted.” Libido, that is, was allocated either to the self or to the other. It could not reside in both at once. In a letter to Freud, Ferenczi disagreed, arguing that the self in love was enhanced, bringing objects into its compass and using them as sources of pleasure through the mechanism of introjection, a concept that Ferenczi had introduced in his 1909 paper, “Introjection and Transference.”33 Self-love and object-love were from his perspective mutually reinforcing. Other analysts went public with their challenges to Freud’s conception of narcissism. His Viennese colleague Paul Federn coined the term healthy narcissism in the 1930s to denote a range of observed narcissistic phenomena that the ascendant understanding of Freud’s position on narcissism could not account for. Federn’s aim was to wrest narcissism from the “realm of pathology” to which he suggested it had been unjustifiably restricted. He pointed out that while in the rigid “dictionary sense” the term denoted pathology and could never be used to refer to any sort of object relationship, in fact even in the hands of Freud—whom he noted invoked “common everyday” senses of critical words to convey technical meanings—it referred to normalcy and to relations with objects. Federn maintained that there were aspects of the healthy, normal self rooted in narcissism, better conveyed in “layman’s language” than in the psychoanalyst’s idiom. General well-being, self-assurance, self-assertion, “satisfaction with one’s own personality,” the “ ‘inner resources’ and ‘equanimity’ ” that underwrote the adult’s capacity to weather the frustrations of daily life—all were sustained by pleasurable and “narcissistically gratifying” positive investment in the self. Individuals’ fantasies “of love, greatness, and ambition,” in which narcissism and object strivings were both visible, were often the basis of worldly accomplishment and creativity. Federn’s point was that these desires were not to be castigated but understood; progressively tempered in the course of life by the demands of reality, they took the form of “useful planning and pondering.”34

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The term healthy narcissism was absent from Freud’s oeuvre. It fit uneasily with his developmental scheme, which saw the mature self transcending its early narcissism. Healthy narcissism referred to a different dimension of personhood, whether it was an “experiential orientation” or a capacity—for exuberance, for liveliness and resourcefulness, for “inner freedom and vitality.” Federn and the few other analysts who invoked the concept before its popularization in the 1970s used it in reference to the self’s needs for “growth and mastery,” to its “feelings of triumph over difficulties,” and, more capaciously, to the “capacity to enjoy life.” They noted variously that “mental harmony in the adult” corresponded to “adequate self-love,” that healthy narcissism was protective of the self, that “feelings of self-liking” with which healthy narcissism was associated sustained a subjective sense of well-being, and that healthy narcissism was critical not only for creative work but also for “full mutuality in mature object relationships.”35 Self-esteem was central to this conversation. A venerable term, it had long appeared in the vernacular as a synonym for positive feelings about the self. In “On Narcissism,” Freud used the word Selbstgefühl—self-feeling, translated by the editors of the Standard Edition as “self-regard”—repeatedly, writing near the end of the essay that it “appears to us to be an expression of the size of the ego” and that it was increased by “everything a person possesses or achieves” as well as by remnants “of the primitive feeling of omnipotence” confirmed by experience. Notably, Freud speculated that in “loverelations” one’s Selbstgefühl was raised by being loved and lowered by not—a formulation that confused his colleagues in contradicting what he had written about the more mechanistic workings of libido but that approximates the understandings of self-esteem developed from the late 1920s on. Some English-speaking analytic readers of the German Freud rendered Selbstgefühl as self-esteem; writing in 1946, Erik Erikson simply assumed that Freud was talking about self-esteem in “On Narcissism.” Other native German speakers also traded easily in self-esteem, among them Otto Fenichel and Annie Reich, endowing it with a positive valence and, taking its presence

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and importance for granted, focusing attention on its sources, regulation, and maintenance. The term self-esteem appeared sporadically in the English language analytic literature beginning in the 1920s. A turning point of sorts is captured in the editor’s note to a 1928 paper by Sándor Rádo explaining his decision to render Selbstgefühl, which he noted was “usually translated by the neutral word ‘self-regard,’ ” variously as “self-respect, self-esteem and self-satisfaction, as well as by self-regard” because, in his estimation, Rádo’s usage of it was more positive than could be conveyed by the word self-regard alone. In this paper, Rádo observed that the self-esteem of strong individuals, premised realistically on their own achievements, barely fluctuated in response to the “trivial offences and disappointments” of everyday life, while their weaker counterparts relied on the “approbation and recognition of others” for the narcissistic gratifications they needed to maintain their self-esteem in the face of life’s many challenges. Self-esteem was, in Rádo’s hands, a condition of healthy independence of others, its absence sparking strong cravings for love and external supports. Fenichel similarly envisioned self-esteem as a fungible quantity subject to regulation, whether internally or externally, highlighting the ways in which some regulated their selfesteem in dependence on others for “external supplies” and love. And Annie Reich saw narcissistic disturbance not in high self-esteem but only in its poor regulation, as visible in the “self-inflation” of those who could not realistically bend to reality’s demands and accept their limitations—giving voice to the analytic view that development demanded of individuals that they relinquish their infantile omnipotence, nurtured in a context of perfectly responsive maternal care that saw to their every need, for the more realistic self-appraisals of mature adulthood. From the 1920s through the 1960s, laboring at the margins of the analytic field, Rádo, Fenichel, and Reich, among others, in effect recouped for analysis, in the form of self-esteem, the self-feeling that constituted the largely overlooked positive narcissism Freud briefly outlined.36 It fell to Kohut to bring healthy narcissism and the self-esteem on which it was premised from the periphery of the analytic conversation to the center, to celebrate what defenders of Freud’s orthodoxy,

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plus royaliste que le roi, imagined would have caused “theoretical embarrassment” in the master. It is noteworthy that Kohut launched his inquiry—at analytic meetings, in seminars and lectures, and in his first major publication on the subject, “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism,” which appeared in 1966—by stressing how problematic he found the analytic juxtaposition of self-love and object love. He argued throughout his career that the analytic maxim that, “grossly put, object love is good and self love is bad” represented the intrusion of moralism into clinical practice. In his view, the analytic axiom that “narcissism disappears as object love appears” was a prejudice that stemmed from a two-thousand-year Western tradition that considered altruism—“to love one’s neighbor more than oneself, essentially not to be concerned with oneself”—an overriding value, “the height of all virtue,” exemplified in the notion that “we start out as egotistical babies, but we end up as social workers.” Within analysis, as Kohut saw it, this took the form of an unacknowledged favoring of the patient’s capacity for fully realized object love “as the sign of emotional maturity” and excluded from the analytic field a range of phenomena properly considered narcissistic, based as they were on positive self-esteem—achievement and ambition as well as the fantasies of greatness that support the personality.37 “That homosexuality and narcissism are closely related goes without saying,” Kohut maintained in a lecture to analytic candidates in 1972, a measure of how tightly the two were still intertwined within the discipline at that point. Yet narcissism was not, to his mind, a disease, and neither was homosexuality. He invoked the achievements of the homosexually inclined Socrates as evidence that “the capacity to copulate”—heterosexually, one assumes he meant here—was not the best measure of a man. Kohut’s goal was to unsettle the antithesis between narcissism and the analyst’s vaunted object-love, as well as, secondarily, the alignment of homosexuality with the former and heterosexuality with the latter. This effort was at the center of his career-long advocacy for the virtues of a broadly construed narcissism. Like Ferenczi before him, he saw the self enhanced in loving another, adducing as an example the lovers’

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“narcissistic glow.” And, like Federn, he argued that narcissistic strivings could be glimpsed in love of another and might even be necessary to it: one did not have to be a psychoanalyst to recognize that those possessed of low self-esteem were hardly the world’s “greatest lovers.” Kohut also bucked analytic wisdom by pointing out that the relationships of many heterosexuals who experienced their partners not as fully differentiated and separate but as extensions or replicas of themselves were fundamentally narcissistic and yet enduring and considered socially valuable. Conversely, among homosexuals it was possible—if rare in analytic practice circa 1972— to find partners experiencing each other as separate individuals in established lifelong relationships not so different from marriage. As Kohut liked to remind his colleagues, it was not the outward appearance but the inward mode of relating that was critical in discriminating between object-differentiated and narcissistically fueled love. Even the most sociable heterosexual might be narcissistic in surrounding himself with those who “mean nothing to him except in terms of his self, or as a relief from loneliness, or as confirming his presence.”38 Kohut endeavored to reconstruct in practice and convey in theory what he called “total feeling states.”39 This again situated him in the same analytic genealogy as Rádo, Federn, and others among their contemporaries, here for the reason that he, like they, chafed at the limitations of the Freudians’ drive-based, developmental model and attempted to define a range of capacities and qualities of little interest to orthodox Freudians. Otto Kernberg, although less focused on healthy narcissism than Kohut, like his colleague conceptualized narcissism in terms of selfesteem regulation and explored the ways it fluctuated in day-to-day gratifying or frustrating experiences with others, as well as with individuals’ experience of the relation between their aspirations and achievements. Like Kohut, Kernberg argued that the self-esteem of the individual in love was enhanced, and not, as Freud had posited, diminished, and that self-love was similarly reinforced by “the images in our mind of those we love and by whom we feel loved.” The

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problem was not that “the narcissist is too much in love with himself,” as it was put to Kernberg in a 1978 interview, or that they “love only themselves and nobody else” but, rather, their self-hate a significant factor, that “they love themselves as badly as they love others.” Envious of what they could not themselves enjoy, they had to “spoil, depreciate, and degrade” the capacity others had to find emotional gratification in love.40

Once narcissism became healthy, the psychoanalyst’s homosexual narcissist quickly and quietly dropped from view. And once self-love was recast as self-esteem, it was transformed into a popular—if almost immediately contested—ideal. Common wisdom circa 1970 held that it was “a simple psychological fact that you cannot love anyone unless you love yourself first.” Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden’s 1969 book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (the latest edition’s subtitle reads A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Understanding That Launched a New Era in Modern Psychology), retrospectively credited with getting the self-esteem “ball rolling,” exhorted readers to love themselves before anything else. Other books with titles like How to Be Your Own Best Friend and articles with titles like “What Makes a  Woman a Good Lover” touted the virtues of self-love and selfesteem as well as the foundational role both played in the making of “remarkably productive” citizens able to value themselves and others, too. Popular magazines invited readers to measure their self-esteem by taking quizzes featuring statements such as “People generally admire me” and “I see myself as a good-looking person,” with strong agreement indicative of an estimably high self-esteem. “Keep up the good work,” counseled one author to those who scored the highest. And Essence editorialized in the early 1980s that it was time for “we Black folk” to start celebrating the self, to experience and hold on to “the glorious feeling” of self-love. “You can have a sense of purpose if you adopt an inner attitude of personal esteem,” counseled the magazine. “No one can nurture or bolster your self-esteem better than you!” One analyst’s observation that “mental harmony in the

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adult often seems to be correlated with adequate self-love” assumed popular form in Good Housekeeping’s at once upbeat and subtly coercive advice: “Believe me, self-esteem leads to a better life for you and everyone with whom you come into contact.”41 The popular experts’ influence was pervasive, with a poll conducted in 1991 showing that 89 percent of respondents considered selfesteem (or “the way people feel about themselves”) very important in motivating people “to work hard and succeed,” ranking it higher than duty, honor, and responsibility to the community. Further, only 10 percent of those polled admitted to having low self-esteem themselves (notably, one-third thought at least one of their relatives was so afflicted). “America Seems to Feel Good about Self-Esteem,” Newsweek announced, even as the concept was emerging as a new cultural battlefield, with the imperative to love oneself considered exemplary of what came to be known—derisively by its many detractors—as self-esteem culture. That the state of California formed a “Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem” in 1987 to investigate the relationship between self-esteem and a range of social problems— “crime, alcoholism, drug abuse, and welfare dependency”—and to make specific policy recommendations to address them only fueled the skeptics’ ire. Newsweek criticized the task force as “a bit lala” even for California, while allowing that in Minnesota the idea of government promoting self-esteem had traction. Among the institutions getting on board were churches (substituting “low self-esteem” for “sin” was more congregant-friendly), businesses (empowering employees was less expensive than giving them raises), and schools (abolishing “F” grades, bestowing awards and gold stars on everyone). “Low self-esteem is merely the latest form of social pathology commending itself to specialists in the cure of souls,” wrote Christopher Lasch in the early 1990s, speaking for the skeptics.42 To Lasch, casting a backward glance, the mindless psychobabble of self-esteem culture was of a piece with Me-Decade sensibilities, centrally implicated in the epidemic of narcissism that was then first visible. Self-esteem makes only a fleeting appearance in The Culture of Narcissism, invoked in passing in portrayals of narcissistic

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pathology; Lasch was at the time of its publication more interested in selfishness than in self-esteem, and he was writing before selfesteem was politicized. But self-esteem’s provenance is neither so straightforward nor so open to mockery. The cultural axiom that “you have to love yourself to be able to love someone else” cannot be so readily dismissed as an excrescence of the Me Decade. Neither is the attempt to puzzle through the pleasures and dangers surrounding self-esteem entirely new; one can find a record of a psychologist bemoaning the regrettable opprobrium attached to it as early as 1909. Newsweek’s admission at the early-1990s peak of self-esteem culture that “as a general prescription for child-rearing” instilling self-esteem was unassailable is evidence of how deeply the normalization of healthy self-feeling had taken root. The professional view, picked up by the popular media, was that it was, as described by Kohut, the cold and rejecting parents who were the problem, the parents who criticized instead of praising and accepting their children.43 The renovation of self-love was also the occasion for the renovation of narcissism—but only within psychoanalysis. Through the 1970s, analysts could be found in the popular press touting the virtues of healthy narcissism, arguing it was necessary for worldly success, “vital for satisfaction and survival,” and an ingredient of general “mental well-being.” Analytic wisdom, as articulated by a leading New York analyst in 1984, held that “you have got to have a bit of narcissism to succeed.” Narcissism was not the antithesis of success but necessary to its achievement; there was nothing wrong with pride or even “the urge to be great.” A New York therapist argued in the New York Times that “there is such a thing as healthy narcissism.” She added: “Appreciate your strengths and work on the weaknesses that are changeable. If there are things that you simply can’t change, then try and accept your imperfections—lovingly.”44 Analysts’ briefs for healthy narcissism made little impact on a public disposed to think of narcissism in terms of pathology. To analysts, it was a truism that, as Freud’s colleague Isidor Sadger had long ago observed, we all to some degree love ourselves. The analyst’s

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narcissism referred to “to self-love, or self-esteem.” To a public debating the pros and cons of self-esteem, however, narcissism—of the decidedly pathological variety—came into play only when too much self-esteem was at issue. In the popular conversation, narcissism was not normalized in the 1970s analytic revolution, only becoming healthy some thirty years on.45

Five INDEPENDENCE

Many Americans like to think of independence as a quintessentially American value. Its roots are seen to stretch back to the first groups of immigrants to have come to American shores in search of personal, social, and political freedom and autonomy. Since the Declaration, the idea and sentiment of independence has been located at the heart of the national enterprise, visible not only in domestic and foreign policies and culture but also in a host of redoubtable American archetypes, from the frontiersman of the nineteenth century to the technology entrepreneurs of the twenty-first. Dependency is, by contrast, anathema to many, associated with subordination, subjection, and neediness—of the poor, for instance, and the young. In the 1970s cultural maelstrom around narcissism, these taken-for-granted verities were cast anew. Christopher Lasch argued that America’s culture of mass consumption was rendering its onceindependent citizenry as dependent as the infant at the breast and he, like many other critics, lamented the passing of the sovereign self of a sturdier time. To Lasch, an ascendant therapeutic sensibility was eroding self-reliance, rendering parents dependent on the helping professions and prompting their children, subjected to “enlightened childrearing,” to embrace “dependence as a way of life.” Rampant narcissism was the result. Heinz Kohut provocatively argued the contrary case. It was not enlightened but emotionally distant parents, unresponsive to their children’s needs for affection and unable to nourish their vitality, who spawned narcissists. Children needed

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adults who could respond with delight, not condemnation, to their grandiosity and fantasies of omnipotence. The independence championed by social critics and orthodox analysts alike was a fiction, Kohut argued. “There is no such thing.” From his vantage, a well-oiled internal support system lay behind what passed for independence. “You need other people to become yourself,” he said, and it was nonsense “to try and give up symbiosis and become an independent self.”1 Psychoanalysis at its inception had valorized independence, self-sufficiency, and freedom from needs, the same values Lasch was promoting in the 1970s. In the same decade, Kohut was pulling together the threads of an alternative analytic perspective in which independence was not an unqualified good but, rather, a sometimesfantasized state symptomatic of a narcissistic refusal of a realistic and healthy dependency. Otto Kernberg, while acknowledging the pleasures associated with independence, like Kohut, would interpret intolerance for dependency as symptomatic of narcissistic pathology. To depend on anyone was anathema to the narcissist, who claimed to need nothing and no one. Kohut, Kernberg, and their like-minded predecessors transformed dependency, like self-love, from a troubling characterological flaw to a necessary dimension of the healthy person’s functioning. Critics for the most part overlooked the analytic revaluation of independence, drawn as they were to the Freudian vision of the exemplary self as autonomous and sovereign, a self without needs. In “On Narcissism,” Freud portrayed the infant as omnipotent in its majestic independence, its narcissism expressed in its autoerotic love of self. Analysts would later see individuals’ development blighted by envy of this infantile state of needing nothing, of perfection and control. Construing infancy as a state of sovereignty, they consistently blurred lines between fantasy (the infant as independent) and social relations (the infant as perforce dependent) in writing about it. The analytic fantasy of needing nothing is encapsulated in the concept of “primary narcissism,” a concept introduced by Freud in 1914 meant to describe the infant’s original condition of aloneness and love of self. The concept was contested from the start, seen

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by some as an impossible state and by others as an achievable ideal. Whatever its eventual analytic fate, Freud’s primary narcissism can be seen as a state of unconstrained autonomy and omnipotent sovereignty that he continually attempted to inhabit, even as he relied upon his many male intimates for ongoing and constant support and mirroring—to say nothing of the female figures in his domestic life. Once again, the nature of Freud’s personal relationships set narcissism’s course from the start. Lasch and his fellow social critics adopted this Freudian fantasy of the self without needs to condemn what they argued was a ubiquitous, feminized dependency threatening the body politic. The critics’ indictment gained force as they joined it to a critique of consumer society structured around a profound distrust of desire and fantasy, wants and needs. Yet even as Lasch turned to contemporary analytic theory to bolster his claims for the rise of a “new narcissism,” he altogether missed that the dominant strand of it represented a repudiation of the values he himself held dear.

Hallucinatory Independence Freud first used the term primary narcissism in reference to a hypothesized early developmental state of aloneness and self-sovereignty that he argued preceded the infant’s connectedness to anyone other than itself. Babies, he held, were blissfully oblivious to reality, capable of attaining satisfaction merely by hallucinating its achievement, just as one might experience pleasurable feelings in dreams. The Freudian infant was fundamentally invested in loving itself, autoerotic in its taking of itself and no one else as a love object. It felt itself to be omnipotent, overestimating the efficacy of its thoughts and imagining its needs might be met by so much “screaming and beating about with its arms and legs.” It was nothing short of sovereign: “His Majesty the Baby,” in the estimation of its besotted parents “the centre and core of creation.”2 The infant’s autarkic sovereignty was, of course, a fantasy. As any mother then or now can tell you, no one is more needy and

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dependent than an infant. Writing in 1911, shortly after the appearance of Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Freud conceded as much, qualifying his description of the infant’s enviable capacity to meet its own needs by adding the words “provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother.” The mother and her ministrations quickly dropped from Freud’s view, however, and the infant of his telling emerged as increasingly sovereign—and fictional. Not for another twenty years, in his essay “Female Sexuality,” would he theorize, let alone mention, the child’s dependence on its mother. It is worth noting that in Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, Freud wrote that he could not “think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection,” a remarkable statement that was consistent with his view of the mother as a hallucinatory presence in the infant’s life.3 Sándor Ferenczi, by contrast, hypothesized that it was only the fetus that was “without wants,” bringing the mother into the infant’s ambit as a real, not hallucinatory, presence. In the womb, he wrote, when all care fell to the mother, when the human lived “as a parasite of the mother’s body,” the fetus had everything it could want. Beyond the womb, Ferenczi consistently saw a hovering maternal presence, whether of mother or nurse, that enabled the infant’s sense of omnipotence, its feeling that it had all it could want and that there was “nothing left to wish for.” As portrayed by Ferenczi, this maternal presence was a master illusionist, instinctively intuiting the infant’s wishes for return to the state of complete satisfaction it had enjoyed in utero and fulfilling them by her swaddling, rhythmical rocking, and monotonous lullabies. That the infant had no knowledge of or interest in “the nurse’s existence and activity” only underscored how perfectly calibrated her attentions were. The infant was irreducibly solipsistic in its expectation that the mother’s interests would always be the same as its own, an expectation that Ferenczi’s fellow Hungarian Alice Balint would later analyze in “On Love for the Mother and Mother-Love,” a brilliant but little noted paper. “For all of us it remains self-evident that the interests of mother and child are identical,” she wrote, adding that “the generally acknowledged measure of the goodness or badness of the mother is how far

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she really feels this identity of interests.” Notably, Balint argued that motherhood offered its own intense gratifications. In her hands, the relation between mother and child was characterized by a Ferenczian mutuality and interdependence.4 Freud acknowledged in “On Narcissism” that the child’s primary narcissism was not in fact directly observable and could only be inferred. He envisioned its existence in observations of the moving but childish quality of parental love, which in its overvaluation of the child’s gifts and capabilities, he argued, was but a “revival and reproduction” of the parents’ own abandoned childhood narcissism. And he hypothesized that the megalomania of adult schizophrenics, primitive peoples, and children alike was not a “new creation” but a magnification of a previously existing infantile condition. This megalomania, consisting in “an over-estimation of the power of their wishes” and a grandiose belief in the omnipotence of their thoughts, was kept under control in normal adults. Freud had already proposed that love of self and love of others were inversely related, arguing that as one was enhanced, the other was depleted and that the homosexual’s overweening self-love ruled out object-love. Now, in 1914, Freud was arguing that it was not only homosexuals who narcissistically sought “themselves as a love object” but, rather, everyone. “We say that a human being has originally two sexual objects,” Freud explained, “himself and the woman who nurses him.”5 Freud was now convinced that the ego was from the start self-loving, invested in itself and not in others, without wants and without desires, a proposition that his colleagues—then and for many years afterward— found utterly bewildering. How could the self love the self? Who or what was doing the loving in this construal? The concept of primary narcissism has proven particularly problematic in the history of psychoanalysis. Critics have cast it as, at best, inconsistently used, complex, and highly theoretical and, more devastatingly, as purely hypothetical, even tautological, an unnecessary concept descriptive of “no recognizable state.” Analysts focused on the mother, especially those analysts based in Britain and in Hungary, were among the first to register objections to the concept, focusing on its occlusion of the maternal role. Arguing that the

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narcissism that was ascribed to the infant “has no real existence,” Ian Suttie charged that primary narcissism was rather a faulty way of representing the infant’s characteristic solipsism that was derived in part from Freud’s own fantasies and resentments. Other revisionists, especially those associated with the émigré analyst Melanie Klein, who had arrived in London from Budapest in 1926, wrote along similar lines that primary narcissism simply “did not exist.” Alice Balint’s husband, Michael Balint, an analysand of Ferenczi’s and, like his wife, an enthusiastic follower of the brilliant Hungarian, offered perhaps the most extended critique of the concept, starting by pointing out that while the theory behind it was neat and tidy, neither Freud nor his followers had been able to observe or adequately describe it. Balint maintained that infants were born relating intensely to their environments and that the responsive care of mothers exclusively devoted to them was a constitutive part of these environments. Assuming this care was delivered with a sensitivity to infantile need, that babies were, for example, not subjected to rigidly enforced nursing routines, it was as fundamental and as unnoticed and as unworthy of comment as the air that they breathed. All narcissism in Balint’s view was secondary, following from a disturbance of this early symbiotic state.6 In delineating primary narcissism, Freud cast the infant as not only independent but also omnipotent. He saw infants as flush with awareness of their own power, possessing the capacity to feel themselves sovereign even over their parents, who, while beholden to the child’s every need, in fact occupied the position of dominance in the nursery. So strong was the siren call of this blissful state of imagined omnipotence that it could tempt even the most realistic of adults with its promise of the unbounded pleasures of self-sufficiency and control. Freud situated the infant—His Majesty—in a field of power relations vis-à-vis the mothers who nurtured them and the fathers who would soon enough demand their submission, employing the freighted language of kingship to capture their fantastic sovereignty. “Both infant and sovereign somehow exist beyond the limits imposed on adults by ‘reality,’ ” notes one theorist of monarchical power, suggesting that the monarch, like the infant, perforce inhabits “two

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worlds simultaneously, one soberly realistic and the other utterly fantastic.” The paternal idiom of kingship leaves no room for maternal authority and nurturance in political theory and Freudian theory alike.7 Freud’s majestic baby is in this sense not a rhetorical flourish but an emblematic figure that transforms actual, feminized infantile dependency into a fantasized male omnipotence.

Freud’s Heroic Dependencies The social relations of motherhood and of paid servitude that sustained the Freudian infant’s pleasurable yet illusory autarky were absent from Freud’s work and field of vision. While Ferenczi registered and later Michael Balint theorized a morally neutral interdependence, Freud saw in this most helpless of states a wholly implausible independence that tells us as much about his own inner currents as it does about infant psychology. Freud repeatedly made clear his personal disdain for dependence. As Ernest Jones tells us, independence was Freud’s life blood, in his own words “a lordly feeling.” Dependence, in contrast, was anathema, and to rely on others for help or support was in Freud’s construal to risk feminization. For example, writing to Carl Jung in the aftermath of the Palermo affair described in Chapter 4, Freud characterized Ferenczi as infantile and objected to his passive, receptive nature, to his “letting everything be done for him like a woman,” adding, “and I really haven’t got enough homosexuality in me to accept him as one.”8 This idea of woman as one who lets everything be done for her is especially piquant coming from a man who depended on the care and support of a bevy of women, among them his wife, his daughter Anna, and his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, as well as of a full household staff. Freud insisted, according to Jones, “on doing everything for himself,” but it was in part this supportive network of female caretakers who made his remarkable productivity possible. “Anybody who had the privilege of knowing Freud’s household was impressed by the loving care which made possible a tranquil life for this indefatigable intellectual laborer,” noted fellow analyst Fritz Wittels. Another, “dazzled by the beauty” of the Freud’s family life,

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credited the household’s harmony to his wife Martha’s gentle nature. Yet another, gesturing to the division of labor that worked to Freud’s advantage, lightheartedly observed that if he “had a wife like Martha he too would have written all those books.” Intelligent young men, Freud wrote from the wisdom of middle age, knew to choose a wife not for physical beauty but for cheerfulness and “the talent to make their life easier and more beautiful.” Martha Freud was abundantly endowed with that talent, completely devoted to her husband’s welfare. After his death, she would claim that in fiftythree years of marriage the two had never exchanged an angry word and that she had done all she could “to remove from his path the misery of everyday life.”9 Managing the large household with methodical and unobtrusive efficiency, she allowed Freud what was even by the conventions of bourgeois households of the time an extraordinary measure of freedom from domestic concerns. The care of the six children, the preparations and presentation of meals, the management of the staff—all this fell to Martha. Much has been written of Martha Freud’s devoted domesticity. Her evident contentment in fulfilling her husband’s expectation that women fashion themselves as, in Jones’s words, “ministering angels to the needs and comforts of men” has occasioned discomfort among some feminists who would prefer to discern some nobler calling or spark of rebelliousness in this exemplar—in psychoanalytic terms— of normal femininity. Indeed, the management of the household that Sigmund’s fellow analysts and idealizing biographers have portrayed lyrically, stressing the couple’s complementarities, takes on a darker cast in the hands of Katya Behling, a recent feminist chronicler of Martha’s life. All observers are in agreement that order and punctuality— regimentation, in Behling’s characterization—were seen as special virtues in the household, and that the professor lived by the clock. Rising every morning at seven to dress himself in clothes Martha had laid out for him, Sigmund was “said to have been given a helping hand in getting washed and dressed,” Behling writes, adding that “rumor had it she would even put the toothpaste on his brush for him.” Following a quick breakfast and a glance at the day’s news, he was off to his study where, from eight o’clock until one, he saw pa-

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tients for sessions, each lasting fifty-five minutes. Every spare moment between analyses he devoted to catching up on his voluminous correspondence. Lunch, the main meal of the day, was a precisely choreographed production during which Freud, in the company of his chatting wife and children, sat in a preoccupied silence that puzzled the occasional guest. After lunch, Freud took his near-daily constitutional through the neighborhood, stopping to visit publishers or to replenish his supply of cigars. Coffee was served by the household’s maids at four. More patients followed, often until nine at night. Finally, after relaxing a bit with his family at supper, he returned to solitary work in his study, writing letters and analytic papers, until heading to bed at one or later. Through all this, Martha was quietly and efficiently organizing, managing, coordinating, cleaning, shopping, and entertaining, overseeing the household with what Behling sees as almost military rigor.10 The only unconventional aspect of the house was that it was, of course, the incubator for the new and sometimes scandalous science of psychoanalysis, from which Martha, by one account considering it “a form of pornography,” distanced herself. The production and transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge was an immensely laborintensive undertaking. As was typical in such home-centered enterprises, family members were pressed into service. There were manuscripts to be written out and copied by hand. When Freud wanted to send a colleague a snippet from a published paper, someone had to laboriously transcribe the text. Packets containing unpublished manuscript materials had to be entrusted to the post and might be lost. Possessed of what Jones termed a feminine ineptitude for making travel arrangements, Freud relied on his son Oliver to read train timetables and to book cabins with steamship companies for his frequent travels. His daughters—“now my secretary,” he remarked of Sophie in 1910, when she was fifteen years old—helped distribute analytic publications to colleagues across Europe and, when he was in his seventies and not up to the physical demands of writing, Anna, “the mistress of the typewriter,” stepped in. At the center of this hive of productive activity was Freud’s sister-in-law Minna Bernays, Martha’s younger sister, who moved into the Freud household in 1896,

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ten years after the death of her fiancé. Bernays oversaw much of the logistics of Freud’s professional life, from mailing packages to corresponding with hotels about lodgings for participants in analytic gatherings. “I can’t take care of anything myself,” Freud once wrote to Ferenczi when Bernays was away and unable to help—thus assuming the feminine position that he would find so distasteful in his epistolary intimate.11 Freud took for granted the dependence on women’s labors that made his immersion in productive work and enjoyment of a world of homosocial pleasures possible. Dependence on men, however, unsettled him. Jones, who could no more tolerate Freud’s dependencies than the master himself could, discussed the issue at length in his biography. It comes up first in his account of Freud’s “passionate friendship” with Wilhelm Fliess, which traces an arc from dicey dependence to heroic freedom, culminating in Freud’s manful overcoming of his needs for companionship and embarking alone on the self-analysis that would prove to be the foundational moment for his new science of psychoanalysis. At the end of this chapter of his life, by Jones’s telling, Freud stands alone, his need for personal dependence forever vanquished.12 Jones attempted to downplay Freud’s manifest thralldom to Fliess by declaring it a sign not of inner weakness but of “a terrifying strength,” assuring the reader it was “the complete opposite of the more familiar type of dependence” of the weak on the strong before going on to disavow it altogether as the manifestation of a decadelong psychoneurosis. These assertions notwithstanding, Jones admitted that Freud more than Fliess had a “need of psychological dependence.” Jones’s account of the dynamics of the relationship, for all its insistence on the “gratifying mutual admiration” that sustained the two, insistently returned to the imbalance of need that he found so unsettling. In the end, even for Jones, there was no getting around the fact that “Freud’s need was great.”13 We can see the arc of Freud’s relationship with Fliess replicated in his relationship with Jung. The two analysts carried on an intense, tumultuous correspondence that opened in 1906 with warmth and self-revelation before descending into disillusionment, hostility,

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rage, and a mutually expressed, lifelong bitterness toward each other. Jones, who in writing his biography of Freud had privileged access to the more than three hundred unpublished letters that passed between the two, has given us an ascetic Freud who was less deeply invested in the relationship than was Jung; according to Jones, Freud was fond of Jung but not “emotionally involved in a personal sense.” The publication of the uncensored correspondence, in 1974, provided overwhelming evidence to the contrary, with several analysts commenting on the love that bound the two men. Freud’s need for the man he had quickly designated his successor—“I now realize that I am as replaceable as everyone else and that I could hope for no one better than yourself . . . to continue and complete my work”—or, as he put it, “crown prince,” is palpable in his anxious hounding of Jung when he did not immediately reply to letters. Sixteen months into their relationship, Freud admitted to Jung that his own “personality was impoverished” absent communications from him. The motif of Jung’s negligence in meeting Freud’s insistent demands runs through the correspondence to its acrimonious end.14 Even more striking a measure of Freud’s need for his colleague are the fantasies of merger, of complete identity of interest and oneness that he entertained from the start of the relationship. Freud at first expressed a wish that no misunderstandings would arise between them but soon enough became controlling, demanding total submission from Jung—a demand Jung attempted for many years to meet. Thus, two years into their correspondence, Freud wrote to Jung that he was “quite certain that after having moved a few steps away from me you will find your way back. . . . I am satisfied to feel at one with you and no longer fear that we may be torn apart.” As their differences become more apparent, Freud’s demands for and assertions of unity escalated. “Nothing can befall our cause as long as the understanding between you and me remains unclouded,” Freud wrote in 1910, the cause referred to here being psychoanalysis—this in the midst of the jealousies, dissensions, and apostasies chronicled in their correspondence and upon the conclusion of the disastrous Italian journey he had taken with Ferenczi. Two years later, by which time the fact that Freud and

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Jung’s relationship was unraveling was public knowledge in the analytic community, Freud was still offering merger as the only way to save it, as well as, by extension, psychoanalysis. “Otherwise we agree about everything,” Freud wrote, when it was clear they agreed on little, expressing his hopes for “a reciprocal intimate friendship.” When the break finally did come, in 1914, Ferenczi wrote to Freud offering to sustain him in the “face of the loss” that “getting rid of Jung has meant.” Freud’s irritated, devaluing response was that Ferenczi overestimated “Jung’s significance for my emotional life in much the same way he did.” Writing that “I also don’t work easily together with you in particular,” Freud added gratuitously, “you often put a strain on me.” One week later, as Ferenczi put it, Freud was finally “alone, at last.”15 In theory as in life, Freud pathologized dependency and needs, consigning both to the feminine and homosexual. He thought of himself as without wants and needs, consistently positioning himself, as he put it to Ferenczi in the midst of his travails with Jung, as “emotionally quite uninvolved and intellectually above it all.” Freud’s consignment of dependency to the realm of the feminine was written into psychoanalytic theory and lore, ensuring that he and his analytic colleagues had a hand in imbuing the term with the morally freighted psychological dimension it still carries today. Since the sixteenth century, dependency has denoted a condition of subjection or subordination. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon tell us that the term was then used in reference to a subordinate’s reliance on another for subsistence or support—for example, a laborer’s reliance on a landowner, or a wife’s on her husband. This kind of subordination was normal and routine, and for the most part morally neutral. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, as working men claimed political rights for themselves and as political movements deemed dependency antithetical to independent citizenship, the term was increasingly stigmatized. It took on a feminine cast as gendered forms of subordination considered normative for women but degrading for men became increasingly visible. Chief among these forms was that of the housewife, a figure whose purported withdrawal from productive endeavor invited the charge of

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parasitism that shadowed her past the midpoint of the twentiethcentury period and whose reliance on her husband’s “family wage” obscured his own economic dependence on his employer. As her dependency was highlighted, his was occluded. By the end of the nineteenth century, dependency’s compass had shifted to refer less to an individual’s social, economic, or political status than to his or her characterological disposition. It took on a psychological dimension, referring to an “excessive emotional neediness” and to a childish refusal of independence.16 Enter Freud and his colleagues, many of whom from the start linked dependency with women and children, reflexively qualifying the term with “infantile” or “childish” when using it in reference to adults. When it was a man’s dependency that was at issue, it was deemed girlish, morbid, or even paralyzing. The boy’s task, as Freud saw it, was to renounce infantile pleasures and join the company of men. Within the world of the analyst’s Oedipus, the boy is not dependent on the mother; rather, he desires her. “To be really progressive, free and independent, an individual must shake off his infantile attachment to, and dependence on, the parents—whether as real individuals, as memories of these individuals, or as incorporations of these individuals within the self,” one analyst wrote in 1927, paraphrasing the Freudian perspective. The girl’s task, by contrast, was to accede to her biologically determined inferiority, manifest in her lack of a penis. The sovereign separateness that was the boy’s aim was an option closed to her, who in transforming her stymied wish for a penis into a wish for a child took her father in the place of the disappointing—because penisless—mother as her love object. That is, while the boy emerged from the oedipal moment without attachments, the girl emerged dependent on a man—her father. Freud and his colleagues proposed that woman’s dependence on man was not a social fact but, variously, biological, physiological, or natural. Jones, for example, claimed that women, for “obvious physiological reasons,” depended more on their partners of the opposite sex for sexual gratification than did men. In the social sphere, it was far more common to see traits associated with independence such as “enterprise, responsibility, initiative, and self-reliance” in men than in

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women, tethered as they were to their parents. Analysts would later develop the concepts of “morbid dependency” and “extreme dependency” to account for a woman’s anxiety-fueled clinging to a domineering man in whom she seeks the strength she does not herself have or a person’s overreliance on another to the extent of not recognizing him as having a separate existence.17 But on the question of what “normal dependency” might mean they were for the most part silent. In the genealogy of dependency, then, early psychoanalysts gave gendered social relations the stamp of professional approval by naturalizing women’s dependence on men. On this issue as on many others, there were strong but marginalized dissenting voices within the discipline. Suttie, a blistering critic of Freud and classical analysis, argued in his 1935 book The Origins of Love and Hate that “psychic dependency of one sort or another is a feature of everyone’s character.” As early as 1923, Suttie was attempting to challenge the primacy of the drives in Freudian theory, proposing as an alternative that the infant was object seeking—and thus not independent—from birth, but Jones, after “anxious consideration,” declined to publish his work in the field’s flagship journal, the International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, which he edited. Thus rebuffed, Suttie went on to publish in psychiatric, not psychoanalytic, journals, and he and his revolutionary perspective—which has only recently been given its due as pioneering and remarkably prescient—were effectively banished from psychoanalytic view until the 1970s and later. And, in the 1940s, W. R. D. Fairbairn, working in relative professional isolation in Edinburgh, would theorize a mature dependency that was normal, neither shameful nor feminized.18 Through the 1950s, however, the analysts in the mainstream of their profession who wrote about dependency underscored its feminine cast.

Self-Sufficiency Dependency figured centrally in Lasch’s indictment of 1970s American culture. Freud and his colleagues located the origins of dependency in the earliest stages of human development. Lasch,

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in contrast, located its origins in consumer culture, arguing that narcissistic dependency was rooted in materialism. His argument was clear, if a bit disingenuous when it came to his fellow social commentators: moderns were narcissistic in their weakness and dependency, which was evident in their inability to see to their needs, not, as simple-minded critics would have it, in their hedonistic, selfseeking egoism—on this score critiquing his colleagues for voicing what was a major strain in his own work. Lasch adroitly managed to transmit to readers something of the Freudian horror of dependency in a wholly accessible form. It was those portions of his books written in the vernacular—not in the idiom of psychoanalysis—and informed by a critical tradition that celebrated independence and warned of its demise that accounted for the appeal of his extended polemic on the virtues of self-sufficiency. 19 Lasch took particularly sharp aim at the culture of consumption, arguing that it bore responsibility for many of the deficiencies of the contemporary American character. In his account, capitalists had once cared only for their workers’ capacity to produce and had been indifferent to what little private life they enjoyed after twelve to fourteen hours in the factory. The advent of mass production in the early years of the twentieth century prompted capitalists to recast their employees in the mold of consumer, a civilizing mission that involved instilling in them a taste for new and better things. No longer destined to lives “of drudgery and mere subsistence,” the masses began to indulge in the frivolous pleasure—formerly restricted to members of the aristocracy—of discarding old possessions and buying new ones simply because they wanted to. Venerable habits of postponing gratification gave way under the relentless pressure of propaganda that forcibly instilled new needs and appetites in the hapless, fostering new forms of discontent, anxiety, and envy in the process. Promising limitless satisfactions, consumer society sided with women against oppressive men, emancipating them from patriarchal authority and mandating that they “smoke and drink in public, move about freely, and assert their right to happiness instead of living for others.”20 In Lasch’s view, these were all sham forms of liberation. He saw no genuine autonomy for women in the freedom to consume and

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skipped over the potential significance of a domestic balance of power so significantly altered in women’s favor to which he had himself drawn attention. The crux of his argument was that consumer society bred narcissism by undermining independence, rendering individuals weak, dependent, and unable to meet their own needs despite appearances to the contrary. Consumers’ “complete dependence” on the market, on vast bureaucracies, and on technological systems beyond their immediate control nurtured feelings of helplessness akin to those experienced by infants “completely dependent on the breast,” Lasch argued, adducing as examples individuals’ blind reliance on the electrical grid to provide power or on medical technology to improve health. Life as a modern consumer, which in Lasch’s hands consisted in a reenactment of the cycles of gratification and frustration experienced at the breast, was nasty if not short enough—an ever-increasing population of confused and dependent elderly in need of care and support constituting “an undesirable side-effect” of faith in the material and technological progress that undermined the autonomy of worker and consumer alike.21 Lasch often strained against his own arguments in attempting to shoehorn consumption-besotted women into a position of dependency. He maintained that the purveyors of the ethic of mass consumption decisively if unwittingly encouraged women’s liberation from male control and oppression, nurturing in them an appetite for personal fulfillment and self-expression that, we might suppose, would not be so easily sated by the material goods newly on offer. But to him women’s newfound independence of the claims of family and tradition served only to feed consumerism. The contributions of new technologies to women’s independence—the sexual freedom abetted by reliable birth control or, more prosaically, the physical freedom enabled by the development of labor-saving household appliances—were to Lasch problematic. He objected to birth control on the grounds it stripped sex, “especially for women,” of what he primly called “important ‘consequences.’ ” And he tried to transform the washing machine and dryer into oppressors of women, allowing that while these household appliances reduced the housekeeper’s drudgery, they also ensured her dependence, explaining that a failure

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of the power grid would bring “housekeeping to a halt.” Some feminists have seen women victimized in their pursuit of the impossible standards—of personal beauty, of domestic cleanliness— that the world holds up as normative, while others have seen in that same pursuit a freedom to flout those norms and create them anew.22 Lasch wanted it both ways—women in his estimation were victimized by their liberation. Lasch’s tendentious take on consumption had roots in a critical perspective that, since at least the advent of commercial society in the West in the eighteenth century, divided economic activity between a highly valued and well-disciplined sphere of productive activity and a devalued, suspect, and impossible-to-control sphere of consumption associated with women—inconstant and fickle, sensual and frivolous. Defined by Adam Smith in his 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations as the natural and self-evident complement to production, its “sole end and purpose,” consumption would be largely neglected in economic thought, reflexively located in the home, until the development of theories of marginal utility in the 1870s. Classical political economists, worrying the question of what endowed things with exchange-value, looked exclusively at men’s labors—which were becoming more visible as work moved from home to factory—in their calculations of the contribution of wages to the cost of goods, overlooking women’s domestic endeavors. Women’s contributions to the maintenance and reproduction of the workforce were also ignored. The home was reframed as a nonproductive private sphere of particularized consumption, in contrast to the market with its universalizing tendencies, and the housewife was rendered a superfluous economic actor, a parasite on men who no longer had anything to do as the birthrate fell and as the market supplied the food, clothing, and other goods she had once produced at home.23 Parasitism, a strong charge summoning up graphic images of a leeching, exploitative dependency, surfaced repeatedly in both sober social scientific and popular accounts of the housewife’s diminished duties in the first half of the twentieth century. The NorwegianAmerican social critic Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term

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“conspicuous consumption,” suggested that this womanly parasitism was no mere unintended side effect of economic progress but a mandate, honored among the poor as well as the rich, that testified to the standing and reputability of the master of the household: a wife’s idleness vouched for her husband’s success. In his The Theory of the Leisure Class, a witty send-up of the extravagances of the newly rich and those further down the pecuniary scale who would imitate them, the middle-class wife performs leisure for her husband’s vicarious enjoyment while paradoxically serving as the “chief menial in the house.” Veblen’s version of the production-to-consumption narrative turned on woman, with the wife who had once produced goods for her husband’s consumption now ceremonially consuming the goods he produced.24 Many commentators subsequent to Veblen transformed the wifely acts of consumption that he ironically characterized as performative into alarming social fact. They overlooked altogether the dialectic between servitude and leisure that Veblen argued was constitutive of the archaic institution of the wife, giving us instead a home altogether drained of productive activities. As a Professor U. G. Weatherly wrote in 1909, the eclipse of home production—“poultry-raising, gardening, weaving, soap-making”—by the modern money economy opened the possibility to women, who were no longer economically useful, of “frankly accepting the position of a parasite” in becoming wholly dependent on their husbands. Five years later, another social scientist reported that industrial progress had yielded “a relatively large leisure class of parasitic women” who, with nothing to do, personified economic dependency—a development he and Weatherly both decried. Meanwhile, feminist writers of the period also exploited the specter of womanhood reduced “from partners to parasites,” in their case to argue for women’s access to the world beyond the home. They warned that idleness bred complacency and restlessness and questioned the normality of lives so wasted.25 A few feminist writers tried to counter the developing socialscientific consensus that theirs was a parasitical sex. One in particular, Amey E. Watson, an expert on the economics of the home and professor of social work, argued in a 1932 article that the fact that

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so much household labor was performed without remuneration— “done for love”—had misled both economists and the laity into grossly undervaluing its economic worth. Making a pitch for a broadened conception of the home’s productive functions, she invoked her fellow home economists’ argument that “any activity that develops a utility or satisfaction” is productive, including those commonly classed under the rubric of consumption. She provided the reader with a daunting list of essentials to the operation of the household, ranging from the most basic tasks of food preparation and cleaning to the higher level managerial tasks related to the “psychological, emotional, and educational care” of members of the family. The home, as Watson portrayed it, was a productive unit worthy of economists’ respect, a business partnership under the joint control of its husband-and-wife board of directors. But hers was a losing battle in the court of public opinion. Within the discipline of home economics, an enhanced conception of the housewife’s activities may have prevailed, but beyond it the household was cast as a site of wasteful consumption, a sinkhole of bottomless, unmet need superintended by the idle housewife. Families “buy everything—food, laundry, entertainment—and produce nothing,” according to an article in Life magazine in 1948. Along similar lines, a sociologist writing in 1943, barely two paragraphs after describing “the drudgery of housecleaning, diapers, and the preparation of meals,” blithely asserted that the middle-class mother “has little to do, in or out of the home.” And, in their popular 1947 misogynistic screed Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham advanced a version of the same argument, portraying the premodern home as a hub of activity, in contrast to the idle modern household. In suggesting that before the industrial revolution “women had a large and satisfying world of free activity available to them”— spinning and weaving, sewing and baking, canning and laundry—and that after it the home was an empty and economically superfluous shell, they turned women’s preindustrial household labors into satisfying avocations while at the same time proving themselves as oblivious as any other writers on the subject of the physical toll housework even in the most modern of houses exacted.26

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Lasch critiqued consumer society from the perspective of the selfsufficient subject with few needs and no superfluous wants. He argued that people would still be able “to provide for their own needs” as they had once done had they not, since the 1920s, been subjected to reeducation at the hands of advertisers intent on discouraging home production to stimulate consumer demand. Invoking handicraft production as an ideal, without, however, specifying what goods he envisioned individuals actually crafting, he maintained that Americans—surrounded by objects they had not themselves made—were “weak and dependent” where they had once been masterful and independent. In Haven in a Heartless World, published in 1977, Lasch called for the restoration of paternal sovereignty in the household, sovereignty that he thought had been too readily yielded to the feminizing agents of the helping professions—social workers, educational reformers, temperance advocates—promising to liberate women from the oppressions of the family.27 He began to round out his vision of familial autarky in The Culture of Narcissism, supplementing the political and emotional dimensions outlined in Haven in a Heartless World with a material dimension that was anachronistic and austere, even grandiose, in its scope. His vision would have families living on the farm and off the grid and men meeting in the town square while women cooked, cleaned, sewed, and—recall those “consequences”—reared children, all without recourse to technology or the marketplace.

Phony Independence Kohut’s combative claim, shortly before he died, that independence was a phony value was a frontal assault on one of the core principles of Freudianism. In his view, classical analysis mistakenly took for granted that independence was the goal of development, and that children naturally matured as they overcame their helplessness and dependencies. Kohut recognized throughout his writings individuals’ strivings for independence, and he was attuned to the pleasures of experiencing oneself as an independent self, assertive and “alive.”28 But he argued that Freud’s—and, by implication, Lasch’s—stress on

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independence was not analytically defensible. His critique centered on three points. First, Kohut insisted on distinguishing among the biological, sociological, and psychological meanings of dependence and independence, claiming that classical analysis misleadingly failed to do so. The infant’s helpless dependence was an undisputed biological fact, and sociologically it was beyond questioning that adults were dependent upon each other, for no one person had the skills to see to all of his or her needs. Psychology, however, properly referred to neither biology nor sociology but only to persons’ mental states, and psychoanalysts went astray in assuming that dependency strivings in adults had the same quality as the child’s normal feelings. In consequence, he charged, analysts misguidedly cast behaviors seen in the adult analysand such as “fearful or stubborn clinging,” “holding on,” and “resistance to letting go” of the analyst as manifestations of psychological infantilism. Dependency as used by analysts misleadingly came to refer both to the infant’s condition (a biological fact) and to the adult’s wishes to be dependent (a psychological state). Analysts who employed the concept of regression to explain what they considered infantile dependencies in adults knew little of actual infantile mental states—in infants, that is.29 Analysts might imagine adults with dependency needs as but bigger-sized infants, but of the infant’s actual feelings they perforce knew nothing. Second, Kohut maintained that in healthy persons childish narcissism was not altogether abandoned as mature object-love was taken up, as mandated by the Freudian developmental model, but instead transformed. Early forms of it, such as grandiosity, were “remobilized and reintegrated” in the service of ideals, self-esteem, creativity, and other useful attributes of a healthy personality. Narcissism followed its own line of development. To privilege independence and autonomy over dependence, and to align the former with maturity and the latter with lack of the same, was to espouse a moral view in the language of science. Kohut sought to sever the connections Freud had established between independence and psychological health and maturity.30 Third, Kohut argued that what adults experienced as independence was a feeling made possible by the lifelong presence of

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sustaining and reassuring internalized others or, in the language of self psychology, selfobjects. “An independent self is one that is clever enough to find a good selfobject system,” Kohut explained. It was “nonsense” to aspire to Freudian independence, a condition of being free of all needs. Kohut conceptualized independence phenomenologically, arguing that the term captured a state in which individuals felt themselves vibrantly alive, in turn with their innermost goals and ambitions. The capacity to experience pleasurable feelings of independence as an adult was paradoxically premised on parents recognizing and gratifying their children’s dependency needs, not denying them in the name of a vaunted autonomy. In 1950, David Riesman had registered the strangeness of Freud’s view of the child, cast as loath to forgo “the blissful fetal state” for reality’s harsh demands, socialized only forcibly into adolescence and adulthood. Kohut likewise questioned this orthodox view of the child as unwilling to face reality and instead clinging “to the supposedly joyous state of self-overestimation,” reveling in its “omnipotence, omniscience, moral and esthetic perfection.” Independence as Kohut saw it flowed from the child’s natural, joyful strivings, provided they were mirrored and supported by attentive caregivers. Individuals did not follow a solitary path to maturity but were throughout their lives situated in sustaining matrices of relations. By the end of his career, Kohut understood mature autonomy as the capacity to rely on others, to accept one’s dependencies as a manifestation of human relatedness. Claiming one’s independence of the world of selfobjects was, in his view, a sign of severe psychopathology.31 Kohut, unlike many other revisionists, accepted that primary narcissism was a valid concept. But he did not see the point of debating its existence. He treated it not as an actual possibility or realizable state but as a heuristic, a “psychological abstraction,” useful for thinking about the quality of the self’s relationships to others. It was a clinical fact only by inference not observation, referring strictly to a prepsychological state inaccessible to even the most empathically inclined. “I will not bother you much with that concept,” he told fellow psychotherapists at a seminar, “only mentioning that it has a certain usefulness.”32 Primary narcissism offered a conceptual space

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in which he would delineate the selfobject, an object experienced as part of the self, that figured so centrally in self psychology. And it offered therapists a conceptual tool for comprehending the otherwise inexplicably childish behavior of adults who must control everything and who react with rage when thwarted. Therapists could use primary narcissism as an aid to envisioning such adults as infants who had not yet distinguished between themselves and the mothers who nurtured them.

“Pathological narcissists simply cannot depend upon others,” Otto Kernberg said in Newsweek in 1978, deeming this a “crucial characteristic.” To him, their intense denial of normal needs for dependency is a strategy meant to protect an “inflated self concept”—it is as if the narcissist asks, why risk rejection at the hands of another who may not see me for “the ideal person I imagine” myself to be? Patients’ dependence on their analysts was problematic to Freud, but to Kohut, Kernberg, and their fellow revisionists it was the sine qua non of the analytic relationship. These analysts were in agreement that narcissists in the treatment setting deny their dependencies, their denial shielding them from their own intolerable feelings of rage and envy. Enclosed in their autarkic kingdoms, narcissists defend themselves against those who would tempt them out of their isolation. Their social and sexual relations may appear normal, but in fact they are unable to allow themselves to need anything or anyone because they experience such need as a humiliation. The greatest threat to the narcissist is the “object-loving” other who cannot resist the challenge of undermining the narcissist’s self-sufficiency.33 Freud bequeathed to psychoanalysis what one analyst characterized as “an inordinate fear” of patients’ dependency needs. It may have been that his skittishness about his own dependencies shaped his construal of what many have agreed is the impossible-to-realize state of aloneness and sovereignty that he hypothesized was constitutive of primary narcissism. Commentary on Freud’s personality is threaded through the analytic corpus, whether it was Jones’s fervid defense of the master’s improbable independence or Suttie’s rather

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cruel ventriloquism of what he took to be Freud’s pessimistic philosophy, “I care for nobody and nobody cares for me.” That Freud fashioned himself fiercely independent while being unable to tolerate the same in his followers has long been noted; the gist of Jung’s complaint that Freud kept his analytic colleagues “in a state of infantile dependency” recurs regularly in the literature. “His Dependence on Men,” Erich Fromm’s provocatively titled chapter in his popular book, Sigmund Freud’s Mission, published in 1959, challenged Freud’s self-portrayal, as well as the portrait sketched by the “idolizing” Jones. Fromm charged that Freud “was ashamed of, and hated” his dependencies on his male intimates. A reader of his voluminous correspondence with these intimates cannot but be struck by how pressing is the issue of who can admit to needing what, and by the assiduousness with which Freud managed the closeness and intimacy of those relationships—aided, to be sure, by the fact they were epistolary, not face-to-face.34 Kohut recognized that analysts’ unexamined commitment to independence values was based not only on Freudian ideals but also on the centrality of these values to the western tradition. He objected to their distorting influence and “abiding primacy in the hierarchy of Man’s values.” Kohut was largely successful in his campaign to dethrone independence as an unquestioned analytic ideal. Desperately committed to an illusory sovereignty and self-sufficiency, narcissists were defined by Kohut and his colleagues not by their dependency but by their fiercely held, fantasized independence. Lasch thought of himself as a student of the new narcissism, but on the question of independence—as on others—he was more classically Freudian than he knew. He cast the narcissist as dependent and saw narcissism sustained by the dependent “way of life” that he argued was the new cultural ideal, and saw nothing of what analysts might have considered narcissism in his own valorizations of self-sufficiency.35 Freud’s primary narcissism corresponds to the fantasy of the freestanding, sovereign male self of the social theorists, the self without needs and without attachment. Analysts working in the classical tradition pathologized dependency, gratification, and satiation, contrasting them to the much vaunted independence, renunciation,

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and asceticism that were their own ideals. In favoring the latter over the former, mainstream analysts were arguing from the same position as were the social critics who eviscerated their contemporaries. Revisionist analysts situated the human person in a relationship of dependence from the start and, in contrast to their classical colleagues, stressed the inevitability of dependence and the therapeutic value of gratifications. Advancing their critiques of the modal American’s lack of independence, quest for instant gratification, and immersion in the pleasures of the moment, social critics blamed psychoanalysis for offering a vision of life without restraints. In doing so, they misread mainstream psychoanalysis, which held dependency and gratification in as much contempt as they themselves did, blaming it for loosening the restraints of tradition and undermining the social order.

Six VA N I T Y

Vanity, long referring to a female taste for frivolity and desire for admiration, has been associated with narcissism from the start. What Freud’s colleague Otto Rank called “normal feminine vanity” entered the psychoanalytic conversation in 1911, making its debut linked to the narcissistically tinged love of one’s own body that Rank suggested was especially evident in women and feminized homosexuals. Maintaining that woman was more narcissistic than man, analysts in the next several decades confidently theorized womanly narcissism as compensatory and biologically determined, derivative of the “castration” girls underwent at puberty. As one explained, a young woman’s physical beauty “makes up to her for the lost penis” she had once “virtually possessed.” Her masculine strivings renounced with the loss of the male organ, woman was fated to “prize the beauty of her figure and face” and was destined “to sexually and aesthestically excite the desire of men.”1 Female narcissism, whether expressive of beauty and charm or of lack and deformity, was in early analysts’ construals an acceptable if inescapable accommodation to woman’s subordination to man, an adaptive response to the cold facts of anatomical difference mobilized in the service of heterosexual desirability. Freud, however, in his essay “On Narcissism” gives us a female narcissist—in his estimation “the purest and truest” type of woman—conceptualized in terms not of biological lack but of an enviable psychic plentitude. In contrast to his colleagues, Freud was focused primarily not on the

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narcissist’s beauty, which he allowed was often considerable, but on her psychology, pointing to her self-possession as the source of her charm and attractiveness. Loving only herself, he argued, the narcissistic woman was not inclined to the “sexual overvaluation” of the other that he held constituted at once “an impoverishment of the ego” and “the origin of the peculiar state of being in love.” Rather, it was “only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of the man’s love for them.” To love another fully, to be capable of complete object-love, was by Freud’s telling to give up something of oneself—object-love constituted a depletion, not an enhancement of the self and its resources. The self-contented and emotionally inaccessible narcissistic woman was critically important “for the erotic life of mankind,” Freud wrote. She had “the greatest fascination for men.”2 What so forcefully struck Freud about the female narcissist was her unwillingness to jeopardize her blissful self-sufficiency, so reminiscent to his mind of the child’s original state, in the name of love. The female narcissist’s refusal of attachment signaled a gender-specific deficiency of development that Freud would eventually spell out in a theory organized around women’s lack of the penis and envy thereof. For the moment, however, it was man who was lacking, and woman who in her enigmatic self-contentment sparked the other’s envy. Of the narcissistically self-sufficient Freud wrote, “It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind.”3 Woman, to Freud in 1914, had what man wanted. The dictum that narcissism, and the self-admiration symptomatic of it, was more pronounced in women than in men—with the significant exception of homosexual men, who rarely came up in this discussion of the gender of narcissism—went largely uncontested in the theorizing of Freud and his colleagues, as did the purportedly greater female disposition to exhibitionistic display. To analysts, the narcissism of women was especially evident in the project of selfmaking around clothing, which in the early decades of the twentieth century sparked a wide-ranging discussion that was—notably—as much as much concerned with the pleasures as with the pathologies of narcissism. Participants in this conversation envisioned a female

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self reveling in sensuous experience of the world that was too often denied to men, or that men denied themselves. They saw clothing not as mere frippery but as a site for individuals to experience a range of distinct pleasures, at once material and emotional. Among these, in the words of one psychologist, was “the sense of power, of initiative, of individuality, and of making a thing one’s own.” Narcissism would soon enough be associated with “selfish ruthlessness, arrogance, vanity, and ingratitude,” but for the moment, in this conversation, pleasure and narcissism were aligned, much as they were in Freud’s “On Narcissism.” The early-twentieth-century psychoanalysts and psychologists who made the case for narcissistic enjoyments were challenging the negative moral valence that had historically trailed vanity.4 Over the next several decades, however, the distress occasioned by penis envy overshadowed the delights offered by vanity in analytic discussions of women’s narcissism. Women’s anatomical lack, inferiority, and handicap were widely seen to account for women’s psychological makeup through the 1960s, within psychoanalysis and beyond. Then, challenged by feminists and some revisionist analysts and subjected to public scrutiny, penis envy lost some of its explanatory power. With the debut of the new narcissism in the 1970s, linked to a critique of consumption, commentators increasingly associated vanity with material plentitude, not physical lack. That women’s defining anatomical disability is nowhere to be found in Christopher Lasch’s critique of vanity, and that he did not see it as a specifically female disposition, testifies to how decisively the conversation around it had changed. Rather, Lasch invoked an expansively conceived vanity as symptomatic of narcissism, seeing it, and the associated sins of “pride and acquisitiveness,” in moderns’—both male and female—craving for the empty pleasures of “riches, fame, and power.”5

Clothes Make the Woman Why was it, Freud asked his colleagues in 1909, that women slavishly bowed to fashion’s dictates and so often wore unflattering

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attire? “Clothes fetishists” all, they were incomprehensibly given to wearing the same things, as if obeying “a general command,” however ill-fitting and ill-suited their fashionable garments were. Taking his cue from the pioneering sexologist Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, Freud explained that fetishism, a newly defined sexual abnormality, was rooted in emotional experience. The fetishist according to Freud derived sexual pleasure from specific, nongenital “parts of a woman’s body”—a foot, for example—or from feminine articles of attire. In men, clothes fetishism developed as a consequence of a repressed “drive to look” at women. The frustration at the feminine clothing that inhibited the male gaze was, he hypothesized, turned to worship of that same clothing as a substitute for the disavowed, voyeuristic wish to watch women undress. Suggesting his reasoning was commonsensical, that everyone knew “half of humanity” were clothes fetishists, Freud suggested a parallel explanation for women’s puzzling behavior, which he argued was seen in even the most intelligent among them. The key to women’s worship of clothing, Freud proclaimed, was to be found in the way it repressed their normal exhibitionism. Women wished to be seen naked. Clothing repressed that wish and was as a result “raised to a fetish.” In women, clothing was a substitute for “parts of the body,” the unnamed analogue in this just-so story of the missing phallus. If women all dressed alike, it was because they had made a secret pact to show only “what the others can show,” in so doing collectively reassuring men in the only way available that they were similarly equipped (or ill-equipped) under their unattractive but basically identical pieces of clothing. As Freud saw it, a woman’s thralldom to bad taste signaled to men “that one can find in her everything that one can expect from women”—or not.6 However contorted and ambiguous, Freud’s logic brought the womanly taste for ornamentation and display on the one hand and passivity and castration on the other into strained relation. Freud’s fellow analysts quickly transformed this relation into a natural fact. That female vanity was among “the psychic consequences of the anatomical differences of the sexes” was an established truism by the mid-1920s. A series of developmental claims, in which women

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were envisioned as arrested at the narcissistic stage of self-love that men routinely transcended on the path to full object-love, bridged the theoretical distance between a feminine disposition to preening and the anatomical fact of castration. Her development stymied, “the authentic type ‘woman’ does not love the man,” Freud explained to his colleagues at a 1912 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, adding that she loves herself and her child exclusively but only “narcissistically, as part of her own self.” Woman loves solely on the condition of being admired by man, ventured the analyst Wilhelm Stekel at the meeting, assenting to Freud’s proposition. The visiting analyst Sabina Speilrein dissented from these assertions of female difference, reminding her assembled colleagues—all of them male—that the “man, too, loves at first narcissistically.” Like men, she suggested, “masculine women desire merely sexual objects.” Weighing in on the vexed issue of what women want and how they love, another colleague argued that “woman actually wants any man who comes to meet her half way”7—giving voice to a sentiment with which legions of single heterosexual women before and since are familiar. Analysts agreed that castration dealt the developing girl’s narcissism a stark blow. “Made a woman by an experience that profoundly offended her self-love,” incapable in any case of object-love, woman had no choice but to make her entire body into a phallus—to invest her “figure and face” with the erotic energy that men narcissistically bestowed on their penises. Frustration at anatomy’s dictates was thus envisioned as formative to “femaleness,” with its normative genitalization of the body and associated exhibitionism. So powerfully erotic was women’s self-admiration that analysts reported they could be sexually aroused by simply gazing at themselves in the mirror while combing their hair. Although the literature also featured men, most but not all of them homosexual, versed in the pleasures of self-admiration, such as those who engaged in the practice, apparently common among healthy college men, of masturbating in front of mirrors, the linkages among exhibitionism, castration, and womanly vanity quickly gained wide assent.8 Women’s narcissism— first wounded and then enhanced by castration—explained their

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vanity, which was grounds for their relegation in the male imaginary to decorative if alluring objects. As such, women were trapped in the “gilded cage” constructed by the analysts’ hermetic reasoning. According to analysts, women, by definition narcissistic and lacking, compensated by lavishing attention on their bodies, rendering themselves objects of display and enhancing in turn—in a “vicious circle,” the London-based analyst J. C. Flügel observed—the narcissistic self-regard that was their psychic and bodily inheritance and that, moreover, set limits on their full participation in civic life. As Flügel explained, laying out but not critiquing the vicious circle, the admiration women enjoyed impeded any capacity they might have had for love of the other, the lack of which was symptomatic of their original narcissism. Flügel plaintively added that men would be able to compete with womanly narcissism—that is, to distract women from their admiration of self—in the marketplace of affection, attraction, love, and sex only if they expended the effort to make themselves more sexually appealing. Men’s appearance, too often neglected, mattered to women’s estimation of them—a proposition exemplified, according to Flügel, in women’s disappointment upon seeing “a man in civilian clothes after first meeting him in uniform.”9 In his 1930 book, The Psychology of Clothes, Flügel highlighted the feminine indifference to male opinion that so vexed and fascinated Freud. Flügel maintained that female vanity and the follies of ruinous competition with other women, not a desire to please men, largely determined women’s choice of attire. Women’s interest in eliciting the admiration of men was inversely related to “the excessive ‘modishness’ ” of modern-day fashion; that the admiration of men was so little in evidence accounted in part for fashion’s excesses.10 When it came to dress—and the sexual titillation and attraction it was intended to effect—women were narcissistically independent of male opinion, whether positive or negative. It was this independence of the other that Freud highlighted in his 1914 portrait of the female narcissist. Freud’s woman coolly refused risking anything of herself in the name of love, which he characterized

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as a dicey, “peculiar state” marked by sexual overvaluation of the other and a corresponding impoverishment of the self. The narcissist’s charm and sexual appeal were to be found in this very refusal, in her “self-contentment and inaccessibility.” Largely indifferent to the other, like cats and “large beasts of prey,” or like “great criminals and humorists,” she and her narcissism elicited men’s yearnings and envy—for, as Freud explained, those who had renounced their own childhood narcissism, as had heterosexual men, were fated to seek manifestations of it in others. Woman envied man nothing, and, notably, her narcissism at this point in Freud’s thinking derived from social custom, not biological lack. It compensated “them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object.”11 Female narcissism in the Freud of 1914 resulted not from a lack of a penis but from a paucity of social option. Flügel was as envious of women’s narcissism as was Freud. But where Freud downplayed the aesthetic dimension of female narcissism in favor of the psychological and even the social, Flügel worried the ways in which aesthetics and psychology were mutually reinforcing and openly admitted to jealousy of women’s greater sartorial freedom. Everyone expected and tolerated a degree of narcissism in women—whether in their dress or in their incapacity for object-love—that would be considered indicative of homosexuality in men. As he saw it, men had altogether ceded to women the psychological pleasures clothing afforded, chief among them narcissism and exhibitionism, collectively embracing a drably austere and ascetic uniformity in their habits of dress. This move, which Flügel believed starkly shifted the balance of power between the sexes, occurred late in the eighteenth century. In what he characterized as a defeat for men and corresponding victory for women, the sartorial splendor that from the fall of Rome to the revolutionary moment characterized the costume of both sexes suddenly became solely the province of women, with men abjuring their rights to “brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation.” In a “Great Masculine Renunciation,” men adopted a plebian simplicity and uniformity expressive of their new-found, democratically inspired fraternity, leaving the privileges and prerogatives of beauty,

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splendor, and magnificence long associated with aristocratic court cultures entirely to the distaff side. Man, Flügel plaintively charged, “abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful.”12 In Flügel’s treatise we have, as in Freud’s portrait of the female narcissist, the generally accepted equation of envy—held by analysts to be a female disability—starkly reversed. Flügel’s envy of women’s socially sanctioned exhibitionism is everywhere evident and freely admitted to. He envies women the color, variety, and adaptability of their clothing, the sensuous materiality of their artificial silks and the exuberance of their fashions. He finds it galling that women’s clothing, compared with men’s, is at once more sensible—varying with the seasons, for example—and more expressive of eroticism, and in particular productive of the autoerotic pleasures of “silk, velvet, fur, etc.” against the skin that men had foresworn in adopting a sober utilitarianism. And he envies women the freedom to flaunt their narcissism, to embrace it enthusiastically while men suppress their own in the name of a common humanity. Flügel held that women’s disposition to narcissism, whether natural or fostered by social custom, found reinforcement in their taste for fashion, but this was not necessarily a bad thing. In his hands, it might even represent triumph. Women’s “defiant use of powder-puff and lipstick,” and their irritating habit of applying both in public, might be symptomatic of a selfabsorbed indifference to the opinion of others, but it was at the same time a “victorious gesture” symbolic of women’s conquering of “old habits of sexual repression and social subordination.”13 Flügel’s book offers a way into a lively conversation among psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and but a few psychoanalysts about the pleasures—narcissistic and otherwise—and symbolic meanings of clothing, and the differing relationships of men and women to fashion and everyday attire. In this discussion, to which Flügel’s book serves as a capstone, the notion of a particularly female enslavement to fashion as compensatory for biological lack is a minor thread. Notably, the one woman participant in the debate, the delightfully named Sylvia Bliss, saw adornment as compensatory for both genders, venturing that the impulse to decorate and adorn the body was rooted in the “fundamental feeling of incompleteness”

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and dissatisfaction with self that analysts and others saw as peculiarly female. Clothing, she wrote in 1916, resulted from man’s “attempt to remedy the deficiency, to replace what he has lost.”14 But in this early conversation, more often than not the meanings of fashion were considered in a more capacious register. Some observers saw clothing as critical to the survival of the species, with the “exquisite attire” of those young persons active in the sexual marketplace cast as the equivalent of the animal kingdom’s “manes, beards, crests, tusks and antlers” that accompanied sexual maturity and reproductive readiness. Others, alternately, construed clothing as a battleground in a brewing “sex war” between men and women that saw, along lines later suggested by Flügel, newly emancipated woman disarming and even vanquishing man, having “commandeered his weapons for herself.” Woman’s supremacy was both artistic and hygienic, testified to by her adoption of fashions more graceful, varied, and comfortable than the constricting Victorian garments she had recently discarded even as men consigned themselves to the dullness that Flügel, among others, condemned. If men suffered from a “sexual apathy” at odds with the exhibitionistic possibilities of clothing, women had embraced them, trading “slothful effeminacy” for an ascendant “virile self-regard.” The distribution of gender power reversed, woman posed no longer “as the weak, dependent creature.”15 Woman’s sartorial emancipation mirrored and enabled her social emancipation. In this early-twentieth-century conversation, clothing—most daringly—was also seen as a site for the sort of self-exploration and self-expression that would elicit the condemnation of dour moralists. That clothing yielded narcissistic satisfactions was beyond dispute, but whereas the analysts focused on woman’s insatiable need for admiration would locate them in a nexus of heterosexual exchange, other commentators, many of them psychologists, saw these satisfactions as independent of the other, located in the self. As one put it, it was not “mere vanity aroused by the admiration of others” that accounted for humankind’s habits of bodily adornment but, rather, the ways that clothing enhanced and refined the wearer’s selffeeling. Clothing was from this perspective a “source of pleasure,”

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heightening and ennobling “vital feelings” and exciting inner sensations, an “extension of personality” conditioned by “inner necessity.” It might produce “the distinctly pleasurable tang” of power and initiative, and it might sustain an illusory but experimentally verifiable sense of expansiveness, of the sentient self “beyond the limits” of the body. Along these lines, one psychologist advised his readers to think of various forms of high headgear and lofty coiffures as pleasurably “lengthening the rod of self.” And as Bliss wrote, endorsing the masque as an arena for exploring fantasy and aspiration, “other selves within us must have their setting.”16 Most of the young women attending a Normal School in New York State surveyed in 1905 by the Clark University psychologist Louis W. Flaccus, as well as a majority of the Britons responding to a questionnaire Flügel distributed in 1928, in effect agreed with the notion that clothing was a legitimate form “of vanity and selfexpression” that could enhance self-esteem and self-confidence and produce pleasurable bodily sensations. Tight clothing, while spurned by most, offered gratifications to its devotees, who felt themselves energized and, as one put it, “ready for all contingencies” when subjected to its mild discipline. Attractive dress “tends to make one happy and contented,” wrote one respondent; “I work more confidently when pleasingly dressed,” noted another. “One’s spirits respond to one’s personal appearance,” wrote yet another. Dressed for an outing, “I feel a rise in my animal spirits,” noted a nineteen-yearold woman. Her classmates associated dressing well with power, mastery, and “a feeling of equality,” as a twenty-year-old put it. The looser garments favored by most produced the “heavenly” sensations of air and sun on the skin, and more than a few respondents contrasted the pleasures of silks to the abominations of scratchy woolens on sensitive skin. Contra Freud’s fantasy of women’s herdlike submission to fashion’s dictates, a higher proportion of male (35 percent) than female (29 percent) respondents indicated they did not resist fashion, with those who did citing comfort and economy as their reasons. Flaccus observed that some men were known to spend as much as half of their incomes on ordering new suits to replace those barely worn, simply because they preferred novelty to

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wearing the same attire day in and day out. Nor did Flügel find any gender difference in the time invested in buying and fitting clothes; men and women alike rated themselves slightly below what they imagined was average on this score.17 Clothing, as Flügel saw it, was a site of sex war and gender inversion and, for many of those he surveyed, of enjoyments both psychic and physical, of self-discipline and self-expression—notably, and in contrast to most of his fellow analysts, for men as well as for women. The least conflicted about finding happiness in clothes among his subjects had successfully transferred the narcissistic pleasure of “skin and muscle erotism” from their bodies onto their clothing. The men in this group had also struck the right balance between the freedom afforded by loose clothing and the phallic power imparted by stiff clothing—especially items “that project from the surface of the body.” Articulating this tension, one man admitted to a willingness to sacrifice the physical comforts of soft, silky garments “for the sake of an idea” that he associated with snug, tight clothing—an idea Flügel spelled out in a psychoanalytic publication: “the idea, that is, of ‘having a continuous erection.’ ” Women more readily than men got the balance between freedom and constraint right, Flügel argued, due to the greater scope allowed them to express their narcissism, but it was an issue everyone had to negotiate. If there was lack here of the sort that would be breezily invoked as the source of feminine vanity, or clothes fetishism of the sort Freud saw normative in women, it was to be found not in the dress as substitute penis but in that hated but defining article of male attire—the stiff collar that appeared “to render him more potent.”18 In this extended early-twentieth-century discussion, obscured from historical view by the post-Flügel hegemony of an analytic consensus that saw clothing as compensation for biological lack and vanity as a lamentable feminine disability, sartorial satisfaction was serious business. Fashion, with its insistent novelty and expressive possibility, was a form of self-making open to women and too often denied to men, an incitement to male envy. Neither “mere caprice” nor “mercenary contrivance,” fashion in this construal was creative and generative, replete with notions of fantasy and masquerade. In

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books with titles like The Eternal Masquerade (1923) and Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes (1924), the case was made. “Dress is an ever-apparent symbol of personality,” wrote the author of Eternal Masquerade. “There is a purpose in what the Puritan loves to denounce as empty vanity,” added the author of Narcissus. “In the masquerade,” Bliss suggested, “conditions and occupations” actually closed to us “are for the moment, through the medium of clothes, made our own.” The fashion industry might exploit female narcissism in the pursuit of profits, but, as Flügel pointed out, the transaction between creator and consumer was two-sided, and its psychology was difficult to explain.19 In his and others’ commentary it is easy to see clothing as the occasion for negotiating the fantastic play of aspiration and power, exuberance and exhibitionism, joy and animal spirits—in all, as the material expression of narcissistic pleasures. Female vanity was by the 1930s so well established as a popular and analytic fact—and linked to the peculiarly female proclivity for narcissism—that few questioned whether a similar dynamic might be found among men. “We must learn to tolerate the male body, and perhaps even to admire it—if only as a counterpart to the female body, which we already idolise,” wrote Flügel, who in addition to lamenting men’s slavish conventionality in dress deplored a related disdain for their own sexual bodies. His solution was for men to abandon austerity in dress and instead make themselves more sexually appealing to women through their clothing, thus offering men a relational alternative to the narcissistic bodily self-admiration that was woman’s natural state. He proposed then quickly dismissed the idea that men might adopt a narcissism derivative of bodily selfadmiration, seeing in it a “tendency to homosexuality.” Appearance was the province of woman, and when man tended to his own he was adopting “feminine armor.” The focus of men’s self-admiration, then, was best located beyond the body.20 For Flügel this meant clothing, but soon enough the automobile would provide another option. The automobile was recognized early on as symbolic of virility and male power and by the 1970s would be conceptualized as a sometimes-magical narcissistic extension of the masculine self, “a predatory male body” that enabled the

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satisfaction of sexual and aggressive desires while signaling to both women and other men “sexual readiness and achievement.” As Barry Richards observed, “more than any other everyday object, the car resembles the body.” It turns fuel into energy, like the maternal body carries and protects people, and like all bodies eventually grows old, saggy, leaky, and useless. It could be as richly endowed with meaning as was clothing: expressive of exhibitionism and competitive strivings, it at the same time allowed men to engage in the caretaking and aesthetic appreciation usually coded as feminine. Owners of cars could take pleasure in the engineering and design that produced “states of well-being”—a maternal function usually the preserve of women but here refracted through indisputably masculine pursuits.21 Cars, like clothing, were not only material possessions but also occasions for expressing creativity and for experiencing legitimate narcissistic pleasures. They could also serve as compensation for lack, their power an expression of an insecurely established phallicism. Men, like Flügel’s competitive and catty women, could envy one another their cars and could engage in all of the forms of exchange that he saw in women’s relations to clothing and that in his estimation were missing in men: jealousy, pettiness, assertions of superiority and dominance, and mutual admiration. And, for a brief moment in the 1960s and 1970s, men became like women in their body narcissism, growing long locks and beards as extensions of their bodies and delighting in their exhibitionism. But narcissistic investment in the body, or vanity, remained visible only in women. So fixed were the associations among women, narcissism, and the augmentation of the body through materiality—precisely what Flügel lamented men were unwilling to engage in—that a line of argument in which the car was the masculine analogue of clothing was never fully elaborated.

Secrets of Women In the mid-1930s, the London-based psychoanalyst Joan Riviere joined the analytic debate that was seeing female lack and female narcissism knitted ever more tightly together by proclaiming that

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Freud’s view of women was neither credible nor “the ordinary judgment of mankind.” The feminine fate that Freud could then envision only in terms of lack, disappointment, and loss, stemming from the traumatic moment of discovering the absence of the penis, she saw as offering “full and overflowing” satisfactions and narcissistic gratifications. In a lengthy review of Freud’s New Introductory Essays, Riviere reminded readers that in his 1914 paper on narcissism Freud had “placed on record” the characteristics of what he had called “the purest and truest feminine type.” She reproved him for not mentioning these now: the “typical female self-sufficiency, inaccessibility, the relative lack of object-love and satisfaction of women in being loved.” She took the measure of how much had been forfeited in the twenty years between the Freud of “On Narcissism,” who had revealed himself as at once fascinated and mystified by woman’s enigmatic capacity for blissful self-possession, and the Freud who could don the mantle of science and declare that “woman feels inferior and lacking all her days.” Riviere charged Freud with abjuring the analyst’s duty in analyzing only what was visible and external. Then, he had seen masculine envy and retreated in respectful confusion before the “enigma of woman.” Now, however, he “dismisses the greater narcissism of woman in a word and couples it with feminine vanity as an overcompensation for the lack of a penis.”22 Riviere’s pointed assessment of Freud’s bafflement in the face of woman, his dismissive coupling of female vanity and narcissism, returns us to the contentious ground of lack, envy, and possession worked by the theoreticians of dress. Riviere, much like Flügel, her colleague in the British Psycho-Analytical Society, saw woman’s purportedly greater narcissism as cause for celebration, not condemnation. But where Flügel optimistically envisioned women triumphing, their freedom in attire anticipating a coming social emancipation and enhanced civic presence, Riviere, concerned with the contrast between women’s inner freedoms and the external “difficulties and disappointments” that plagued them, more soberly envisioned women embracing secretly enjoyed narcissistic pleasures as a solution to the intractable problem of gendered social subordination. Seeing these pleasures as incorporative and possessive, modeled on the receptive,

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devouring vagina of heterosexual intercourse that sucked up the man’s penis, Riviere proposed that woman’s freedom consisted in her capacity to acquire and secretly enjoy a range of inner objects— everything from the man’s fantasized penis to “his children” and her own “bodily beauty.” She argued that woman’s satisfaction consisted in her enjoyment of her “girlhood and beauty, in the wifehood and motherhood that so enlarge her personality and in that part in men’s lives and the world’s work which only women can and do fulfill.” Riviere highlighted “the baby girl’s essential coquetry” and “play with dolls” as indicative of her “instinctual destiny” and, while objecting to Freud’s updated portrait of the female narcissist, accepted the analytic “fact” of women’s castration. She maintained that woman’s body and “her husband and her children make up her life.” She saw passivity, submissiveness, and maternal feeling characteristic of “normal fully-developed woman” and wrote rapturously of the elusive and special female capacity “for outpouring and surrender of the self in love.” Riviere theorized a nonessentialist womanhood and its private and public strategies in her “Womanliness as a Masquerade” paper, published in 1929 and brought to wide attention by Judith Butler in her 1990 book, Gender Trouble. In Riviere’s chiding review of Freud, however, even while faulting him for his theoretical caution and conservatism, she offered a conventional reading of women’s psychology, a separate-emotional-spheres manifesto that elevates passivity to a feminine virtue and that invokes that retrograde notion, “essential”—linked of all things to “coquetry.”23 Yet in the same review, alongside Riviere’s sketch of passive modern womanhood, is a bold interpretation of female narcissism and its pleasures organized around plentitude and possession, not lack and loss. Riviere renders the male’s narcissistically invested penis fantastic and casts the issue of its possession, whether actual or fantasized, as a distraction from the feminine self-sufficiency on which she preferred to focus. In her hands, narcissism is a full and satisfying state, and the narcissist is gloriously independent of anyone and anything. The narcissist’s inner world is not empty but populated with others. “She has incorporated her love-object within herself,” writes Riviere of the female narcissist. Riviere maintains

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that incorporation is the foundation for the independence of external love-objects that Freud, in his 1914 essay, had seen as characteristic of the narcissistic woman. Others may have believed the narcissist incapable of relating to objects, but Riviere saw the narcissist as capable of intensely relating to them—if only in their incorporated instantiation. To accept that “difficulties and disappointments” were women’s lot was to overlook their capacities for “satisfied possession.”24 Riviere was a theorist of possession and attachment. To her narcissism was not about emptiness and compensations for it but about the quality of attachment and the ways in which people related to one another. She resisted simple equations of narcissism and vanity, maintaining that while women may enjoy their clothing and their good looks, this was but an aspect of the self-possessed emotional autarky she championed as an ideal. Narcissism, as Riviere saw it, referred to an economy of needs, in which the individual holds and cherishes within all that she wants and is thereby freed from actual dependence on anyone or anything. Worldly disappointment is transformed into secret satisfaction in this reading of woman’s destiny. Consider Riviere’s treatment of the bereaved wife. Dispensing quickly with the grief that everyone acknowledged the tragedy of losing a husband occasioned, Riviere turned to the widows who had wanted marriage and children but who had not particularly wanted or enjoyed “a man in their lives.” For such women, she wrote, widowhood was a perfect solution, “more especially if it brings with it a pension.”25 Riviere was here taking on a philosophical tradition that for centuries had cast men as independent, self-contained, and masterful free agents while envisioning women enmeshed in sustaining webs of relationships and obligation. Her narcissistic woman is as independent, contained, and masterful as any man. This woman’s secret was to be found in her narcissism, in the fact that her life was lived pleasurably, and in her body—which Riviere defined broadly to include her clothes and house as well as her husband and children. Envisioning these objects held inside, Riviere rendered woman’s lack of a penis irrelevant. Satisfied within, Riviere writes, “she does not need a penis without.” Woman does not betray her secret, but,

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Riviere reminds Freud, it is precisely the task of analysis to disclose it. She charged that he had too hastily retreated from this duty while nevertheless claiming mastery of the feminine psychology he had “more than once acknowledged as obscure and baffling to analytic understanding.”26 Riviere has come to be known as perhaps the most felicitous of Freud’s translators, a figure at the center of the monumental project of translating his work into English that furthered the cause, and shaped the fate, of the international psychoanalytic movement. Born in 1883, she started her working life as a dressmaker, employed by a prestigious London firm and on at least one occasion sewing a banner for a suffrage march. As a young woman of nineteen she had made note of her taste for observing and understanding others, which she called “the strangest of all occupations.” She encountered the works of Freud for the first time in 1916, when she was thirtythree, and tried her hand at writing the next year, while apparently sustaining her interest in clothing. “Began article on Dress”—a first iteration of “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” one presumes—reads her diary entry for 10 December 1917. Within several more years, Riviere would establish her own psychoanalytic practice and would become one of the founding members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.27 Riviere was a keen observer and sometimes-theorist of narcissism, a dimension of her life’s work that has neither been recognized nor explored. Indeed, the most significant of the early psychoanalytic observations on narcissism come from Freud, Ernest Jones, and Riviere. Jones’s paper on the narcissism of those exhibiting what he called a “God-complex” appeared in 1913, and Freud’s essay “On Narcissism” was published the next year. Riviere, perhaps narcissism’s first phenomenologist, was alert to what would come to be seen as the many dimensions of narcissism from the time of her first forays into analytic writing. Reviewing a biography of Queen Elizabeth in 1922, for example, she highlighted the monarch’s exhibitionism and craving for admirers and asserted that narcissism was “clearly the dominant note in her character.” And, in her landmark paper on womanliness, she brought out the narcissistic currents in

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her subjects’ psychology, showing how they gratified their narcissism in retreating into a fantasized omnipotence.28 Riviere’s work may be read as an ongoing, if episodic, exploration of narcissism, in which both its pleasure and terrors are unflinchingly delineated. She better than anyone else conveyed the experience of living within the narcissist’s skin, bringing the narcissist’s inner landscape fully to life. Riviere is better known as a pioneering theorist of gender. Feminists have mined her “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” finding in her an early, proto-Lacanian theoretician of a nonessentialist womanhood and its public and private strategies. Riviere’s subjects are the intellectual women who disguise their masculine ambitions, competence, and desires for worldly efficacy behind a masquerade of femininity that is meant to help them avoid both the anxiety they experience at the prospect of being found in possession of stolen phallic trophies and the retribution they unconsciously fear their possession will elicit from men. It used to be, Riviere writes, that women with intellectual interests were classified as masculine. Now, however, “in University life, in scientific professions and in business” could be found women who were capable of combining professional success with conventionally realized femininity. Riviere’s professionally accomplished subjects fashion themselves female, attending to their appearance, dressing in womanly attire, and displaying virtues traditionally associated with femininity—devotedly caring for others and acting the part of the mother substitute to friends and relatives. Women of this type, she held, were especially difficult to classify in an analytic world in which passivity was associated with the feminine and activity with the masculine.29 Riviere tells of a highly accomplished intellectual, a speaker and writer, who, following every public performance, finds herself in the incongruous position of compulsively “ogling and coquetting” with male father figures in the audience, attempting to seduce them into making sexual advances. In Riviere’s account, to lecture in public was to be in possession of the father’s penis, which the woman could have obtained only by an act of theft; her flirting and coquetting were meant to preemptively propitiate the avenger and to disguise her power, allowing her to appear “as merely a castrated woman.”

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Her capacity to imagine herself “attractive as an object of love” was conditional on disavowing her phallicism. Her womanliness was thus a mask that she could don “to hide the possession of masculinity.” As Riviere saw it, femininity was a capacity, not an essence; there was no true womanly nature distorted by social custom. She refused to specify in what femininity consisted. To those who “ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’,” she issued the dictum that has secured her standing as a postmodern theorist of gender avant la lettre: “Genuine womanliness and ‘the masquerade’ . . . are the same thing.”30 Riviere provides the reader with other scenarios in which womanhood is performed. She tells of a cultured and capable housewife who acted the part of the “foolish and bewildered” woman in her dealings with tradesmen and shopkeepers, her ample technical knowledge and iron will hidden behind the mask of deferential femininity. And she presents the case of a university lecturer who wore especially feminine clothing and was inappropriately flippant when lecturing to her male colleagues, treating the situation, in which her masculine intellect was on display, “as a ‘game’, as something not real, as a ‘joke’,” and thereby minimizing the offense her expertise in a male-dominated field occasioned. Riviere’s lecturing women enact what Joan Scott has argued has been one of feminism’s animating fantasies, the transgressive scene of “a woman standing at a podium giving a speech.” In the iconic figure of the lecturing woman the triumphant pleasure of violating gender norms is balanced by the punishment her illicit behavior occasions. Riviere’s women are constantly appeasing, atoning, and placating men as the price of their supremacy over them, seeking recognition for their possession of the penis as they put on “the mask of womanly subservience.” They pay a high price for their assumption of the masculine, in anxiety, apprehensiveness, and misgivings about a femininity they could only experience as a masquerade.31 Femininity was thus not a natural stance but in Riviere’s conception something of a pose, behind which raged a struggle between dominance and submission, activity and passivity.

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Among her analytic contemporaries, Riviere was known to be focused on individuals’ inner worlds and uninterested in “reality,” yet in her writings she conveyed more of the social world in which her subjects made their lives than perhaps any of her colleagues. In public lectures on “The Emotional Life of Civilized Men and Women,” Riviere offered a snapshot of the pleasures and disappointments experienced by a range of men and women in mid-1930s London, explaining to an interested laity how unrecognized “inner emotional needs” shaped behavior, from the dramatic—betrayal, revenge, hate—to the evasions and self-deceptions of everyday modern life.32 Riviere’s conception of “womanliness” was timely as well, making clear how difficult it was for the first generation of women entering the male professional sphere to navigate a rapidly changing gender landscape. Moving seamlessly between the social and the psychological realms, Riviere implicitly made an argument for the salience of both.

The Material Me Writing in the first decade of the new century, the psychologist Louis W. Flaccus held that “certain mental states” were so complex and subtle as to be at “the ragged edge of scientific analysis.” Among these complex mental states were the feelings, ranging from the pleasure of sensations felt on the skin to the more elusive “effects on the self” engendered by clothing. Neither a “love of praise” nor a straightforward “impulse to spend money for the sake of spending it” could explain why a man would spend lavishly on clothing. What his sartorially extravagant subject was seeking, Flaccus wrote, was “a change in his ‘material me’ with whatever subtle emotional displacements that brings.”33 How the “material me” incorporates objects external to the person and makes them part of itself was the question taken up by Riviere and her colleagues in London, among them D. W. Winnicott. Founding members of the British school of object relations, Riviere and Winnicott traded in internal objects cast more robustly than Freud’s. Both were interested in possession and in the psychic maneuvers by

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which people incorporated inanimate objects and made them part of themselves. Riviere saw the craving “to possess, acquire, and incorporate” something outside the self, whether another person or a material thing, and to “make it one’s own” as a primordial and unexceptionable human desire. As she saw it, everyone carried around within an entire world of other people, both good and bad; every individual was in fact “a company of many.” For his part, Winnicott argued that any comprehensive account of “human nature must include a third intermediate area of experiencing” that served as a “resting-place” for individuals engaged in the lifelong endeavor to keep “inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated.” He dubbed the infant’s cherished blanket or plush toy a “transitional object,” a first possession that existed in this third, illusory space, and that was experienced by the infant as vital, alive, and inseparably part of the self.34 Riviere intuited the possibilities of the Winnicottian third space and grasped what was at stake in framing the “material me,” the self enlivened in its relations with inanimate objects. In her lecture invoking the case of a woman who felt her clothes were ugly, ragged, and out of style, Riviere explained how things came to embody powerful emotions. This woman’s clothing carried her feelings of hopelessness, feelings that could more easily be negotiated between her husband and herself when embodied in an object external to both of them. In Riviere’s hands, as in Flaccus’s, clothing was irreducibly material and at the same time a site for negotiating what Flaccus called the “subtle emotional displacements” all of us constantly make in our efforts to make our strong feelings tolerable. As an object of exchange between men and women—as in the scenario of a wife finagling a new dress out of a miserly husband as proof of his love for her—clothing could serve as the target for greedy and aggressive wishes too volatile to express directly. Riviere started from the propositions that all of us seek security and pleasure and that the normal range of emotions expressed in daily life encompasses love, hate, contempt, depreciation, envy, and greed. The question was not whether individuals had these emotions, for that was a given, but how they distributed them. Dangerous, unsettling emo-

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tions were in normal adults regulated and kept in check, sometimes by locating them in material objects outside the body. A feeling of inner dread could be moderated by the consolations of accumulating things as assurance against psychic disintegration.35 Riviere conveyed to her readers a capacious and nonmoralized understanding of the desire to possess, linking it to the impulse to incorporate “something good in order to increase the feeling of inner well-being”—a means of self-soothing learned in infancy when mother’s milk ousted the pain of hunger. The capacity to live contentedly and satisfied rested on ensuring all was good within— individuals’ “vanity and self-esteem” depended on it. “Our narcissism requires that we should have the best of everything outside us as well as inside,” Riviere wrote. “Our possessions, reputations, or, say, our children particularly, should have no flaws.” In the world these claims were of necessity tempered; within, we could maintain the infant’s “autocratic intolerance of all interference with our selfsatisfaction and well-being.” Riviere was concerned that worldly prosperity was displacing inner goodness as an ideal, but she treated her readers’ quest for it respectfully, recognizing that individuals could more easily be certain of its attainment than they could be certain that they had attained the inner goodness for which it served as partial proxy. In her view, acquisitiveness stemmed from a quest for basic security in the world.36 Freud had conceived of narcissism as a state of imagined selfsufficiency, free of internal objects. Riviere by contrast conceived of narcissism as a state in which internal objects were intensely experienced, felt to be “essential parts” of the self and sometimes experienced as more “real” than people in the external world. She envisioned individuals continuously taking in others, feeling their presence within, and having lively emotional relationships with them. The internal world was solipsistic and thus by definition narcissistic, yet at the same time it was filled with others. Riviere was aware that as late as the 1950s the notion of an inner world aroused “suspicion and intolerance,” even among psychoanalysts. She suggested to skeptics that the fantasies we all have of “containing other persons inside ourselves,” evident in comforting thoughts such as “I shall always have

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him or her with me wherever I go,” testified to the existence of an inner world. Riviere’s portrait of this unseen but deeply experienced world was colored by her evolving understanding of what would eventually be classified as pathological narcissism. She notes that some people, the ones “who are continually needing praise and recognition,” cannot experience anything good within themselves. She sees charismatic men exploiting and enslaving unsuspecting women. And she sees individuals engaging in a range of narcissistic behaviors intended to secure their security and wholeness: envious, they depreciate what they cannot have; revengeful, they destroy what is good in others; contemptuous, they betray those who love them; fearful, they entertain fantasies of omnipotence; and helpless, they seek to ruthlessly control everyone and everything. They may lay claim to asceticism, prompted by a fear of dependency; they may just as well seek to locate their own goodness in the material things they accumulate.37 The “material me” that took shape in Riviere’s theorizing engages in a complex negotiation between inner feelings and the external world of people and things, moving continuously between them and displacing feelings arising from one realm onto the other. It regulates its aggression, turning some part of it inward, and attempts to suppress its hates. Its every move is conditioned by both psychic and external needs and circumstances. This is the “me” of object relations that would prove foundational to Otto Kernberg as he theorized narcissism in the 1960s. Like Riviere, Kernberg argued that narcissism and object relations “go hand-in-hand” and that pathological narcissism was not, as Freud had asserted, a state free of internalized others or of “the capacity to invest” in them but, rather, a state in which those relations were distorted and deeply disturbed, characterized by “rage and envy, fear and guilt” linked to “a desperate longing for a loving relationship that will not be destroyed by hatred.”38 Kernberg’s malignant narcissists were characterized not only by their observable behaviors but also, importantly, by what he argued was the disturbed nature of their internalized object relations.39 Kernberg, again like Riviere, saw an active presence within where

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others had seen only lack. This active psychic interior allowed Kernberg to account for some contradictory aspects of narcissistic behavior that had long puzzled analysts. In his narcissism, nothing was what it seemed. High self-esteem could mask low self-esteem. Excessive self-love may be a sign of self-hate. Heightened grandiosity may point to feelings of worthlessness. A manifest dependence on the analyst may coexist with a desperate fear of relying on anyone. To grapple with this malignant narcissism, it was not enough to look at isolated narcissistic traits; understanding the whole of a patient’s psychic interior as well as the dramas enacted there was necessary. Kernberg consolidated the project, on which Riviere had embarked, of conceptualizing the inner world as active, if at times terrifying. Heinz Kohut, with his championing of healthy narcissism and its pleasures, in effect developed another dimension of Riviere’s work— her attempt to normalize narcissism and the strong emotions associated with it. He saw healthy expressions of self in childhood exhibitionism and grandiosity where others had seen these behaviors as pathological. He argued that they were not to be rooted out and destroyed but, rather, transformed into realistic self-esteem and ambitions. More suggestive is his debt to Winnicott. Kohut singled out the Winnicottian “concept of man” as the most congenial with his own conceptions. He was early on interested in Winnicott’s transitional object and drew on it in formulating his own concept of the selfobject, the other experienced narcissistically within that enabled the child to gradually assume an existence separate from the mother. Winnicott’s transitional object was a material possession, appearing to the observer as an inanimate thing, whereas Kohut’s selfobject was a wholly internal construct. Winnicott’s transitional object eventually lost its special meaning to the child, while Kohut’s selfobjects sustained individuals throughout their lives.40 Yet both were under the child’s control, experienced narcissistically as part of the self, and both the transitional object and the selfobject encapsulated a theory of the self’s experience of the other as supportive, sustaining presence. Many psychoanalysts since Kohut have treated the transitional object and the selfobject as referring to the same thing and as

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roughly interchangeable. It is perhaps more defensible to treat the latter as an important new concept, another solution to the problem posed by Riviere and Winnicott: how do people bridge the divide between self and other, internal and external?

The popularizing analyst Theodor Reik asserted in his 1957 book Of Love and Lust that women’s interest in clothing was “consolation and compensation” for their shared “anatomical handicap.” The dress, he proposed, served to help woman “to forget and forgive” early feelings of being given short shrift, and the commonly voiced plaint of having “nothing to wear,” heard even from those with burgeoning closets, was but the girl’s grievance at her “sexual imperfection” in displaced form. “Freud showed us,” Reik wrote, that women’s vanity was rooted in their feelings of being disadvantaged vis-à-vis men on account of their “penislessness.” Women “emotionally conquered” these feelings by indulging their feminine vanity, taking pride in their figures and physical charms and attempting to make “themselves as attractive as possible.” Most of them vain, they made, Reik wrote, “a virtue of anatomical necessity.”41 In the 1970s, Kohut questioned this analytic fantasy that construed the girl as but a castrated boy and that saw women’s lesser lot foreshadowed in the girl’s experience of “nonpossession of the penis.” He stated at a symposium in 1974 that he could not see that the girl’s narcissistic injury was in essence different from that suffered by the boy, “who discovers that his penis is very small compared to the penis of a grown man.” Chided by his orthodox colleagues for having deviated so markedly from Freud and orthodox tenets, Kohut held his ground, allowing that while penis-deprived girls might indeed experience narcissistic injury, the psychological significance of this for women’s psychic makeup was questionable. Kohut switched the ground of discussion from anatomical lack to healthy selfesteem, turning orthodox theory on its head in arguing that it was not the missing penis that accounted for women’s feeling of being castrated. Rather, it was that women who as children did not experience “mirroring acceptance” of their bodily selves from their parents

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felt castrated and turned to “rage and vengefulness” as a result.42 Penis envy was not cause but effect. Kohut and other analysts severed the links between female narcissism and normative psychosexual development that had been developed over the course of a half century of speculative theorizing. In particular, they questioned the account of the “genital trauma” of castration that was universally experienced by women and that engendered among them what Freud called an envious “narcissistic soreness” toward men. The attribution of narcissism and vanity to women that flowed so easily from the analyst’s pen through the 1960s was unsettled in part by Kohut’s construal of both traits as universal and appropriate for the small child—to Kohut, both were expressions of its grandiose self—and by Kernberg’s and other analysts’ construal of excessive vanity and exhibitionism as symptomatic of pathological narcissism in women but also in men. As analysts in the United States, following Kernberg’s lead, focused increasingly on the quality of narcissists’ object relations as manifest both in their observable behavior toward others and in their inner worlds, the biologically defined sexual difference—the possession or nonpossession of the penis—that had destined women to narcissism quietly but steadily faded from view. To be sure, some analysts would continue to cast vanity, even “flirtatiousness and whimsicality,” as “essential feminine traits” expressive of women’s greater narcissism, but the dynamic of retreating to narcissism, whether in fantasy or in behavior, as compensation for vulnerability, lack, or injury was now seen in both men and women as a form of self-esteem regulation and an attempt to secure a feeling of goodness and well-being.43 Through the 1970s, the vain woman appeared in popular discussions of narcissistic shopaholics, who were seen as easy prey for advertisers seeking to profit from their vanity—and whose self-sufficiency intrigued Freud, vexed Flügel, and served as cause for celebration by Riviere. We can glimpse how open the conversation could be in 1978, when Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism appeared. That year, a journalist put the question of whether women’s interest in clothing and self-adornment was healthy or pathological to a pastor, to the manager of a women’s dress shop in downtown Cincinnati, and to

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an academic expert on fashion. The pastor had drunk at the well of healthy narcissism, saying that now “people are feeling better about themselves,” relying “more on their inner strengths than on outer, concrete things they can show off.” He suggested that narcissism was a cyclical phenomenon that had peaked and would soon “level off,” with the next, less narcissistic generation saying of their elders, “Look at those selfish clods.” The store manager defended women’s narcissistic interest in beauty and clothing, arguing that while men had “always been in the spotlight,” it was now time for women, deprived of opportunities “to be expressive, to be something, to be noticed,” to use fashion “to make a statement.” Narcissism “is really for everyone,” she added, agreeing with the pastor that narcissism was not on the rise but “would mellow out.” The academic rested her case for fashion on the joys of expressiveness. “Fashion is saying,” she argued, “ ‘Why can’t I have fun? I’ve earned it. I’ve gotten my head together, now I can enjoy it.’ ” Women deserved the outlet it provided, she said, adding that fashion was fun, and “shouldn’t be over-psychoanalyzed”—advice that would be roundly ignored in the popular discussion of narcissism in the decades to come.44

Seven G R AT I F I C AT I O N

Gratification figured centrally in social commentators’ jeremiads, encapsulating the contest between excess, satisfaction, and pleasure on the one hand and asceticism, restraint, and control on the other. “Gratification Now Is the Slogan of the ’70s, Laments a Historian,” reads the title of a 1979 People magazine profile of Christopher Lasch, who singled out the counterculture’s celebration of “living for the moment, immediate gratification, opposition to the work ethic” as exemplary of America’s culture of narcissism.1 Critics spoke with one voice in condemning what they argued was an ascendant culture of personal gratification that celebrated self-fulfillment and self-realization at the expense of venerable habits of abnegation and self-control, and pointed to the narcissist as an avatar of the unconstrained need and desire that appeared suddenly so problematic. From the critics’ perspective, psychoanalysis was a site of unrelieved indulgence and gratification, an incubator of the reckless impulsiveness blighting the cultural landscape. Within the discipline, however, the status of gratification was more complex. Both ubiquitous and controversial, gratification was central to Freudian theory: the proposition that the mind will seek pleasure—instinctual gratification—and avoid unpleasure was foundational to classical Freudian drive psychology. But gratification was also at the center of heated debate about proper analytic technique. Freud recommended that an encompassing emotional abstinence govern the treatment setting, holding that

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patients’ wishes, desires, and demands were to be frustrated in the service of the cure. Sándor Ferenczi, dissenting on this as on other issues, argued that this technique too often inhibited rather than furthered patients’ recoveries from their illnesses, and advocated a “principle of indulgence” and a gratifying empathy that would act as a counterweight to Freudian frustration. By the late 1920s, Freud and Ferenczi were bitterly divided over the question of what patients needed and what analysts should provide them. Freud prevailed; Ferenczi was censored, and banished from the psychoanalytic fold. Their split—which many analysts considered tragic, even traumatic—burdened the discipline, dividing it for decades between orthodoxy and revisionism. The questions that Ferenczi’s banishment was meant to suppress persisted, however, and were aired in debates that picked up in the 1950s. These debates, which in effect converged on the question of whether patients like Ferenczi’s—who, everyone agreed, were “sicker” than Freud’s, difficult, hopeless, and narcissistically inaccessible—were properly within or beyond the analytic compass, testified to how unsettled the field remained thirty years after his expulsion.2 With Heinz Kohut’s rise to prominence, psychoanalysis restaged the traumatic conflict between Freud and Ferenczi. The outcome was different this time. Under the banner of empathy, Kohut challenged the asceticism of the midcentury classical analytic setting, deftly if quietly managing to bring orthodoxy and revisionism together— most effectively, we shall see, on the issue of technique. Recuperating the Ferenczian project and the Ferenczian patient for psychoanalysis proper, Kohut began the process of salving psychoanalysis’s selfinflicted wound. He imbued the once-suspect gratification with a neutral, even positive, valence. And Ferenczi’s difficult patients, now called narcissists, were rendered fit subjects for the analyst’s couch. While not abandoning the Freudian prohibition on sexual gratification between patient and analyst, psychoanalysis quietly abandoned many of the constraints of its self-imposed austerity.3 Social critics aligned narcissism with indulgence and prescribed austerity both emotional and material to dampen its efflorescence and to combat its manifestations. Revisionist analysts from Ferenczi to Kohut, by contrast, located the roots of narcissism not in material

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indulgence but in emotional deprivation, seeing it as a response to protect the self from injury at the hands of frustrating others, from parents to friends to potential partners: “If the world does not love me enough,” reasons the narcissist, “I have to love and gratify myself.” Some went so far as to cast narcissism as an iatrogenic illness caused by the privations of the classical Freudian analytic setting. According to this line of argument, analytic abstinence, in limiting analysts’ responsiveness and in downplaying—even proscribing—the possibility of a “real” relationship between them and their patients, tacitly encouraged “a stoic, narcissistic self-sufficiency.” Ferenczian “spoiling” and “coddling” were from this perspective antidotes, not incitements, to patients’ narcissism.4 Gratification—like self-esteem, independence, and vanity—was recast and reconfigured over the course of the psychoanalytic century. Whereas at the outset it was considered heretical that patients might need or want gratification, by the 1970s Kohut and other revisionists had raised the possibility that it was part of the analyst’s task to meet patients’ needs, especially if the patient exhibited narcissistic pathology. It is not altogether surprising that social critics were unaware of gratification’s shifting analytic fortunes. The analytic controversy around gratification was internal to the discipline and, focused on questions of technique that had little cultural purchase, largely hidden from view. The analyst’s narcissists did not gratify their needs but, rather, disavowed them in the name of a grandiose self-sufficiency and omnipotence. The critics focused on the external feast of gratifications enjoyed by the narcissist while overlooking the internal refusals of the same. Philip Rieff, Daniel Bell, and their critical brethren lamented that asceticism as a cultural ideal had disappeared, but they might have found it surviving in the person of the narcissist, had his commitment to asceticism not been occluded by the force of their own consumerist critique.

Cures of Love To appreciate how high the gratification stakes are, we need only peer over Ferenczi’s shoulder as he put furious pen to private paper,

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casting himself as an “enfant terrible” in revolt against his oncebeloved but now irredeemably hypocritical Freud. The year was 1932. At this point, Freud and Ferenczi had been colleagues for more than twenty years, having traveled together extensively and having exchanged more than twelve hundred remarkably intimate letters. Ferenczi had been able to sustain a relationship with Freud where other teachers, collaborators, and acolytes had failed and been cast aside—Josef Breuer in 1895, Wilhelm Fliess in 1904, Carl Jung in 1912, Otto Rank in 1924. But he had done this at great personal cost, learning early on that Freud, while claiming to want mutuality, would brook neither independence nor dissension. Ferenczi’s submission, exemplified in his stance of abjection—acceding to Freud’s vision of their relationship—following the crisis in Palermo in 1910 described in Chapter 4, had secured his position as Freud’s favorite, his proclaimed crown prince (as Freud had earlier called Jung) and “the most perfect heir of his ideas.” Through the 1920s, however, the “wise baby” of psychoanalysis had played the part of unruly adolescent to Freud’s coolly restrained pater familias, adopting and advocating a number of experimental technical innovations that pushed against the limits of a developing psychoanalytic orthodoxy and in consequence strained their relationship. Where Freud famously mandated that analysis was to be carried out “in a state of frustration,” Ferenczi would respond to his patients’ wishes.5 It took a particularly disdainful, even mocking, letter from Freud— dated December 13, 1931—to push Ferenczi to the break he knew was the price of his intellectual and emotional freedom. Three weeks later, he embarked on the Clinical Diary, a long-suppressed document published only in 1985, which, in the very condition of its secret existence, testifies to how difficult it was for Ferenczi to confront Freud directly, how dangerous even suppressed and hidden revolt could feel. Indeed, in his last entry, written eight months before he died of pernicious anemia at the age of fifty-nine, Ferenczi linked the onset of his “blood-crisis” to the realization that Freud, “a ‘higher power’ ” upon whom he long relied for protection, would no longer protect but would “on the contrary” trample him under foot “as soon as I go my own way and not his”—as Freud had in fact repeat-

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edly done. The pace of his and Freud’s once-ardent correspondence had been slowing for some time—Freud had observed ten years previously that “formerly so lively,” it had “gone to sleep”—and with Freud’s critiques of him and his therapeutic enthusiasms mounting, Ferenczi gave vent to the creative energy within that had once found expression in his letters to Freud. The Clinical Diary alternates between ruthless self-scrutiny and blistering attacks on Freud, as well as on the constraints he had imposed. Charging him again and again with hypocrisy, Ferenczi homes in on Freud’s emotional detachment and professed contempt for those who sought a cure in psychoanalysis. Throughout, Ferenczi expresses his belief that “the insensitivity of the analyst” was rooted in a perspective organized to secure the analyst’s comfort rather than the patient’s cure.6 Ferenczi opened the Diary contrasting the “unfeeling and indifferent” stance of the orthodox analyst he had once been with his evolving commitment to “natural and sincere behavior” as best suited to establish a favorable atmosphere for analysis. The “mannered form of greeting, formal request to ‘tell everything’, so-called free-floating attention” that together constituted the Freudian analytic setting were inadequate, he held, to the intensity of the analysand’s suffering, the last in particular ultimately amounting “to no attention at all.” The request to tell everything that Ferenczi invokes here refers to the demand made on the patient to speak freely, not to selfcensor, in the analyst’s presence, a technique central to the development of psychoanalysis that Freud elevated to the standing of a “fundamental rule” in 1912. In the same year, Freud first proposed “evenly-suspended attention” as the analyst’s preferred stance in his “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis,” one in a series of six papers published between 1911 and 1915 that came to be known as his Papers on Technique, the sacred fons et origo of orthodox practice. A counterpart to the recommended “free association” on the ideally compliant patient’s part, the analyst’s evenly suspended attention ensured that he would not subject what the patient said to unconscious censorship. Rather, he would use his unconscious as an instrument—a receptive organ, as Freud put it,

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much like a telephone receiver—prepared to receive the “transmitting unconscious of the patient,” and, provided the analyst had “undergone a psycho-analytic purification” in the course of a training analysis, the risk of his distorting what the patient produced would prove minimal.7 Freud would admit to Ferenczi in a 1928 letter that the recommendations on technique he had made fifteen years previously were essentially negative, allowing that they had emphasized “what one should not do, to demonstrate the temptations that work against analysis.” Freud wrote that then he had left everything positive unspecified and claimed that he now realized that he had implicitly relied on the analyst’s tact, his “capacity for empathy,” a concept Ferenczi had recently spoken about, in 1927, in a lecture to his Hungarian colleagues. What had happened in the intervening years, however, was that “the excessively docile” among analysts had failed to understand the elasticity required of them and “subjected themselves to Freud’s ‘don’t’s’ [sic] as if they were taboos.” In 1928, Freud did allow that his recommendations were in need of revision. And he applauded his correspondent’s advocacy of elasticity in technique, the term referring to the analyst’s yielding, “like an elastic band,” to the pulls of the patient while pulling back himself, a give-and-take account of the analytic encounter that Ferenczi, in the same lecture, said had been suggested to him by a patient. But Freud would not follow Ferenczi in what he saw as the latter’s concession to an arbitrary, impossible-to-control subjectivity on the part of the analyst. Those analysts without a capacity for empathy, Freud worried, would exploit the analytic situation, giving rein to their “own unrestrained complexes.” The analytic process consisted “first and foremost” in the analyst’s “quantitative assessment of the dynamic factors in the situation,” not in the nonscientific mysticism that he worried Ferenczi was promoting.8 Ferenczi replied to Freud that his own approach required that the subjective factor be strictly controlled: the analyst was to put himself in the patient’s position. “One must ‘empathize’ [einfühlen],” he proclaimed. Ferenczi went so far as to formulate his own psycho-

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analytic rule, the “empathy rule,” as an alternative to Freud’s “fundamental rule.” Empathy, Ferenczi explained, invoking imagery borrowed from the pathological laboratory, was knowledge derived from “dissection of many minds,” most notably the analyst’s own, that allowed the analyst to envision the whole range of the patient’s conscious and unconscious thoughts and associations. The analyst was to be guided not by feelings but by this capacity for coolly mobilized empathy. In the consulting room, he would find his mind— here the elasticity of technique comes into play—continuously swinging from empathy to self-observation and from self-observation to making judgments.9 As the back and forth between Ferenczi and Freud on the subject in 1928 shows, empathy was not a concept entirely foreign to Freud. The concept was native not to psychology but to the field of aesthetics, with the word Einfühlung—literally “feeling into”—first appearing in the 1873 doctoral dissertation of the German philosopher Robert Vischer. Vischer used the term to characterize the relationship between the viewer of art and the art object itself, arguing that whatever aesthetic qualities the former would claim to see in the latter were not inherent to it but, rather, projected onto it by the viewer. Theodore Lipps, professor of philosophy at Munich, endowed the term with more broadly psychological meanings in his Zur Einfühlung, published in 1913. Freud, an avid if at times envious reader of Lipps, in whose works he admitted he had “found the substance of my insights stated quite clearly . . . , perhaps rather more so than I would like,” used the word eight times in his Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, published in 1905, a book inspired in large part by Lipps’s own 1898 Komik und Humor. Einfühlung, as Freud later put it, refers to the process, similar to identification, which allows a person to understand another person, to “take up any attitude at all towards another mental life.” Although after Jokes Freud used the term twelve more times in his published writings, in only three of those instances did the word empathy— consensually established as the English equivalent of Einfühlung by around 1920—appear in the English language Standard Edition, in

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part because James and Alix Strachey, who supervised the translation, found the word distasteful, in Alix’s estimation “a vile word, elephantine, for a subtle process.”10 The Stracheys’ idiosyncratic aversion to the word empathy likely contributed to the received wisdom that empathy was alien to the emotionally cold and distant Freud of the consulting room—a view of Freud that is clearly in need of some qualification. Most notably, in one of his Papers on Technique, Freud advised analysts that it was imperative to the success of a psychoanalytic treatment that they approach the patient with empathy or Einfühlung, which appears as “sympathetic understanding” in the Standard Edition translation, a less subjective and robust emotional stance than he actually had in mind.11 But to posit an empathic, responsive, and nimble consulting-room Freud on the basis of misguided translation practices is to go too far, for Freud was also consistent in calling primarily on the intellectual dimensions of the term and was throughout his life suspicious of the analyst’s own emotions in the analytic setting. If he was familiar with empathy, he did not enthusiastically embrace it. Informing the minor contretemps over empathy between Freud and Ferenczi was the former’s urgent recommendation to his colleagues sixteen years earlier, in 1912, that they model themselves on the surgeon, “who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy.” The “emotional coldness” of Freud’s enjoining stood in stark contrast to Ferenczi’s recommended empathy, and it was altogether consonant with his advocacy of the analyst as mirror to the patient’s psyche and, more broadly, of psychoanalysis as primarily an intellectual exercise of interpretation. Freud maintained that the analyst’s coldness allowed for maximal exploration of the unconscious material produced by the analysand while at the same time protecting the analyst’s “own emotional life.” The analyst’s own individuality and any “intimate attitude” he might want to bring to the treatment were not aids to its progress but, rather, dangers that brought the specter of suggestion into the consulting room.12 Suggestive influences might induce patients to produce material to please the analyst, but such influences were of no utility in uncover-

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ing what was unconscious, the psychoanalyst’s quarry. Only the analyst’s opacity to the patient would ensure that unconscious material— material of which the patient was by definition unaware—would be made available for use in the treatment. Objectivity, neutrality, and disinterestedness on the part of the analyst were the watchwords of analytic technique as presented by Freud in his Papers on Technique. Yet, Freud was well aware that emotional coldness was in many cases inadequate to the task of gaining the patient’s compliance. “The cure is effected by love,” he had written to Jung years earlier, noting that only transference, by which he then meant the patient’s love for the analyst, could provide the impetus necessary for patients to engage in the difficult process of analysis. Patients give up their resistances “to please us,” Freud told his Viennese colleagues the next year: “Our cures are cures of love,” he said, once again underscoring the instrumentally seductive nature of the analytic encounter. Freud first characterized the love for the physician—specifically, in an early case of hysteria he treated, a female patient’s desire that he might kiss her—that he witnessed among patients in treatment as in the nature of a “false connection,” explaining that the patient in question harbored an unconscious wish that a certain man in her past “might boldly take the initiative and give her a kiss.”13 By 1915, when he published his paper on the phenomenon, “Observations on Transference-Love,” the patient’s love had been transformed into a highly explosive force and endowed with a measure of reality, turned from a false connection into a genuine phenomenon. “Transference-Love” was Freud’s favorite among his technical papers, a tour de force that in ten briskly argued pages interrogates not only the nature of the analytic encounter but also of love itself. Written in the aftermath of what Freud called “the showdown” with Jung, it was in Freud’s estimation “more honest, bolder, and more ruthless” in presentation than his earlier work. The love that in “On Narcissism” is strained and pinched, a fixed quantity mechanistically distributed between self and other, is in “Transference-Love” a crazy-making, unpredictable, and destabilizing force “lacking in normality”—which is what makes it, paradoxically, normal. “Being

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in love in ordinary life,” Freud wrote, is “more similar to abnormal than normal mental phenomena.” If love in the context of analysis was less sensible and more blind, in its overvaluation of the loved one, than love in ordinary life, then this was just in the nature of love: “These departures from the norm constitute precisely what is essential about being in love.”14 Love here is rendered more in the register of cataclysm than in the coolly distributed ebbs and flows of “On Narcissism.” And cataclysmic it was, on the one hand eliciting behaviors and declarations both comical and serious from patients besotted with their analysts and on the other powerfully tempting the analyst to “forget his technique and his medical task for the sake of a fine experience.” Freud recommended that the analyst at the receiving end of a patient’s passion not attempt to convince her of the unreality of her love, of the fact that it represented a revival of feelings first laid down in early childhood. He was to keep in mind that the patient’s love had little to do with “the charms of his own person” and he was not to be tempted to view the situation as a conquest. He was not to talk her out of her desires, to urge her “to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts,” but neither was he to gratify them. The treatment, Freud famously declared, “must be carried out in abstinence.” It was “a fundamental principle that the patient’s need and longing should be allowed to persist in her,” for only in such a state of suspended satisfaction would she be impelled to do the work analysis demanded. No surrogate satisfactions were to be offered her, for her frustration was critical to the progress of the treatment. “Cruel though it may sound,” he later told his colleagues, it was the analyst’s task to make sure that the patient’s suffering was not prematurely foreclosed and, if it was, “to re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation.”15 Freud was well acquainted with what he called in 1894 “the horrible misery of abstinence.” Privation, renunciation, and abstinence, sites of struggle through the decade of the 1890s, held meanings for Freud that were at once personal and professional. Anguished discussion of the superhuman torments imposed by abstinence punctuate his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, especially in the

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years from 1893 through 1896, when he was working his way toward the conclusion that the origins of the neuroses were exclusively sexual. Freud’s first mention of abstinence in his correspondence with Fliess refers to his own sexual deprivation, he and his wife having decided to live “in abstinence” following the birth of six children in as many years of marriage. Every subsequent mention, however, refers to the “indescribably bleak” miseries of abstinence not from sex but from smoking. It appears that Fliess—in this respect a Freudian avant la lettre—responded to his friend’s repeated reports of troubling cardiac symptoms by issuing a prohibition, more than once, on smoking his favored cigars. Freud complained that this made his life unbearable. In one instance, he was able to honor Fliess’s absolutist edict for seven weeks, but the deprivation left him feeling so “outrageously bad . . . completely incapable of working, a beaten man” that he resumed the habit. Three weeks into this period of abstinence, Freud reported suffering “a severe cardiac misery,” characterized by “violent arrhythmia, constant tension, pressure, burning in the heart region” in addition to shooting pains down his left arm and feelings of depression “which took the form of visions of death and departure.” The episode, he claimed, was worse than he had ever experienced while smoking. It was as if abstinence had heightened his underlying anxieties, bringing them to light for inspection by his physician Fliess. Two months later Freud was half ironically referring to the narrative of his symptoms as “my case history.”16 The mechanism of symptom formation visible here is strikingly similar to the one Freud later outlined in issuing his recommendation that analytic treatment be carried out “in a state of frustration.” Just as Fliess denying Freud the consolation of smoking resulted in more-frightening-than-normal cardiac symptoms and amplified his self-described neurosis, the Freudian analyst seeks, by refusing the patient all gratifications, to sharpen her conflicts, to raise them to their highest pitch so that she will have the motivation and energy necessary to address them. Abstinence is in the service of the cure. It is worth noting that Freud broached then immediately dropped the thread of his own sexual abstinence in his correspondence with

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Fliess. The issue surfaced time and again, however, in displaced form, in his narrative of his own struggles to cease smoking. Freud plaintively complained to Fliess in 1894 about the absence of anything “warm any more between the lips.” The first, bowdlerized edition of the letters rendered Freud’s complaint as “nothing lit between my lips,” prompting Erik Erikson to comment drolly, “It is hard to see why Freud is censored here.”17 In 1896, following two years spent complaining that Fliess’s prohibition on smoking was robbing his life of enjoyment and preventing him from working, Freud changed his tune and admitted that abstinence—redefined now as limiting himself to between one and four cigars daily—did him good. He turned his “inner unrest” in a productive direction, back to resolving the problem of hysteria. It was as if Freud had found in these tightly rationed cigars the surrogate satisfactions that, he wrote, partially appease the “need and longing” experienced by patients subjected to the deprivations of analytic treatment. He went on to endow abstinence with charismatic power, proclaiming that it “attracts people” by holding out the promise of plentitude to those waiting for the riches it held to be finally distributed. We can only speculate on the degree to which Freud might have drawn on his own experience of abstinence in formulating his technical recommendations in the years from 1911 through 1914. Throughout his life, he consistently disparaged the sexual abstinence—voluntary or socially mandated as the price of civilization—that he held was the root cause of anxiety. But he also saw a more broadly construed abstinence as potentially transformative of the self, the “renunciation and privation” that constituted it serving as “a means to power.” Religiously prescribed asceticism did not constitute a withdrawal from the world but was gratifying and empowering. Examining the chastity of the religious virtuosi, Max Weber, in his 1922 treatise The Sociology of Religion, similarly cast abstinence as in the service of charisma.18 As Freud saw it, asceticism in the analytic setting was not simple privation but a means to self-discovery and mastery.

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Analytic Censorship Throughout his career as psychoanalyst, Ferenczi was subjected to censorship, not all of it externally imposed. In his Diary he analyzed his long-standing self-censorship, both in his “literal subordination” to Freud and in his “total inhibition about speaking in his presence until he broached a subject.” Ferenczi learned that submission to Freud’s authority coupled with empathic attunement to his needs would allow him to hold Freud close and, although he silently seethed for years, it was not until he was in his midfifties that he mustered the wherewithal to publicly assert his independence from Freud. By 1922, it was clear their relationship was cooling. Ferenczi, by his own telling “older and more sensible” than he had been in Palermo, was belatedly “weaning” himself from Freud in the guise of substitute father and finding himself forced to “intellectual self-reliance.”19 Ferenczi would focus increasingly on the technique of psychoanalysis and would increasingly find himself questioning the rationale for and the efficacy of Freud’s technical recommendations. Through the 1920s, he published a series of papers in which he documented his therapeutic experimentation. Although his Clinical Diary would not come to light for decades, these papers voiced many of the concerns central to that document, attacking analytic privation and the hypocrisy of subjecting patients to suffering in the name of treatment. According to Ferenczi, it was Freud’s indifference to the therapeutic dimension of the analytic project that prompted his own apostasy. Freud’s indifference is by now well documented. His correspondence is punctuated with references to the toll exacted by patients, whom he characterized variously as boring, disgusting, and insatiable. He was “saturated with analysis as therapy” and “fed up,” he wrote to Ferenczi. He was eager to limit how many patients he saw, “with the clear intent of tormenting myself less.” He once remarked in Ferenczi’s presence that “patients are a rabble,” serving only to provide analysts with their livelihoods and “material to learn from”—expressing the therapeutic nihilism that Ferenczi found especially troubling. Freud’s patience with neurotics in analysis was limited, he told Ferenczi, and “in life I am inclined to intolerance toward them.” To

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one analysand, the American Smiley Blanton, Freud explained that the main aim of psychoanalysis was not therapeutic but, rather, “to contribute to the science of psychology and to the world of literature and life in general.”20 These sentiments were privately conveyed. But Freud also went public with his doubts. He proclaimed in 1933 that he had “never been a therapeutic enthusiast,” and four years later, in one of the last of his works to appear in his lifetime, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” he expounded on what James Strachey as editor of the piece defensively characterized as a cool, even pessimistic, attitude toward psychoanalysis’s therapeutic ambitions. Freud in this essay dismissively brackets the question of what eventuates in cure as “sufficiently elucidated,” preferring to focus instead on obstacles in the way of such cures. He then goes on to settle scores in adducing as evidence Ferenczi’s failed analysis with him in support of his own pessimism. Ferenczi’s overweening “need to cure and to help” had led him from the path of analysis to a “boundless course of experimentation,” Freud wrote, adding that Ferenczi had set himself aims “altogether out of reach to-day.”21 Indeed, it was Ferenczi’s furor sanandi, his therapeutic overeagerness and rage to heal, that his analytic detractors would see as the Achilles heel that led him from the analytic straight and narrow. Ferenczi, who bridled against the constraints on the analyst’s behavior that flowed from Freud’s technical recommendations—from the conviction expressed in them that patients could not be helped— saw his own need to help as the driving force behind his creative explorations. “Freud no longer loves his patients,” Ferenczi charged in his Diary. Freud was intellectually but no longer emotionally invested in psychoanalysis, disdainful of patients and in the analytic setting “levitating like some kind of divinity” above them. Framing it as an issue of not abusing patients’ trust, Ferenczi distinguished himself from Freud in his own willingness to follow patients’ lead, to relax Freud’s precepts and “to be openly a human being with feelings” both positive and negative toward the patient, to allow himself to be empathic but also “frankly exasperated.”22 Where Freud hated his patients, he would love them.

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In his time, Ferenczi’s couch was known in the analytic world as the haven for hopeless cases, those patients considered too disturbed to tolerate the privations of the orthodox analytic setting. Freudians for the most part considered narcissistically inaccessible patients incurable; Ferenczi argued that it was not the patient but the Freudian coolly aloof and minimally responsive analyst who was at fault. Ferenczi would substitute for the Freudian analyst’s “expectant silence” and “stereotyped question”—“Now what comes into your mind about that?”—a vision of analysis not unlike the “game of questions and answers” child analysts played with their patients. He would replace the Freudian’s “technical strictness” with his own “inexhaustible patience, understanding, goodwill, and kindliness.” He would encourage patients to surrender to their spontaneously experienced emotions and allow them to reenact the signal traumatic events of their childhoods, treating the “acting out” that the Freudian saw as preliminary to recollection—the actual work of analysis—as a valuable source of material in itself. Ferenczi’s observation that his patients overcame their mistrust of him only when convinced they would not encounter in his consulting room the “insincerity and hypocrisy” that had marked their childhoods informed his stance of “general encouragement.” Like “an affectionate mother,” he would indulge their “wishes and impulses as far as is in any way possible.” In another paper, Ferenczi wrote that patients for whom the standard analytic approach was inadequate needed “to be adopted and to partake for the first time in their lives of the advantages of a normal nursery.”23 Ferenczi’s apostasy reached its climax in a confrontation with Freud and analytic orthodoxy in September 1932. Stopping off to visit Freud on his way to a psychoanalytic congress in Wiesbaden, Ferenczi read aloud to him the paper that would be published the next year under the title “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child.” In this paper, now considered a classic, Ferenczi went public with the charge of professional hypocrisy he had made in his Diary and to which he had glancingly referred in print two years previously. He saw this hypocrisy in analysts’ politeness in the presence of angry, reproachful, or critical patients whom they in fact

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found hard to tolerate and often disliked. Needy patients, many of whom had as children experienced adults as duplicitous, picked up on the disdain beneath the analyst’s mannered graciousness and were thus forced to experience anew, sometimes in hallucinatory, trancelike states of dissociation, the traumas of inattention, abandonment, or sexual predation that had characterized their early years. Patients exhibit “a remarkable, almost clairvoyant knowledge” concerning their analyst’s thoughts and emotions, Ferenczi argued, and in the treatment setting the most damaged and needy of them responded much like children; that is, they responded not to intellectual explanations but to the analyst’s sincerity and “maternal friendliness.” Patients were better served by analysts who responded honestly to criticisms than by those who hid behind their own authority. It was with the former, who abjured complacency and admitted to the possibility of error, that patients could feel the confidence and trust necessary to approach the past “as an objective memory,” not as a live trauma, and with whom they could begin the process of recovery. Pay attention to the ways you speak to your patients and pupils, Ferenczi advised: “Loosen, as it were, their tongues.”24 Freud listened “thunderstruck” to Ferenczi’s disquisition, warning him that he was on dangerous ground in departing so radically from established psychoanalytic technique and begging him not to deliver the paper. Ferenczi’s attack on the coolly detached analytic persona was heretical enough. Coupled with his focus on the traumatizing effects of incestuous seductions and “real rape,” issues that Freud had long preferred to treat in the register of fantasy, Ferenczi’s “errors” were serious enough to merit banishment. Even before Freud heard Ferenczi out, he was preparing to censor him. After the fact he was furious, characterizing the paper in a letter to his daughter Anna as confused, contrived, and devious. In a telegram to a Berlin loyalist sent the day after his meeting with Ferenczi—their last meeting, it would turn out, ending with Freud declining to shake Ferenczi’s hand offered “in affectionate adieu”—he deemed the paper harmless but stupid. Colleagues who wanted to forbid Ferenczi from speaking at the congress joined Freud in predicting, over the next several days, that scandal, even sensation, would ensue were

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the paper to be heard. Freud tried to stand between the paper and publication—to censor it—writing to Ferenczi a few days after their meeting of his hopes that the latter would recognize “the technical impropriety” of the procedures outlined in the paper and his belief that Ferenczi would fail to “rectify” himself. Although the paper was published the following year in German, it was not until 1949 that it appeared in English translation in a “Ferenczi Number” of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Ernest Jones’s promise to Ferenczi he would publish it immediately notwithstanding.25 Ferenczi was soon enough branded as psychotic and posthumously considered as such by all but a few of his fellow analysts. He was marginal to the mainstream analytic tradition, cast as a once-faithful, sometimes-brilliant disciple who regrettably had lost his way. “The Confusion of Tongues” was long adduced as evidence of his madness, characterized as the work of a dying analyst. His writings were censored by Freud’s faithful acolytes. Much of what has been written concerning this episode and of its traumatic effects on the analytic community follows Freud in focusing on Ferenczi’s theoretical backward glance. But it was their clash over love and provision in the analytic setting that matters here. Freud was happy to use love instrumentally in analysis, in “Transference-Love” seeing the patient’s love for the analyst first elicited in the service of compliance with the treatment and then of necessity left unresponded to, coolly transformed in the name of proper technique from something genuine to something unreal. In his Diary, Ferenczi objected to Freud’s construal of transference love, chalking it up to the analyst’s “narcissistic, specifically erotomaniacal delusion.” In contrast to Freud, who held that this love was a spontaneous phenomenon, Ferenczi argued it was an artificially produced effect of the analytic situation, a response to the analyst’s technique, inherently narcissistic, of interpreting every detail of the patient’s response as expressive of her feelings regarding him, as well as of his expectation, even explicit exhortations, that the patient manifest such strong, passionate feelings for him. Ferenczi held that in so exhorting the patient, the analyst was unwittingly setting up a situation in which the child’s relationship vis-à-vis the parents was replicated, as parents similarly

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exhorted her to feel loving and passionate feelings that were possibly nonexistent, given her young age. The analyst’s mechanical and egotistical stance strengthened patients’ inhibitions and curtailed their ability to speak freely and to contradict or criticize the analyst, whose feelings they did not want to offend and upon whose friendliness they were dependent. Ferenczi thought that however adoring of the analyst patients were, they longed to free themselves of the analyst’s oppressive demands for love, of the “over-burdening transference.” The transference, Ferenczi argued, was not always the means of the cure but sometimes an impediment to it. The Freudian analytic setting was a hothouse of ethical, technical, and erotic danger threatening to the professionalism of the analyst and the recovery of the patient. The Ferenczian setting was ideally by contrast characterized by a “mild, passionless atmosphere” that freed patients in making no covert demands on them.26 Freud’s technical recommendations, organized around abstinence and privation, were of a piece with his construal of the analytic encounter and its dangers. For his part, Ferenczi saw the dangers of analysis, a “cruel game with patients” as practiced by the orthodox, in the very withdrawal of emotion that Freud prescribed.27 There was, to be sure, a paradox here, a paradox at the heart of the disagreement between the two analysts: Freudian cool objectivity is allied with the passionate intensity of transference love, while the Ferenczian setting, awash in empathy and warmth, is, if Ferenczi is to be believed, passionless. In an ironic twist of historical fortunes, Ferenczi, who attempted to drain the analytic atmosphere of the heightened passion with which Freud imbued it, has been branded in the literature as driven by an inordinate desire to cure through love.

Privation in the Analytic Setting We can see in the series of confrontations between Freud and Ferenczi, and in particular with the organized suppression of the latter, the triumph of privation and abstinence as organizing concepts within psychoanalysis. It would be hard to overestimate the importance historically of abstinence to psychoanalytic practice, especially

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in the mid-twentieth-century heyday of ego psychology in the United States. Although frequently invoked before then, it was only in the 1950s that it was enshrined as a rule, the so-called rule of abstinence.28 Freud emphasized that the abstinence he envisioned was not sexual, though, it should be noted, he had good reasons for issuing a prohibition on analyst-patient sexual relations. Such relations, now called boundary violations, were rife in early analytic practice. Jung and his analysand and later coworker and fellow analyst Sabina Spielrein had an affair four years after her two-month-long analysis with him that ended quite badly; Jones met Loe Kann, with whom he lived for years, when she was in treatment with him; and an especially messy thicket of analysis and sex ended in Ferenczi marrying Gizella Pálos, a patient of his and Freud’s alike (Ferenczi was also in love with her daughter, Elma). Freud attempted to manage a number of such relationships, and though he was disconcerted by Ferenczi’s messy triangle and chided Jones for his sexual impulsiveness, his stance was not one of moral condemnation. He was less concerned with the sexual transgressions in themselves than with the ignominy he feared these relationships would bring analysis. Sexual abstinence was thus envisioned in the service of the cure. But, as many have pointed out, Freud was never so abstemious—so coldly ungratifying—in his actual practice as his own recommendations prescribed, prompting the question, “was Freud a Freudian?”29 Freud’s patients in the 1920s and 1930s were primarily analysts in training, for reasons ranging from his need for hard currency in the midst of the post–World War I economic collapse, to a desire to see his influence spread, to a straightforward preference for students over neurotics. A number of them published memoirs of their sessions with the master. Marshaling these accounts to document discrepancies between Freud’s words and actions has turned into a minor industry. The consulting room Freud was not the “mirror” to his patients of his stated recommendations but a warmly human presence who shared freely of his perspectives and concerns; analysands remember him as speaking openly on a range of topics. One recalls that Freud even got up to light a cigar while exclaiming “this must

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be celebrated!” when he felt especially pleased with the work being accomplished; another wrote about Freud pounding “the arms of his chair and often the head of the couch” as he transmitted his excitement. Freud was not silent but could talk through entire sessions, with one American claiming he spoke for the entirety of two separate hour-long sessions. He could be directive and commanding with patients; the most frequently cited example of this is his resorting in frustration to the highly unusual move of telling the recalcitrant Wolf Man that his treatment would end one year hence, cured or not, in effect blackmailing him into giving up his symptoms. Freud was known to gossip with analysands about his colleagues and about other patients: Karen Horney was “able but malicious—mean”; Ferenczi was “starved for love”; Alfred Adler was “too proud to live in the shadow of this giant” (that is, Freud himself). Freud found it “too painful” to speak of Jung with some colleagues in treatment, whereas with others the bitterness poured forth. He gave and accepted books and other gifts to and from patients, while alert to how problematic his actions could be; one remembers him saying “you will see . . . what difficulties gifts in analysis always make.”30 And, most scandalously, he analyzed his own daughter Anna, the fact of which many were dimly aware, which provided ample fodder for the very active analytic rumor mill. In all, Freud’s deviations from orthodoxy were significant enough to prompt dismay among the contemporaneous analytic “authorities,” as he ironically called them. For even his staunchest defenders, the contrast between the rigidities of the textbook Freud and the often-gratifying humanness of the consulting room Freud has proven a source of consternation and confusion. Peter Gay, for example, notes Freud’s “sovereign readiness to disregard his own rules” and accounts for Freud’s rule bending and rule breaking by reference to his “sense of mastery” and “sheer humaneness.” Gay argues that on abstinence Freud was categorical but concludes that the “frigid” imagery of the surgeon and the mirror he employed to convey the concept was particularly unfortunate as it obscured the analyst’s very human partnership with his patient.31

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The trope of the analyst’s “humanness” comes up repeatedly in considerations of technique, its strangeness when cast in the interrogatory form of “can the analyst be human” symptomatic of the difficulty in which midcentury American psychoanalysis found itself. The literature is punctuated with tales of patients’ astonishment upon realizing the analyst was indeed a fellow human being. The Viennese Otto Fenichel wrote, for instance, that his patients were taken aback by his “freedom and naturalness”: “They had believed an analyst is a special creation and is not permitted to be human!” Freud’s recommendations hardened in the hands of the émigré ego psychologists, who went Freud one better in advocating an analytic setting characterized by an austerity and abstinence consonant with his technical recommendations but absent from his actual practice. They expanded the compass of Freud’s recommended abstinence to proscribe any words, gestures, actions, or behaviors on the part of the analyst that might interfere with the purity of the analytic process. And they delineated patently appealing modes of relationship—the working alliance, the therapeutic relationship, the real relationship—that might supplement but not replace the ascetic and authoritarian transference, attempting to preserve the latter’s purity while bringing a measure of simple humanity into the orthodox consulting room and establishing the terms in which analytic technique would be discussed for decades: an impossibly abstinent ideal supplemented by a stream of tools and ancillary modes of relationship that qualified and softened its coldness.32 These extratransferential relationships testify to just how impoverished the relationship between analyst and patient had become in the hands of the orthodox. The basic argument of Leo Stone’s landmark book, The Psychoanalytic Situation, published in 1961, was that in their pursuit of an unattainable purity his colleagues had abandoned any semblance of common sense. He pointed to the “superfluous deprivations” exacted by “overzealous and indiscriminate” adherence to the rule of abstinence and chastised his fellow analysts for the austerity, aloofness, and “arbitrary authoritarianism” that characterized their interactions with patients. Highlighting the analyst’s

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rule-bound rigidity, his “robotlike invocation of a blanket rule,” his treating the patient as if surgically anesthetized, comatose, or even cadaverous, Stone argued passionately that patients needed more than the classical (or neoclassical) setting offered. The midcentury literature is peppered with accounts of analysts so under the sway of orthodoxy that they cannot express any compassion over the fate of a patient’s seriously ill infant or, conversely, congratulate a patient on a major achievement for fear of doing harm. Was it really so dangerous for the patient to know whether the analyst vacationed “in Vermont or Maine” or, “let me be really bold,” Stone writes, “that one knows something more about sailing than about golf or bridge.”33 Stone concluded that analysts’ preference for “schematic perfection” over “intuitive wisdom” in the treatment setting skewed the analytic process. Skittishness on the question of the legitimate gratifications that might sustain “a palpably human context” was especially limiting, he maintained; only certain “essential gratifications” would equip patients to tolerate abstinence.34 That is, as Stone saw it, gratification need not necessarily be opposed to abstinence but could work in its service. His book vividly testifies to the intellectual and emotional impoverishment psychoanalysis visited upon itself in honoring Freud’s dicta, an impoverishment that would, however, provide an opening for Kohut’s reorientation of the analytic field in the 1970s.

The Burdens of Empathy Ferenczi and his explorations of empathy were largely lost to psychoanalysis until thirty years later, when Kohut reopened the conversation. Empathy was used only infrequently in the analytic literature before the appearance of Kohut’s important 1959 paper, “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis.”35 Following its publication, the term appears with increasing frequency, a regular focus of interest and debate. No one in the analytic world is now more closely associated with the concept than Kohut, who, well aware of the disdain heaped upon Ferenczi by the orthodox, in championing empathy

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distanced himself from the overly indulgent, gratifying Ferenczi of the literature. This was despite the fact that Kohut followed Ferenczi’s lead in maintaining that empathy should be conceptualized as in the service of science. In Ferenczi’s view, psychoanalysts had shown that it was possible to understand mental processes, to methodically investigate the mind, by means of transmissible technique—not just, as some would insist, an inexplicable “faculty called knowledge of human nature.” As Ferenczi saw it, the development of technique put this understanding of human nature, formerly the province of artists and psychological geniuses, within reach of anyone “of only average gifts” willing to take the time and expend the effort to learn. As it was in other sciences, so it was in the realm of the mind, with “the mystical and the miraculous” displaced “by universally valid and inevitable laws.” With the establishment of the training analysis, in which the prospective analyst was herself analyzed, what Ferenczi called the “personal equation” that was at the center of the analytic relationship was diminishing. Proper training ensured that an array of observers of “psychological raw material” would all reach the same objective conclusions regarding it.36 Whatever uncertainties came up in the course of a treatment—at what precise point an interpretation should be shared with the patient, for example—that could not be spelled out in advance were a matter of the analyst’s tact, or empathy. Like Ferenczi, Kohut mounted a fierce attack on analytic orthodoxy around empathy, arguing it was a far better technique for gathering data than Freud’s recommended free association and evenly suspended attention. Freud had warned Ferenczi that tact (empathy) should be divested “of its mystical character for beginners” who might use it to justify “the subjective factor” in analysis. Ferenczi’s response was that this was precisely his aim: empathy was premised not on intuition but on “the conscious assessment of the dynamic situation.” Ferenczi in the 1920s and Kohut in the 1960s and 1970s found themselves parrying the charges of mysticism, subjectivity, and maternalism leveled by their opponents. Writing in 1975, Kohut

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suggested that analysts had long been ashamed of empathy as not scientific, that the early analyst especially had been “eager to distance himself from a demimonde of sentimental fuzziness, of tenderhearted perception.” Offering a scientifically valid empathy as antidote, Kohut stressed it was emphatically “not a sex-linked capacity.” Rather, it was a tool of empirical science, an instrument with which to explore interiority.37 Kohut, like Ferenczi, was determined to wrestle the mantle of science away from Freud and his orthodox followers. To fully grasp how burdened empathy was in the analytic domain by the time Kohut revived it, it is necessary to re-create the final scene in the Freud-Ferenczi drama in which the maternal, gratification, love, and kissing were woven together into one scandalous set piece. Ferenczi’s attention to the mother in psychoanalysis set him squarely against Freud, and his explorations of “the mother-role of the analyst” eventually opened him to perhaps the most notorious of the many charges leveled against him, that, as Freud pointedly put it to him in the famous letter of December 13, 1931, the letter that prompted Ferenczi’s diary writing, reproduced by Jones in his Freud biography: “You kiss your patients and let them kiss you.” Freud continued: “Why stop with a kiss? Certainly, one will achieve still more if one adds ‘pawing,’ which, after all, doesn’t make any babies. And then bolder ones will come along who will take the further step of peeping and showing, and soon we will have accepted into the technique of psychoanalysis the whole repertoire of demiviergerie and petting parties.” It was not only the kissing that irked Freud. Rather, he objected to the “technique of maternal tenderness” in toto, holding it and Ferenczi up to ridicule. “He is offended because one is not delighted to hear how he plays mother and child with his female patients,” Freud wrote to a colleague.38 Ferenczi responded by defending the extreme asceticism of his practice, but the “kissing technique” barb stuck, discussed by Jones in his Freud biography and passed down among analysts as a cautionary tale of therapeutic enthusiasms run amok in the name of indulgence and love—despite the fact there is no evidence to support the contention that Ferenczi had in fact kissed patients. This infamous incident may account in part for why Kohut distanced himself

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from Ferenczi, about whom he was mostly silent. At least once, however, he dredged up the unpleasant “image of the aging Ferenczi, allowing his patients to sit on his knees, trying to provide them with the love of which they had been deprived in their childhood.” Not for Kohut the soft humanitarianism associated with revisionist analysts from Ferenczi onward. From the start, Kohut would conceptualize empathy—again, much like Ferenczi had—as “a rigorously controlled tool of observation,” a “specific, disciplined cognitive process,” and do what he could to stave off its distortion by do-gooders who could see in it only “an aim-inhibited form of love.” This was simply too close to the unscientific, sentimental “cure-through-love” with which too many of the public had associated psychoanalysis for too long.39 The radical implications of Kohut’s initial 1959 brief for empathy were not immediately clear. In the paper, he relegated free association— Freud’s fundamental rule—to an ancillary position in the analyst’s armamentarium, an “auxiliary instrument” to be mobilized in support of introspection and empathy. Free association would be increasingly associated with the intellectual dimension of analysis, that is with a preference for measured insight and interpretation over any more robust mode of engagement. Evenly suspended attention was similarly demoted in the Kohutian analytic world, knocked from its pedestal to serve as mere handmaid to empathy, functioning primarily as a method to focus the analyst’s mind prior to empathy’s supervention. And, finally, Kohut took on the transference, which was at the centerpiece of Freud’s Papers on Technique, arguing that the analyst did not function as a screen onto which the patient’s internal structure was projected but was a real presence and experienced as such. Psychoanalysis was like small particle physics, he would later suggest, with the analyst-as-observer part of the observational field. The discipline’s objective truths only existed to the extent that they accounted for the effects of the observational process. The analyst influenced the process “as an intrinsically significant human presence,” he wrote in a passage echoing Ferenczi.40 Kohut claimed scientific status for empathy, and labored to distinguish it from gratification. He argued that his self psychology

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adhered more stringently to Freud’s recommendations than did orthodoxy, insisting that interpretation was the self psychologist’s, like the Freudian’s, métier. But he also questioned the prescribed analytic stance of minimal responsiveness, contrasting the warmly empathic analyst fully engaged in the analytic process with the silent, datagathering analyst-as-computer who “emits interpretations.” Neutrality was in practice often “grossly depriving.” He insisted that while the muted and sometimes emotionally barren atmosphere with which it was consonant was perhaps suitable for the sexually overstimulated hysterics who were Freud’s early patients, it was neither appropriate nor helpful for the deprived, character-disordered patients with narcissistic issues who were increasingly seeking psychoanalysts’ help. Kohut argued that analysts should respond to patients in a way befitting a person whose life work it was to help others, drawing on deep layers of their own personalities. With Ferenczi no doubt in mind, Kohut emphasized that analysts should not attempt to make up for the traumatic failures that their patients had experienced in childhood with an “extra measure of love and kindness.” Rather, they should immerse themselves empathically in their patients’ inner lives, while calling on their technical knowledge of the same to tactfully interpret and offer support for patients’ strivings.41 Kohut offered analysts theoretical justification for what he and others suggested they were already doing. A good part of the success of his analytic revolution was premised on his ability to assuage his fellow analysts’ guilt about their deviating from Freud’s recommendations to act naturally in the treatment setting.42 How he managed to do this is a story perhaps best told through the lens offered by Janet Malcolm’s 1981 book, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, an account in which orthodoxy and revisionism, austerity and gratification, neurosis and narcissism dramatically and satisfyingly square off. A sensation when it first appeared, The Impossible Profession now reads as a brilliant ethnography of a tribe of healers—the New York–based orthodox Freudian establishment—fitfully attempting to comprehend, and parry, the threat to their sovereignty posed by “a fervid cult in Chicago.” Arrivistes worshipping the new god Kohut

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and offering a new kind of magical healing, the Chicagoans elicited a scathing contempt, leavened with a bit of grudging respect, from the New Yorkers, who saw them as but the latest in a long line of pretenders whom they had faced down—“savagely fought,” as Malcolm puts it—and successfully defeated in the defense of their founding god’s science. (Indeed, one of Malcolm’s more colorful informants boasted of having at a conference done “a hatchet job on Kernberg”—a New Yorker but like the Chicagoans a revisionist—and having thereby proved his bona fides: “I had done my homework, and I crushed him, and everyone knew I had. . . . people started noticing me, inviting me to parties.”) This time would be no different. Alfred Adler and Carl Jung in the 1920s, Franz Alexander in the 1940s: psychoanalysis, Malcolm’s chief informant, the pseudononymous Aaron Green maintained, “has waves of this kind of thing, and it serenely lets them wash over itself, because eventually they all subside,” occasional recourse to the hatchet notwithstanding.43 But not this time. In the decade-long subsiding that followed the publication of Malcolm’s book, Kohut was assimilated into the analytic mainstream, and the high orthodoxy of the New York Freudians was more washed out than washed over. It is clear now that Malcolm swooped down on the orthodox at the point when their commitment to an uncompromisingly austere technique had become untenable, attacked from the outside but also, more important, eroded from within. Green, for instance, extoled the virtues of adopting a “fanatically pure” technique—namely, the greater freedom it,  as “the more libertarian perspective,” allowed the patient. He thought that tempering the rigors of orthodox technique with “judicious doses of kindliness and friendliness” deprived patients of the freedom to decide what was best for themselves. He could even suggest that in the difficulties abstinence imposed on the analyst were to be found “the real wear and tear of analysis,” invoking the “chronic struggle to keep oneself from doing the things that decent people naturally and spontaneously do.” Yet he could not help but highlight the gratuitous cruelty that had long shadowed abstinence. “No one likes to hurt people,” he told Malcolm, unwittingly caricaturing classical technique in terms of causing pain, standing silently by in

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the face of suffering, and withholding help from patients “when they plead for it.”44 Malcolm’s story unfolds most compellingly at the level of technique, and it is in Green’s ambivalence on this score, which she masterfully evokes, that we can glimpse something of the magnitude of Kohut’s achievement. Malcolm’s Freudians are ascetics to the core, disdainful of the laxness and sloppiness of the upstarts, the faddishness and mawkish sentimentality of their therapeutic ambitions. Yet Green—for all of his commitment to a “fanatically pure” technique, his disdain for Kohut’s misguided theorizing, his “hate” for self psychology—cannot help but be drawn to Kohut’s recommendations on technique, almost as if in spite of his orthodox self. Green grudgingly admits to respecting Kohut’s technique with very difficult patients: “Whenever I read his clinical discussions, my therapeutic technique improves. It’s true. . . . He reminds me of my obligation to the patient, which is to think analytically about everything he says and does.”45 To Green, Ferenczi was an empathic genius, “a man of great personal kindness” endowed with the “intuitiveness and sensitivity and kindness” working with the very sick demanded, and thus his dispensing “with the rigor of orthodox technique” was excusable. Green saw Kohut working with similarly difficult patients. These patients, he explained, were now known as narcissists. They “had always been around,” disliked by analysts who found them nearly impossible to treat. Such patients were too self-absorbed and inaccessible to form the transference that was the condition of classical analysis, capable of forming only what were called “narcissistic transferences.” Ferenczi’s narcissistically split patients had developed deep transferences to him once he had abandoned frustration for indulgence, and revisionists working in the suppressed Ferenczian tradition labored to bring these patients within the analytic compass. Starting in the 1930s, Michael Balint, like Ferenczi, worked with similarly traumatized and “sicker” patients. And in 1954, Leo Stone cataloged the irritations these difficult patients with narcissistic transferences presented to analysts—they were demanding, controlling, tyrannizing, insatiable, and destructive—while adding he was

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surprised at how well they had actually done in analysis. Kohut resolved the issue by, in effect, recasting the venerable but disqualifying narcissistic transferences as treatable “self-object” transferences. It was the work of analysis to see them transmuted, he argued, to reactivate “the developmental potential of the defective self.” Green credited Kohut with convincing his fellow analysts to treat all of their patients’ behaviors, including their tendency to idealize the analyst one moment and “treat the analyst like dirt” the next, as transferential and therefore legitimate, part of the analytic process not undermining of it. “This was a good thing to say. It needed to be said.” But Green also faulted Kohut for using this as the pretext for “inventing” a whole new psychoanalytic psychology.46 Green’s ambivalence toward Kohut is on display in his impassioned account of the first time he read, “with utter amazement,” Kohut’s controversial 1979 paper, “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z.” In it, Kohut contrasted the dead end of a by-the-book classical analysis and its many “empathic failures” with the hopefulness and joy generated by a reanalysis conducted along self-psychological lines. The paper came under withering criticism, even before it was revealed after Kohut’s death that it was autobiographical, that Mr. Z was Kohut himself. Skeptics from the orthodox camp argued that the first analysis was wrongly carried out and that it presented a distorted picture of classical technique. Green objected that the first analysis “just didn’t make sense,” adding that “in the second, ‘Kohutian’ analysis, he finally did what any one of us ‘classical’ analysts would have done in the first place. His description of the first analysis reads like a caricature of analysis, while the second analysis is made to seem rich and profound, subtle and empathic, humanistic and humane.” That is, self psychology was just orthodoxy by another name. Or, was it the reverse, some asked—that orthodoxy at its best had “succeeded because it was using self-psychological methods without knowing it was doing so”?47 Even those analysts who rejected Kohut’s theorizing, then, were influenced by his approach to the analytic encounter. “Kohut’s technique is very beguiling,” said one skeptic, adding that “it probably represents a general corrective to what a lot of analysts have done.

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But then, if that’s all you’ve done, you’re really a good bartender.” The question of whether Kohut offered patients traditionally proscribed Ferenczian gratifications instead of Freud’s recommended interpretations divided analysts, with some finding him guilty and others innocent of the charge. Supporters explained that what Kohut did was interpret patients’ insatiable demands for gratifications as expressive of legitimate needs that were to be understood not necessarily overcome. To the public they explained that replacing “analytic aloofness” with Kohutian empathy legitimized “more human approaches in analysis.” Patients are not pleasure-seeking infants clinging to their fantasized omnipotence, Kohut argued, but adults desperate for confirmation and support. Kohutian analysts were to appreciate their patients’ strivings and narcissistic needs and, with nothing more than imaginative attentiveness, gratify these needs in the analytic setting. Green scoffed at the idea that his version of analysis would “have to assimilate” Kohut’s renegade systematizing, but in his and his colleagues’ sniffing claim there was nothing new in self psychology, we can see enacted the incorporating impulse that led to Kohut’s eventual absorption into—and reshaping of—the mainstream of analysis in the United States.48

Gratification, Instant and Immediate Me-Decade cultural critics associated narcissism with bottomless greed and blissful gratification, largely unaware that asceticism figured importantly in Freudian orthodoxy. Philip Rieff, Daniel Bell, and others lamented that asceticism as a cultural ideal had disappeared, missing that if it could be found anywhere it was in needdenying narcissists. These narcissists maintained that they needed nothing, disavowing worldly and psychic needs in the name of a grandiose self-sufficiency and omnipotence. While they were manifestly indifferent to others, they were in analysts’ eyes nevertheless hungry for praise and admiration, even love. Any pathological desires they harbored for material goods was seen as secondary to their greediness for other people and what they could get from them. In

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the 1970s, some analysts began to sign on to the critics’ vision, in which narcissism and indulgence were aligned. But most continued to focus primarily on the narcissist’s search for psychic, not material, gratification. Among critics, Lasch made the strongest argument about gratification, holding that “ideologies based on the postponement of gratification” were crumbling under the pressure of consumerism and the revolution in sexual mores, both of which were weakening paternal authority, freeing women from bondage to the family, and glorifying the young as consumers equipped with their own telephones, televisions, and hi-fis. Like Lasch, Daniel Bell saw a watershed moment in the counterculture’s creation of a “world of immediate gratification and exhibitionistic display.” But for Bell there was no going back: the dynamism of twentieth-century capitalism depended on the insatiably needy consumer. “The one thing that would utterly destroy the new capitalism is the serious practice of deferred gratification,” he wrote. The prodigality of desire and the pleasures of acquisition that he and other critics found so lamentable in the young were not antithetical to “the capitalist economic system” but, rather, integral to its survival. The adman Ernest Dichter had, in 1960, made much the same point, arguing that the “economy would literally collapse overnight” were people to restrict themselves to fulfilling “immediate and necessary needs.” Dichter updated Thorstein Veblen’s work, suggesting that the gratification, thrill, and enjoyment to be found in using products ranging from cars to golf clubs to dictating machines, not their value as status symbols, accounted for their irresistible attraction to consumers. Where else but the marketplace would individuals experience satisfactions as intense as those afforded by the “first few minutes” with your new television and the first ten minutes driving your new car? Such pleasures, he argued, were unequaled, never again to be duplicated in the course of life.49 The executive’s new toys apart, the critics directed their dismay about rampant gratification largely at the younger generation. Bell’s perspective, similar to that of David Riesman and William H. Whyte,

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did little to stanch outrage at the flagrantly displayed hedonism of the young, the condemnation of them as spoiled brats and their parents as misguided prophets of permissiveness. Lasch was characteristically withering on the issue, lambasting the practices of feeding on demand and attending to children’s “needs”—the scare quotes are his—as part and parcel of a culturally sanctioned and “exaggerated concern for the rights of the child” undermining of patriarchal authority. He would have parents ignore the debased Freudianism of the experts, but he praised the Kohutian mother’s provision of “optimal frustration,” described by Kohut as a stance that gave the child soothing, calming, narcissistic sustenance while at the same time enabling it progressively to tolerate an ever more realistic level of disappointment over the mother’s lack of perfection. One can only assume that it was the “frustration” here that elicited Lasch’s approval, for as described by Kohut “optimal frustration” referred to a maternal attentiveness and responsiveness to infantile need that Lasch otherwise mocked.50 Even when he did find room for Kohut in his work, then, Lasch got him 180-degrees wrong. Lasch was not alone in seeing permissive parents as the problem. Another commentator called 1970s youth the “picked-up generation”—because as babies their parents had picked them up and comforted them whenever they cried—and claimed they had “gone out of control,” unable to tolerate either authority or frustration and demanding “immediate satisfaction” of their needs. It was common wisdom that the children of permissive and indulgent parents, especially of weak fathers, grew into the rebellious students who fought the establishment with childish impetuousness when they were not busy gratifying their sexual desires. In these critiques, the immediate gratification sought by the young took a variety of forms, from the solitary (shamelessly experiencing selfish orgasms that did “not unite one overwhelmingly to another human being”) to the pharmacological (seeking transcendence through LSD and other widely available drugs) to the communal (huddling together in “large family-like enclaves” offering the gratifications of interdependency).51

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Notably, some social observers dissented from this jeremiad. They argued that the brashness of the college-educated young was admirable, evidence of their existential security. These young were familiar enough with affluence to mock and reject it, and narcissistic enough to envision the world radically remade in their own image. Proclaiming that “most hippies are total narcissists,” Henry Malcolm, in his 1971 book Generation of Narcissus, highlighted the unwillingness of the young to limit themselves in any way, seeing themselves instead as at one with the universe. To Malcolm, this was not an altogether bad thing. He framed the choice facing the young as one between their parents’ repressive, fear-based, and conventional morality and their own optimistic belief that the world existed for them. Others gave Malcolm’s argument a more political spin, casting the young as courageous in their dissent against injustice and seeing their distrust of their elders, who were quiescent in the face of racism and who had led the country into Vietnam, as understandable. The idealism of the countercultural young was to be lauded: better that than the conformism of their more complacent peers who sought happiness in a “big house, two cars, and a lot of money.” One study of upper-middle-class adolescents like these found them dismayingly anti-intellectual, bereft of deep moral principles (more than half admitted to cheating on their high school exams), joyless and old before their time, seeking education and knowledge only as a “ticket to the kind of life their parents want for them.”52 Was this one version of the substance of Lasch’s idealized past and wishedfor present? Some psychoanalysts, for better or worse living up to their popular reputation as prophets of permissiveness, were among those who applauded the younger generation’s worldview. They argued it was not parental permissiveness but the bomb and the specter of total annihilation that had shaped the younger generation’s hedonistic, “live for the moment” outlook. As one analyst saw it, the children who had practiced crawling under their school desks in pointless and terrifying air raid drills had to deal not only with the castration fantasies that were the analysts’ stock in trade but also with

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“apocalyptic fantasies around an overwhelming external threat.” Deprived of a belief in a secure future, subjected to “weekly, scheduled rehearsals for apocalypse,” anyone born after 1945 knew the sirens and the drills, the radiation fears and worries about contaminated milk, “the insane fantasies of bomb shelters and stockpiled foods.” Was it any wonder that they took refuge in sensual, immediate, and ecstatic experience, in the intoxications of drugs, and in the expansion of consciousness? Further, the same parents who could offer their children only the most superficial reassurances against nuclear annihilation relentlessly pushed them to achieve in school to guarantee their social survival. Even the analyst Bruno Bettelheim, reliably a critic of the young, saw their permissive parents as “more demanding than any Victorian parent possibly could have been” in their expectations of perfection, on the one hand giving their children the bottle on demand while on the other letting them know they had to be “the brightest kid in school.” The hypocrisy of these parents was manifest: they had taken the country into an unnecessary war (war was nothing more than “deferred infanticide,” according to one analyst), they had raised their children to protest injustice then clamped down on them when they did, and they dismissed the search for gratification among the young while claiming their own gratifications as entitlements (condemning marijuana while abusing alcohol and misusing tranquilizers and “pep pills”).53 Still, some analysts joined critics struggling to shore up the sharp polarities of restraint and release. Consider a paper by the analyst Herbert Strean on the issue of what he argued was the excessive amount of “egoistic self-satisfaction” in early 1970s culture. Strean saw gratification everywhere, invoking the concept nearly twenty times in fifteen pages in spelling out his contention that society and the popular, nonanalytic therapies currently on offer paralleled each other in actively supporting “rebellion against restraint.” As he saw it, therapy stimulated patients’ grandiosity and omnipotent wishes, catering to their narcissism while duping them into thinking these could be realized. Strean’s Laschian prescription was large doses of brutal and frustrating reality in the form of “frequent and regulated doses of abstinence, self-control, hard work and study.” Strean was

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patently reasonable in advocating attention to patients’ “maturational needs.” Yet his polarities leave no place for individuals’ yearnings for love, desires for “adoration and success,” and expressions of grandiose ambitions and omnipotent fantasies, all seen in the analytic tradition since Freud’s time as narcissistic and normalized as constitutive of healthy narcissism by Kohut. Strean could only characterize the dimensions of the self that the counterculture celebrated and that the Kohutian analyst focused on as irritating intrusions into what ideally was a well-modulated analytic space devoted to strengthening patients’ egos. He invoked the Freud pessimistic about society’s capacity to manage the aggressiveness and gratifications that we as humans have found so difficult to renounce. But he was unable to characterize the dimensions of the self that Freud and others in his wake associated with narcissism as other than vaguely illicit and supplemental add-ons.54 Strean’s censorious stance toward his patients’ wishes and desires is exemplary of the straitened perspective of mainstream classical psychoanalysis on the eve of its 1970s reorientation around narcissism. Under the banner of healthy narcissism, Kohut normalized the desires that Strean pathologized, seeing them as critical aspects of the person fully engaged in the world. Ascetically minded critics and ascetically minded psychoanalysts alike complained of Americans’ inordinate desire for gratifications and of a rising inability to defer them. The inhibition that Rieff saw as “the price of entry into every real satisfaction,” they argued, was giving way to “pleasures unpaid for in parallel pains.” Conservatively-minded analysts argued that the societal repression consonant with the Freudian notion that civilization was built on repression and “the non-satisfaction . . . of powerful instincts” was under assault. Frustration was giving way to gratification as the culture withdrew “institutional support” from repression, celebrating hippies, permitting homosexuality, and tolerating “self-discovery” through psychedelic drug use that eventuated in an inward-looking narcissism. The “happiness” hippies found in analysis—“deep dependency gratifications” and a “plethora of narcissistic supplies”—could even spark envy in their analysts, who, one reported, wished they could “partake of some of this good stuff.”55

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Even the most censorious, it appears, were not immune to the pleasures of gratification.

Freud’s personal physician Max Schur tells us that smoking was the one area in which Freud’s vaunted self-control failed him, the only realm in which he was unable to “establish the ‘supremacy of the ego.’ ” Smoking was for Freud, by his own telling, a “source of gratification,” a habit he was unwilling and unable to renounce even at the cost of the repeated and painful surgeries for cancer of the jaw he underwent in the last two decades of his life. Defiantly invoking Lord Bacon, in 1931 he wrote in a letter thanking a colleague for sending him a shipment of cigars, “I won’t be plucked of my feathers.” Freud could admit that abstinence from smoking enhanced his well-being. “But it is sad,” he added. Over the years, his colleagues and physicians pleaded with him and issued prohibitions, but to no avail. Freud was disarmingly frank in owning up to his cravings. As Freud told several of his Viennese colleagues, speaking of his pipe: “She is a good friend of mine, my counselor, my comfort, my guide, who smoothes my way.”56 From the vantage of old age, Freud allowed that he had been “faithful to my habit or vice” and credited it with redoubling his already prodigious capacity for work, enhancing his self-mastery, and sustaining his creativity. Schur saw Freud’s smoking as a means to relieve tension. Freud himself made the same point in his admission that “smoking definitely produces a slight narcosis, a relaxation of the nerves.” Drugs, drink, and tobacco were in his estimation but substitutes for masturbation, the “single great habit, the ‘primal addiction,’ ” a perspective to which Schur assented with his observation that for Freud nicotine may “have been essential for continuous sublimation.” Amid a raucous conversation with his colleagues, Freud related the words of a young female smoker, “I smoke so much because I am kissed so little,” which prompted one of them to remark on smoking’s “intimate sexual connotations” and another to exclaim that “the delight in nicotine appears to diminish our want of love.” Freud exclaimed that this “explains the eternal hostility our

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women feel towards smoking!” Did women themselves smoke to “satisfy their emancipatory pleasures” or simply because they “want to have pleasure the way men do”? As physicians, Freud and his colleagues had to admit that smoking, especially in large quantities, was “a dangerous poison.” But for them, smoking was a pleasure, an addiction, a substitute for sex, and a form of self-gratification—all permissible and freely chosen. Seventy years later in consumerist America—a long way from Freud’s Vienna—Lasch saw coercion where Freud saw pleasure, pseudoemancipation where the early analysts had seen emancipatory strivings. Arguing that “the logic of demand creation” mandated that women smoke in public, Lasch could allow for none of the complexity that psychoanalysts saw in gratification.57

Eight INACCESSIBILITY

The notion that the narcissist was a new type of person was central to Christopher Lasch’s indictment of his fellow Americans. Lasch linked the ascendancy of narcissism to what he held were “quite specific” social and cultural changes: bureaucracy, therapeutic ideologies, the culture of consumption, and the changing nature of the family. To him, newly ubiquitous narcissists exemplified how empty, shallow, and meaningless American culture had become. As he saw it, the traits associated with the neuroses and hysterias of Freud’s time—among them acquisitiveness and a fiercely repressed sexuality—were endemic to the morally rigid social milieu in which Freud lived. Likewise, the lax norms of contemporary culture found pointed expression in the behaviors of grandiose, manipulative, and exploitative narcissists. The narcissist’s vague dissatisfactions, pervasive sense of emptiness, and deficient personality were, Lasch suggested, realistic responses to “the tensions and anxieties of modern life.”1 Lasch here joined a critical tradition that connected social and individual pathologies in support of declensionist narratives. David Riesman, asserting that individual character was shaped by society, described his anomic personalities—of whom there were “a sizable number in America”—as too compliant, insufficiently insightful, and empty. They were, he wrote, “ambulatory patients in the ward of modern culture,” as characteristic of his time as hysterics had been of theirs. Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity, similarly

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highlighted the demise of the hysteric and the growing predominance of the “so-called character neuroses” with their painful but not incapacitating symptoms. As Lasch himself put it, “the underlying structure of personality” had changed. In these arguments, the critics echoed what was fast becoming an analytic commonplace: that a seriously disturbed, character-disordered “new patient” was showing up with increasing frequency in the consulting room.2 Psychoanalysts held that these patients suffered not from repression—which analysts saw as a relic of the past, arguing that social prohibitions of all sorts had been weakened by the midcentury period—but from vaguely defined complaints of emptiness, aimlessness, and discontent. New patients were first registered as distinctively American in the 1940s. A variety of midcentury analysts offered descriptions of their salient features. Leo Stone noted that patients of this sort were subtly aloof and supercilious on the one hand and insatiably demanding and controlling on the other. From Topeka it appeared that “these people” were “love hungry, affect hungry, feel empty, and constantly seek excitement.” The view from Los Angeles was of highly accomplished individuals who could see others only as sources of the “narcissistic supplies” they needed to function. The “more sophisticated, urbanized patients” of two New York analysts no longer presented with the florid conversion symptoms of the hysteric but instead complained of “chronic maladaption in living, i.e., working, loving, and playing.” By 1975, the new patient was familiar enough that one analyst could write that when he discussed “this type of patient” that “practically everyone knows to whom I am referring.”3 Even so, some analysts proposed that the new patient was not new, only new to psychoanalysis. To these analysts, what had changed was less the patient than the analyst’s ability, and willingness, to treat him or her. The patient who was too disturbed—withdrawn and inaccessible to the analyst—to undergo the rigors of psychoanalysis had shadowed the discipline almost from its inception. Freud and his followers maintained that such persons were unable to enter into the transference proper and were, at best, capable only of forming “narcissistic transferences.” Freud was himself not indifferent to the plight of these individuals, some of them scarred by the narcissistic

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wounds inflicted by childhood deprivation and disadvantage. But he considered them unsuited for analysis, unable to endure its many renunciations and privations. “Our analytic art is found to be wanting with such people,” Freud wrote to a colleague in 1922. “Our insight is not able yet to see through their dynamic relations.” Of this particular patient, Freud concluded, “He is not worth your effort.”4 Only fitfully would this sort of patient be deemed worthy of mainstream analysts’ attentions. Karl Abraham focused on the narcissism of such patients—he had treated a number of them, he wrote, as had his colleagues—in a 1919 paper highlighting a manifest compliance with psychoanalytic treatment that barely disguised their resistance to anything threatening to injure their self-love; controlling and deprecating of the analyst, they were capable at best of a sort of “autoanalysis.” Yet Abraham was more puzzled than annoyed by these patients, warning his colleagues against assuming too unfavorable a prognosis for them. To little avail: his paper inaugurated a tradition of therapeutic pessimism, even hostility, toward narcissism that reached its apogee in the criterion of “analyzability,” a concept that analysts began to invoke in the 1940s heyday of ego psychology to shore up the divide between the good, classical neurotics who stood to benefit from analysis and the impossibly needy and narcissistic “new patients” who were beyond help. Within a few decades, mainstream analysts would argue that among the criteria for undertaking a classical analysis were the potential analysand’s generally adequate functioning, strong ego, deep relationships with friends and family, lack of narcissistic pathology, and “good tolerance for anxiety, depression, frustration, and suffering.”5 And this was before analysis. Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut popularized the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder in the 1970s while at the same time, in championing psychoanalysis as the treatment of choice for pathological narcissists, countering the consensus on analyzability. Kernberg pulled together half a century’s worth of analytic observations on patients displaying narcissistic traits to delineate the pathological

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narcissist as a particular, if paradoxical, type of person. He described the type’s behaviors and provided a precise account of a frighteningly disturbed inner landscape, weaving all of this into a characterological portrait. Kernberg argued that narcissists were indeed capable of establishing transferential relationships with analysts, arguing that their resistance to treatment was an expected, diagnostic dimension of this transference. At the same time, Kohut’s analytic revolution dealt a blow to the consensual, and increasingly indefensible, view of the goal of analysis as fine-tuning for the worried well. Opinion had already begun to shift by the time Kernberg and Kohut were writing: analysts talked of their discipline’s “widening scope,” and surveys as well as anecdotal evidence showed that more than a few patients considered narcissistic were in treatment. Both Kernberg and Kohut gave analysts permission to throw off the yoke of analyzability. Kernberg, arguing that some narcissists in treatment could “improve dramatically,” focused on the personality structure of such patients, systematically analyzing what he called their “pathological self-structure” as well as their aggressiveness, rage, and envy. Kohut, taking a gentler approach, focused on what he saw as the legitimate but too often thwarted needs of narcissistic patients. As we have seen, even observers hostile to his self psychology, like Aaron Green, could agree that he was working with the difficult patient who had been kept off the orthodox analyst’s couch, narcissists who had long existed. Both Kernberg and Kohut held that the narcissistic transferences were not disqualifying, and that it was possible instead to deploy what both considered general psychoanalytic principles to the demanding, controlling, and tyrannizing patients analysts had long disdained.6 There is no denying the frustrations and difficulties such patients presented. Perhaps the most vivid testimony on the subject comes from Ernest Jones’s and then Freud’s failed analyses of Joan Riviere. From around 1916 through 1922, the three engaged in a fraught and well-documented psychoanalytic triangle. Riviere figures in the analytic tradition as at once theoretician and patient, known for her classic 1936 paper, “A Contribution to the Analysis of the Negative

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Therapeutic Reaction,” and—with the publication of a biography of Jones followed by the appearance of the edited Freud–Jones correspondence—as a severely narcissistic patient of both men. Over the last thirty years, as narcissism has assumed its current shape in analytic thought, analysts have increasingly drawn attention to the many contemporary resonances of Riviere’s paper, citing it as a classic, seminal, masterly, ingenious, gripping, and elegant exploration of the analyzability of those resistant to treatment. Indeed, the analyst Anton Kris, who sees Riviere repeatedly “taking Freud to task” in it, suggests that she understood some of the underlying dynamics of her case better than Freud and commends her for exhibiting “just the sort of grasp that Freud would have wished to be able to achieve.”7 Riviere went into print dissenting from prevailing analytic orthodoxy in 1922, arguing that narcissistic types were “nearly always analysable.” She charged that analysts did not understand narcissism and they too often used the term narcissistic loosely, “as a handy label to apply to failures.”8 She elaborated on this contention in 1936, arguing that narcissistic patients’ attempts to subvert the analytic process notwithstanding, the burden of failure in difficult cases lay with the analyst, not the patient. Riviere’s paper may be read as a disguised recapitulation of her failed analyses with both Jones and Freud, a catalog of their technical mistakes, and a testament to what she felt was her superior understanding of the evasions, feints, and other tactics narcissists use to defeat their analysts. Even as Riviere was arguing that narcissism was eminently treatable, then, she was displaying in her analysis with Freud the very inaccessibility and resistance to him that analysts argued rendered the narcissist unsuited to psychoanalysis. Riviere’s analyses with Jones and Freud call into question the critics’ portrayal of the narcissist as a new figure rising organically from contemporary American society, as well as the assertions of analysts in the 1950s and beyond that the disturbed patient who was starting to appear on their couches was in fact “new.” In the difficulty these analysts had in treating these patients, we can see, among other things, a pattern vividly described by Riviere.

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That Proud Woman Riviere Joan Riviere’s understanding of narcissism was hard won. It was forged in part in the searing cauldron of her analysis with Jones, an analysis that commenced in 1916 and was by all accounts disastrous. In the midst of the treatment, Riviere characterized her relations with Jones as “a long tragedy,” and he, at its end, considered it his “worst failure.” Her understanding was also likely enhanced by the disappointments of her experience of analysis with Freud, whom she in effect charged with unwittingly colluding in a failed outcome. Jones and Freud both maintained that Riviere suffered from character pathology inadequately comprehended by analytic theory. Treating neurotics, among them hysterics with their identifiable symptoms, was the early analyst’s métier. Character was different. The term referred not to symptoms, which could come and go, but to behavioral traits that were relatively stable, as well as more globally to an individual’s mode of being in the world—in all, to a type of person. The concept, as well as that to which it referred, was not well defined in the 1920s. Freud admitted to Abraham as he was beginning his treatment of Riviere that he had “not yet worked out the new technique” character analyses would entail.9 Whether Riviere would have assented to her fellow analysts’ assessment of her is unclear. She was horrified when confronted early on with Jones’s assessment of her “narcissism and selfishness and hate and contempt.” But she nevertheless felt as if she understood the darker sides of human experience, “narcissism, and sadism and masochism—as well as object love,” and thought it a worthy endeavor to bring them within a quotidian compass. She believed, in short, that “we have a right to ourselves.” And, while she could characterize narcissists as mean, self-satisfied, and megalomaniacal, as “egocentric, asocial, [and] self-seeking,” she could also see them as appealing and “fantastic!”10 The many autobiographical referents of her 1936 negative therapeutic reaction paper, which she makes clear is about narcissistic pathology, suggest that she wrote in some awareness—perhaps even acceptance—of what others thought was her characterological constellation.

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That Riviere wrote from experience when she wrote on narcissism and its treatment can only be known from the tangled correspondence among her, Jones, and Freud. Riviere’s letters to Jones and his to Freud document the ferocious currents stirred by her first analysis. It appears that Jones by his account “underestimated the uncontrollability of her emotional reactions” and from the start treated her with a collegial friendliness that was in part instrumental. As he conceded to Freud, “seeing that she was unusually intelligent I hoped to win her for the cause”—the cause being psychoanalysis. Jones ignored Freud’s stated recommendation that the analyst foreswear “an intimate attitude” and adopt an attitude of “emotional coldness” to the patient, like “the surgeon, who puts aside all feelings, even his human sympathy.” He instead assumed the prerogative, upon which Freud himself acted repeatedly, of sustaining what would come to be seen as extra-analytic intimacies alongside of analysis proper, in this case confiding to Riviere details of his tumultuous personal life. In the first years of her analysis, Jones broke off relations with the maid of his former common-law wife and, in 1917, eager to find a wife to install in his nearly purchased country home, married another woman. Prior to his marriage, Jones had given Riviere the use of the house, “she having nowhere to go for a holiday.” By Jones’s telling, “a declaration of love”—which he rebuffed— followed her sojourn in his home. “The mistress of a number of men,” Riviere, broken-hearted, claimed to Jones she had never before been rejected.11 Riviere’s relations with Jones were from this point dominated by the vicissitudes of an eroticized transference with which he conceded he was unequipped to deal. From his perspective, Riviere, “a fiendish sadist,” as he characterized her to Freud, “devoted herself to torturing me without any intermission and with considerable success and ingenuity.” One or both of them broke off the analysis, and the apparently friendly camaraderie that had existed between them prior to Jones’s marriage came to an abrupt end. Entering a sanitarium for seven weeks, Riviere was thrown into turmoil. She left and then, with difficulty, resumed analysis. Her letters to Jones turned angry and accusatory. She charged him with refusing to discuss the

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impasse that the analysis had reached, with nursing his “wounded professional pride” and meeting her “despairingness of life” with “a hard and indifferent silence.” Continuing analysis under such circumstances was painful and pointless. “You and I are too incompatible to ever carry it out,” she wrote.12 Even as Riviere was bitterly lambasting Jones for his impassivity, she was at the same time casting him as the sometimes-perfect analyst, endlessly patient and generous, in whom she could still hope to find everything she sought. This suggests that the transference in whose grip she was caught was not only erotic but also what Kohut would later conceive of as idealizing. Riviere, of course, did not have access to the language of self psychology, but she was enough the intuitive—or practiced—theorist of narcissism to recognize her idealizations for what they were. She wrote to Jones that she had expected perfection in him, having endowed him “with so many virtues.” But she was powerless to analyze her predicament. “Please remember that I am completely in the dark and don’t ‘know’ or realize anything,” she implored him, adding, “if only you would tell me what it is.” Riviere claimed that she didn’t care to go on if she could not be cured: “If I didn’t die I should have to kill myself.”13 Riviere lived, but Jones’s new wife suddenly died. Relations between Riviere and Jones grew even more fraught, with both the excoriating and idealizing streams of her transference to him intensifying. Two weeks after she had heard the news, Riviere wrote the grieving Jones that she herself had “so often thought lately of how enviable” his now-dead wife was—an indication of her solipsism, as well as of the “torture” she was capable of inflicting. Jones’s mourning made him unavailable to her. While she could, in passing, acknowledge his suffering and distress, she could also write bitterly of the sacrifices she had been called upon to make for him and, one week later, could cruelly describe his grief as “too extravagant.” “Just now you are not yourself,” she observed, inviting Jones to analyze why the “very greatness” of his suffering was “so clearly all that you are living for now.” Riviere noted her “agitation about analysis” in her diary, but she did not capture there how all-consuming it had become. Did she realize that her “sense of external reality” was “distorted

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and defective,” and could she see in herself the contempt, depreciation, and attempts to tyrannically control the other that she would later argue in her 1936 paper were at the core of narcissistic pathology? “I am always painfully wondering how you are in mind and body,” she wrote to Jones. Wondering, but also analyzing: “I have done a lot of analysis—of you and myself.”14 Faulting Jones for being insufficiently analytic with respect to his own state, she told him of at last having “the satisfaction of completely understanding” him. Analyst would become patient, patient analyst. “Broken and pitiable,” he would “learn a lot from all this.” Conceding the possibility that he had more insight than she had assumed and allowing that she will herself seem “hard” to him, she could ask, of his excessive grief, “has it shown you the power and the value of the idealizations which in other people you have spent your life in dispersing? And can you bring on yourself the objective light which you have shed on other tragedies?—Now you will know how we all think our case is different and our view is true!” Pleased that he had at last, as Riviere wrote, “reached the greatness that I always knew was in you—the greatness . . . of real feeling you do at last know,” she assured him of her faith in him. She would not, she maintained, adopt the stance of analytic objectivity and omniscience with which he had met her agony of rejection but would instead rely on her capacity for seeing “truths of all kinds,” with which he himself had credited her, and take satisfaction in her singular knowledge of him.15 The narcissistic patients of Riviere’s 1936 paper “oust the analyst from his position and claim to do his work better themselves”—an observation that resonates with the “mean, self-satisfied and defiant” stance she adopted vis-à-vis Jones at this point. It is possible that she felt the first stirrings of her life’s vocation as she turned her penetrating intelligence to analyzing him. “Understanding everything” was her aim, pursued relentlessly, even recklessly. Before, she had feared hurting him; going forward, she would be forthright. As she saw it, Jones identified her with the oedipal mother, for whom desire was overwhelming but could not be directly expressed. He had long refused to acknowledge the depths of his feelings for her and was

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now at this moment of crisis ensnared in their net. His very indifference to her was vindication: of her conviction he was in love with her and of her certainty he had married his now-dead wife as a substitute for herself—“it added very much to my pain that you should imagine that there could be any substitute for me.” His “grotesque and dreadful ‘blunderings’ ” at the time of the marriage forced her into the role of Patient Griselda, the old story “acted out in real life in the 20th century,” a sadly hopeful note in that Griselda eventually took her rightful place as wife to her sadistic spouse.16 Riviere’s claim to femininity was a point of heated contention between her and Jones. “You have not seen the woman in me. You will not see it,” she angrily protested to him. In this she was undoubtedly right; writing to Freud, Jones explained that Riviere was “not the type that attracts me erotically,” while allowing “I certainly have the admiration for her intelligence that I would have with a man.” In the evolving psychoanalytic idiom, intelligence was coded masculine, present in women but in unseemly proportions associated with a “masculinity complex.” Jones once exclaimed to her, “What a pity you are not more of a woman,” prompting Riviere’s retort that she was “a great deal more of a woman” than he knew. Then, once again assuming the analyst’s position, she charged him with being patronizing and afraid, with defending himself, and with having conducted a failed analysis. “I have done most of it,” she claimed of the treatment.17 Riviere’s interpretations did little to assuage her mounting anxiety and despair and nothing to alter the balance of power in their unequal relationship. Her analytic gambit failed, turning Jones resolutely against her. Yet, however vexed their relations, Jones thought enough of Riviere’s analytic capacities to act as her patron. He wrote to Freud that Riviere had “a far-reaching insight” and that she understood psychoanalysis “better than any other member” of the British Psycho-Analytical Society “except perhaps Flügel.” Jones had been happy to put her to use. When he visited Switzerland in March of that year, he took along with him a pen Riviere had bought for Freud, a gesture both practical, in light of the shortages plaguing the postwar Viennese, and symbolic, given that writing—translating—would

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prove the most enduring of the several registers in which her relationship with Freud was conducted. Four days after Jones left for the continent, Riviere embarked on what would become her career as the preeminent English-language translator of Freud’s works, starting with the Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, a work exceeding five hundred pages that appeared in English in 1922 with an introduction by Jones under the title Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. The day after Riviere started work on the translation, Jones wrote Freud from Berne—“I brought you a new pen”—and offered to have his old ones repaired in London.18 Jones apologized to Freud for the inconsequence of his thoughts. But to Freud, who had been writing through “bodily pain caused by a bad pen,” the new pen mattered, the only item among the fifteen kilos worth of goods Jones had brought from England for Freud and his daughter Anna that merited a specific mention. A pen had once before passed from Jones to Freud, who had incorporated it into the 1912 edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Briefly told, Jones had written Freud of his early attachment to an  attractive male surgical intern who carried a stethoscope and, prompted by this, of his memory of being in love with his childhood physician, whose frequent examinations of him with a straight stethoscope—with the accompanying “rhythmic to-and-fro respiratory movement”—aroused voluptuous feelings within. Jones allowed that he must have symbolized the instrument as the physician’s penis, equating it with both sword and pen. Freud related this story in detail in the Psychopathology, adding that Lord Lytton’s line “the pen is mightier than the sword” had greatly impressed the boy (Jones, but not identified as such), who became a prolific writer. Jones, who used “an exceptionally large fountain pen,” giving as the reason that he “had so much to express,” thus knew well not only the pen’s practicality but also its generative and phallic resonances.19 He was also aware of the erotic meanings such professional appurtenances could carry in relations between men. Was his mention of this pen, given to Freud, so abashed because he knew it really came from Riviere?

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Colossal Narcissisms Having reached an impasse in his analysis of Riviere, for two years Jones held out the possibility of an analysis with Freud, to which she finally agreed, contacting him in 1921 to make arrangements. “She has a most colossal narcissism imaginable,” Jones wrote Freud. After negotiating preliminaries with Freud, such as fees and discussing with him by post the cost of lodgings, Riviere traveled to Vienna at the end of February 1922 to begin analysis anew. Her transference to Freud was in Jones’s estimation already strongly positive, her stated position on analytic technique at this point echt Freudian. Analysis, she wrote, is a scientific inquiry, not the emotional experience into which the patient will attempt constantly to transform it; analytic work demands kindness and patience, but also indifference, including to the prospect of the patient’s recovery. To proffer assurances “of the sympathy and esteem of the physician”—of the sort Riviere had constantly demanded of Jones—“is to vacate the position of analyst, whose judgments are necessary, but whose feelings and opinions are always irrelevant,” as she put it. Riviere’s conception of analysis was as austere as orthodox technique would ever prescribe, more uncompromising than Freud would himself practice.20 Riviere would later write of the consulting-room Freud that “his self functioned only as an instrument,” echoing his injunction (translated by her) that the doctor use his unconscious in just that manner. This, however, is an idealization, for we know that Riviere’s analysis with Freud was not nearly as free of extra-analytic considerations as she would have wished. Jones faulted her for cleverly introducing into her analysis with Freud “the same difficulty as happened with me, namely the intermixture of analytical considerations with external actual ones.” But, given that among Jones’s professed motives in referring Riviere to Freud was that “a valuable translator and member” of the British Psycho–Analytical Society not be lost to psychoanalysis, it is clear that from the outset external considerations would inevitably intrude on the analysis. Riviere, for example, would later admit to hating the fact that Freud would open their hour together

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“with problems with the translations.” She felt “frustrated and deprived” in the analysis, and neglected by Freud, who was more interested in “business” matters “than in her as a person.”21 Jones did not withdraw from this analysis as much as he attempted to control it from afar. He monitored with a vigilant eye what appeared to him to be Freud’s seduction at Riviere’s hands, her “shewing [sic] her best qualities,” of which, he conceded, “she certainly has many.” Charge and countercharge flew back and forth from London to Vienna. Jones to Freud: Riviere’s claim that Jones was unkind was “pure myth,” for everyone knew she was his favorite, that he had “great admiration for her gifts,” and that he was not “lacking in gratitude for her help.” Others, notably one with even greater capacity than he “for getting on with hectoring women” had reached their breaking points in dealing with her. She has “a disdainful way of treating people like dirt beneath her feet,” and talk in London was “her visit to Vienna will be the final and most severe test” for psychoanalysis. Freud to Jones: You think “Mrs. R. has put on her sweetest face and moods,” that she has “seduced me to defend her against you,” that I am “a puppet in her hands,” and that I “give you away to her.” But “a secondary analysis like this is no easy or pleasant task,” and I am only “doing my duty as an analyst” in taking her side and defending her interests. You have made mistakes in your relations with Riviere; “you seem to have treated her as a bad character in life but you never got behind her surface to master her wickedness.” “I cannot praise the way you handled her,” but I won’t “dwell on criticizing your ways.” Jones to Freud: Fine, I knew you would have to see things through her eyes, my only fear was your “intellectual judgment” on external matters “might be influenced by information from a biased quarter,” and, by the way, “even with a first-class translator like Mrs. R. I find many mistakes,” some of them “through the influence of her complexes, etc.” Freud to Jones: The “ ‘secondary analysis’ put me into the unwished position to criticize and analyse yourself,” constrained by serious mistakes you had made in handling her. Further, “accuracy and plainness is not in the character of your dealings with people” such that I found myself, in cases “between you and her,” doubting you while unable to refute “that implacable

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woman” who overemphasized “the importance of the slightest features yet was right.” For all, though, “I think our friendship has gone through a severe test, and has fairly well stood it.”22 What of Riviere in this drama of imperiled and then reconstructed male friendship? There is evidence to suggest that in this analytic triangle she—and her invaluable skills as translator—was but an object of exchange, the medium of barter, through which the two male principals negotiated the terms of their conflicting agendas and, sacrificing her particular interests, cemented their own mutual bond. Freud, seeing in Riviere “an uncommon combination of male intelligence with female love for detailed work,” prevailed in persuading Jones, against his wishes, to install her as “translation editor” of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, which he edited. In the midst of the negotiations, Freud charged Jones with a resentful and unbecoming jealousy incompatible with his “high position in the case.” You need not be afraid of her, Freud assured him; “she is ready to work under your commands.” She will relieve you of drudgery, acting “as a skilled secretary” and being “the strongest power at work, while you continue to be the directing mind of the whole.” Freud drove the point home, writing “I can imagine no better combination.” Jones vehemently rejected the charge of jealousy as “absurd.” Yet he later theorized jealousy in terms suggestive of this moment in his relations with Freud, writing in his 1927 article on the subject of the “classic situation of the eternal triangle” that saw two male rivals jockeying for a woman’s love as a reenactment of the boy’s rivalry with his father over possession of the mother. Jones quickly moved on, however, to argue that the morbid jealousy in men that “distorts, misreads, misjudges evidence”—central to Freud’s charge against him—was, in a “perverted expression of a repressed homosexuality,” driven more by desire for the rival than for the woman. Jones could barely tolerate Freud’s attentions to Riviere, in effect charging Freud with infidelity as he nervously pictured Riviere replacing him in the master’s affections. Freud salved Jones’s “wounded narcissism” by assuring him he would enjoy a satisfying, gender-appropriate domination over Riviere if he would only accede to Freud’s wishes. Still, referring to the editorial issues that provided

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the context in which they negotiated this “severe test,” Freud also chided Jones for his suspicions that Riviere had “wanted to put herself in your place.”23 Just over two months into his analysis of Riviere, Freud confided to Jones that his strategy was to be kind to her, to spare no concessions “in order to make her open her mind and disclose the access to the deeper layers.” Writing of Riviere, Freud confidently advised Jones, along similar lines, “you have not to scratch too deeply the skin of a so called masculine woman to bring her femininity to the light.” But Riviere would have nothing of this analytic scratching; the analysis with Freud did not go very deep, she later said. Perhaps recognizing his self-professed diplomacy for the strategy it was, she never developed the positive transference to him that she argued narcissistic patients resist at all costs, instead parading “a substitute ‘friendliness.’ ” She succeeded in keeping her emotions to herself, even on one occasion when Freud had sought to deliberately provoke her by reading aloud to her a letter Jones had written him that was full of criticism of her character. And Freud, who conducted that analysis along libidinal lines and who was especially focused on penis envy, failed to consider her aggression and her “persecutory fear” of her impulses. Freud never got to the love that, she argued, lay beneath her more manifest guilt and pain, wistfully envisioning “brilliant success” where in fact she had at the last minute deployed her “chosen methods of projection and denial to evade it.” Riviere’s implied critique of Freud, that he had allowed “consciousness and external circumstances” to blur his understanding of the “true aggressive character” of her love and her unconscious guilt about it finds vindication in his writing to Jones that “she is a real power and can be put to work by a slight expenditure of kindness and ‘recognitions.’ ”24 Writing of the “negative therapeutic reaction” in 1936, Riviere introduced at the outset the issue on which her analysis with Freud had foundered and that he had publicly worried in a footnote in The Ego and the Id, published the year after her analysis with him ended (and translated by her): the analyst’s (Freud’s) failure to comprehend the patient’s (Riviere’s) desperate masking of guilt, depression, and love for those she relentlessly attacks.25 She almost certainly

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wrote in awareness that portions of Freud’s essay captured almost word-for-word currents that flowed between her and her colleagueanalysts (not, however, of what flowed privately between the two of them) but at the same time could be assured that none of her other readers would have been. The layered, and deeply personal, quality of Riviere’s paper can be glimpsed in an exemplary snippet of interpretation that made its way from her pen, through Freud’s correspondence, to the well-known footnote of his before appearing, finally, in her 1936 paper. Let us start at the end, with the insight into the basis underlying narcissistic pathology that Anton Kris argues eluded Freud’s grasp. The point, rendered in lay terms, is that the narcissist’s characteristically tyrannical treatment of others (and the “hatred, vindictiveness and murderous impulses” toward them the analyst sees) is an organized system of defense that protects her from experiencing the despair, depression, and guilt toward those she loves that lay beneath the manifest tyranny—the despair of having any “real capacity for good within” oneself. The guilt narcissists experience takes the form of being unable to “endure any praise or appreciation.” When their symptoms abate “they get worse during the treatment instead of getting better,” exhibiting, Freud wrote, “a ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ ” that was “the most powerful of all obstacles to recovery.” The patient’s disheartening inability, even refusal, “to give up the punishment of suffering,” was more undermining of the potential for cure than was the “narcissistic inaccessibility” familiar to analysts. Patients’ manifest resistance prompted analysts to adopt a punitive rather than supportive stance toward them. Unbeknownst to Riviere, Freud’s insight echoed what he had privately written to Jones the year before concerning her “narcissistic problem”: “She cannot tolerate praise, triumph or success, not any better than failure, blame and repudiation. . . . Whenever she has got a recognition, a favour or a present, she is sure to become unpleasant and aggressive and to lose respect for the analyst.” Freud saw Riviere projecting her selfcriticism onto others, her “pangs of conscience” turned into “sadistic behavior,” trying “to render other people unhappy because she feels so herself.” In print he wrote that the analyst’s task was to make the

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patient aware of her unconscious guilt, in which—notably, given the tenor of Riviere’s relationship to Jones—he saw traces of “erotic cathexis” or an “abandoned love-relation.”26 In light of what Riviere herself wrote to Jones several years earlier, however, it is plausible that the entire formulation of the narcissist’s punitively disabling self-criticism came, in the beginning, from Riviere, and that she carried it with her to Freud’s consulting room. In a long, anguished letter to Jones written in 1918, she observed that the bitterness and reproaches she continually directed at him were meant to elicit “punishment” from him in the form of his telling her “again how worthless I am.” It is “nothing to do with you,” she continued, repeating what she’d earlier told him: “I said, ‘it is my cynicism directed against myself.’ ” She added, “The disappointments I continually meet with in you” were “my own defense against the truth,” which was “that I was worthless, utterly selfish, utterly worthless.” She knew that Jones would not understand that it was her own “suffering that causes bitterness—but not against you.” She had hurt him unawares. Now she was beginning to see that “you have taken a great deal of what I say ‘to myself’ as meant for you. Evidently this has been a very big thing between us.” Riviere, realizing how she had been “so very unconscious and guiltless” in her stinging critiques of Jones, immediately fell into an abyss of guilty selfreproach. All of this suggests she had a good grasp of the psychic maneuvers in which she was engaged with Jones, maneuvers that she theorized in her 1936 paper. Kris credits Freud with recognizing “very keenly what Riviere needed from him,” in his analysis of her first addressing the issue of her self-criticism, which she was in the habit of projecting onto the analyst, and offering her sustained support. What she herself wrote to Jones of her tendency to turn her despair of herself into sadistic attacks on him opens the possibility that Freud’s understanding was not his alone but was, rather, jointly produced by analyst and analysand.27 Freud was “sometimes quite naïve,” Riviere later wrote, reacting “with simple spontaneous naturalness to whatever he met,” on the assumption his perceptions were valid in themselves. Riviere framed this as a singular capacity of Freud’s, but her words may also be

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read as a criticism of his handling of her analysis, of his having allowed himself to have been tricked and deceived by her wickedness. Writing to her in 1923, Freud stressed her “agonistic disposition,” charging her with “perceiving so much of [sic] conflict and opposition where others would not see it.” On another occasion he rather gratuitously commented that “it suits you well when you are so kind.” And, several years later, he accused her of partisanship for siding with Melanie Klein against his daughter Anna on the question of child analysis, using Riviere’s analysis against her in highlighting her “weakness . . . a tendency toward aggression” and informing her he had “reproached Jones” for not having “restrained” her. “That sounds intolerant, looks like censorship and tutelage,” Freud admitted. “But what else can one do.” Riviere was left feeling injured and disappointed, even full of rage, by Freud’s use of her. But she had the last—if self-defeating—word, with her “falseness and deceit” in the analysis denying him the successful outcome of the treatment he so desperately wanted.28

Hostile Brothers Freud’s charge that Jones was jealous of his relations with Riviere must have stung, for jealousy was freighted with gendered associations. Freud, claiming that it played “a far larger part in the mental life of women than of men,” explained that jealousy was but penis envy displaced from “its true object” and “enormously reinforced” in the growing girl. Jones, for his part, argued that women were more given to jealousy than men because they were usually physiologically and psychologically more dependent on their partners’ approval. Love was optional for men, he held, with the normal men who sought it propelled by desire not—like in women—need.29 Yet the excesses of jealousy would not so easily be sequestered on the distaff side. Nor was jealousy foreign to relations among Freud and his colleagues, Jones’s memories of them as a “happy band of brothers” notwithstanding. Rather, freely admitted-to jealousy was common coin in the brothers’ relations with Freud, a vehicle for establishing intimacy and performing an abject sort of honesty. In

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correspondence with Freud, Jones confessed variously to his own “absurd jealous egotism” allied to a “strong ‘Father complex,’ ” to being jealous of his American colleague A. A. Brill’s relationship to Freud, and to “a personal complex (suppressed jealousy)” vis-à-vis Freud that was perhaps “not agreeable to discuss,” all the while chronicling for Freud others’ jealousy of his own favored position. Writing to Freud, Sándor Ferenczi admitted to “impulses of jealousy with respect to Jung,” adding that from this followed the thought that “you, too, do not fully appreciate me” and “my good will, my longing for recognition.” “Now, don’t be jealous” of Jung, Freud later chided him in a letter praising Jung as “magnificent” and expressing his own conviction that Jung was “the man of the future,” a role Ferenczi had himself hoped to take on—confirming what the jealous Ferenczi suspected. On another occasion Ferenczi wrote consolingly to Freud of the burdens heaped on him by his overly sensitive followers, with their “childish ideas of jealousy and grandeur”: “I scarcely believe that the treatment of your patients ever caused you as many headaches as ours.”30 Riviere, like Jones, would later write on jealousy. Bristling at Jones’s invocation of female dependency, Riviere situated the phenomenon differently, in the context of narcissism. Her subject was a woman, married to a husband who was possibly unfaithful but “quite the most important figure in her life,” who engaged in flirtations that stopped short of actual affairs or intercourse. She derived a good deal of sensual pleasure from these. Pathologically jealous of her husband and of the suspected affairs, she declared that he and his “women were ‘robbing her of everything, taunting, tantalizing, outraging her, stripping her of his love, of her own self-respect and selfconfidence, casting her off, a victim, utterly helpless and destitute.’ ” Riviere relegated any actual grounds the woman may have had for her jealous suspicions to the realm of not-proven and irrelevant and, instead, following Jones, interpreted them as the woman’s projections onto the husband of her own infidelities. But the “microscope of day-to-day analysis” showed this was inadequate to account for the ferocity of the woman’s self-reproaches. This analysis eventually yielded another explanation, in the form of a persistently fantasized

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triangular situation, that bore striking similarities to elements of Riviere’s own position while in analysis with Jones: he played the role of the jealous wife, Freud the flirtatious husband, and Riviere the taunting mistress.31 Riviere allowed that not much analysis was necessary to surmise that the woman’s father and mother were the original figures in her repeatedly staged and apparently straightforwardly oedipal drama. But here as elsewhere, Riviere favored a different interpretive lens, one that would penetrate beneath what she saw as the defensive cover of the woman’s oedipally tinged “genitalizing” of her conflicts to bring into sharper focus the narcissistic elements at play. Taking oblique aim at Freud, she suggested that not all triangular situations need be oedipal, that earlier and deeper losses than that of “the genital relation to the desired parent” may be the motivating force behind the jealous or unfaithful person’s “search for love.” Riviere’s interest was not the fateful traumatic event, the oedipally derived castration complex that she charged Freud with positing as determinative of women’s lifelong history of loss, but in specifying what she called such persons’ “quality of attachments.”32 These, in Riviere’s hands, prove to be as disturbed as later writers on narcissism would propose. The men Riviere’s patient pursued were neither full objects nor real persons to her but, rather, “the means and instruments” of securing her own gratification, of obtaining sensual pleasure and at the same time robbing the women of them. Robbing, despoiling, and depriving the other are the leitmotifs of this paper on jealousy, invoked repeatedly to characterize the tenor of her patient’s relations to others. The attachments Riviere’s patient formed were more often than not to internalized part-objects, not real whole objects, thus accounting for the ease with which she repeatedly dropped one man for another. In her unconscious, men were either penises or owners of such, “not really persons.” Love to this patient “was but a word,” signifying the other’s enslavement, his “complete devotion and surrender.” She was consumed by envy: “Envy of me, made endurable by an attitude of contempt, was her prevailing mood in the transference,” Riviere observed. The rage nurtured by early deprivations accounted for the “acute and desperate

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sense of lack and loss, of dire need, of emptiness and desolation” experienced by the jealous third party in a triangular situation.33 It is notable here that the penis envy Freud saw as determinative of women’s fate plays virtually no part in Riviere’s analysis of envy in women. In her public lectures on the emotional lives “of ordinary men and women in civilized countries,” she suggested it was not the man’s penis alone but his worldly potency, his “capacity for initiative and enterprise,” that women found enviable. And she maintained that so obscure was male envy, wrapped in the common conceit that woman was an enigma, that men did not even know what they were envying. She countered Freud’s view that any gratifications a woman experienced were compensatory for her lack by arguing that men’s sense of superiority in possessing the penis was compensatory for their envy of women’s generative capacities. Notably, theorists would later pick up on and elaborate Riviere’s framing of envy as rooted more in a narcissistic incapacity for object relating than the triangular situations described by Jones and Freud.34

Anton Kris argues that analysts adopted a punitive stance toward narcissistic patients in the half century separating Freud and Kohut, falling prey to the danger, highlighted by Riviere, of failing “to recognize anything but the aggression” in them. Analysts responded to their patients’ manifest hostility, which, as Riviere recognized, was often turned on themselves, by slipping “into a minimalist technique” that honored Freud’s stated technical recommendations—though not his actual behavior—while denying such patients the affirmative support they needed. Kris suggests that with Kohut the analyst’s harsh stance toward the patient began to be replaced by benevolence—at least by some. Analysts worried that “new patients,” most notably narcissists, demanded more of them than Freud’s hysterics, and those disposed to treat them argued it was sometimes allowable to “depart from ordinary technique.” Kohut held that if the “analytic atmosphere” had indeed changed, it was because self psychologists like himself recognized patients’ “legitimate needs” with, perhaps, “a changed tone of voice” or an attunement to the needs of the nar-

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cissistically damaged. The efforts Kohut and Kernberg made to describe and treat such patients allowed analysts to retrospectively assemble genealogies of revisionist clinicians who had tried to bring the outcast patient within their compass. To the tradition represented by Ferenczi, Balint, and Winnicott we might now add Riviere’s name. She was not as well known as the others, giants within the analytic tradition, and neither did she write as much. Yet with her acute clinical sensibility and singular capacity for translating feeling states into prose, she did as much as anyone to illuminate the narcissistic interior.35

Nine IDENTITY

In the 1940s and 1950s, psychoanalysts and cultural critics delineated a newly subjective concept of identity that they argued was integral to the achievement of authentic selfhood, a concept that found immediate and deep resonance with popular notions of the self. Analysts and popular writers told of man’s suddenly urgent quest for identity and of his search for himself, and of the emergence of a new late-adolescent rite of passage, the crisis of identity, while Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the opening salvo in second-wave feminism, published in 1963, maintained that women of her generation were collectively facing an identity crisis of unprecedented proportions, living “in a terror of indecision” about who they were and who they would become.1 The word identity, and that to which it referred—the ideal of a robustly conceived and fully realized self—were soon everywhere, the holy grail of selfhood prompting countless quests and searches as well as the publication of popular books with titles such as Man’s Search for Himself, On Being a Real Person, and several dozen more offering variations on the “search for identity” that collectively made the case that Americans no longer knew who or what they were. Analysts, having helped create this new vision of identity, quickly brought it into discussions of narcissism, proposing that infantile narcissism provided a foundation for the healthy adult’s identity and, conversely, that the narcissist suffered from identity disturbance, loss, and confusion. By the 1960s, identity had become an indispensable

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concept in psychoanalysis and, in the vernacular, a taken-for-granted dimension of personhood that categorized a person simultaneously as unique and as part of a group, whether defined in national, racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, class, or occupational terms. The psychoanalyst most responsible for the rise of identity was Erik Erikson, who, in the mid-1940s, helped transform a term that had formerly referred, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, to a “condition or fact of remaining the same person throughout the various phases of existence,” into a vital concept conveying that which was most essential about a person’s existence in the world, both descriptively and experientially. The descriptive dimension would locate individuals in relation to any number of dimensions of personhood and would prove central to movements expressive of the renewed ethnic and new racial consciousness of the 1960s as well as to feminism and claims for gay and lesbian rights. The experiential dimension offered a framework for talking about the real self, what William James had called the “palpating inward life” that streamed through individuals, sustaining their awareness of themselves as they sorted the “me” from the “not me,” and what the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, a contemporary of Erikson’s, was outlining as the core of the self that ensured its aliveness. Observers complained that Erikson never adequately defined identity, conceiving of it alternately as a process, a mode of self-experience, and an unalterable aspect of self. And some analysts, in particular those ego psychologists who, like him, had been driven from Freud’s Vienna by the rise of Nazism, faulted him for the ambiguity of the term, for using it too broadly, and for his generally “sociological orientation.”2 None of this detracted from the cultural and professional impact of Erikson’s signature concept. In its Eriksonian form, identity was taken up almost immediately in the popular realm, and many analysts, for all of their grudging objections, followed suit. By 1960, identity was everywhere: as a household word, a cliché, a generation’s rallying cry, and one of “the most appealing moral terms of our time.” The next year, the New York Times was consoling college students and, more to the point, their parents with the experts’ consensus that

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“the identity crisis is an intrinsic and necessary part of growing up, a step in development that must be taken,” its attendant “pain and turmoil” notwithstanding. Several years later, the paper was dismissing the same crisis as what “used to be called ‘growing pains,’ ” with others characterizing alienated youth as so many complainers and bellyachers.3 Analysts, who had only sporadically invoked the term before Erikson published his seminal works, began using it with increasing regularity thereafter; in the analytic corpus, its usage doubled with each passing decade, with over twelve thousand books and articles referencing it by the year 2000. The apparent seamlessness of identity’s rise masks, sixty years on, the magnitude of the shift in meaning Erikson effected. The masking was in part Erikson’s doing: he identified as an ego psychologist (and used the term ego-identity in his early writings), even as from the start he attacked ego psychology’s ruling conventions, countering its lifeless scientism and flat prose with his own talk of vitality, creativity, aliveness, growth, and development. Some of the conceptual labors he performed around identity were visible at the time. His understanding of culture, historical change, and what some of his analytic colleagues dismissively called “social factors” was nuanced, as was his account of the ways a “cultural personality” found expression in individuals. But he could be cast as unsophisticated. This was in part because he wrote in a deceptively plain-spoken register. But it was also because he was, rather unfashionably in the eyes of some, “a true clinician” not primarily a theorist, “tuned in to the problems people really struggle with,” wrestling with the “concrete and lived experience of his patients,” and dealing with “the whole person” and the possibilities to be found in living day to day. Less visible was Erikson’s casting of the “new patient” of psychoanalysis in the idiom of identity lost and potentially regained. As Erikson explained in a formulation that would be widely quoted, “the patient of today suffers most under the problem of what he should believe in and who he should—or, indeed, might—become; while the patient of early psychoanalysis suffered most under inhibitions which prevented him from being what and who he thought he knew he was.”5 Critics and analysts would later reframe this shift,

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substituting the narcissist for the Eriksonian person-bereft-ofidentity and using it to explain the precipitous rise in the number of narcissists. The identity conversation was in some respects a trial run for the conversation about narcissism. The popular quest-foridentity literature Erikson’s work inspired in the 1950s and 1960s is strikingly similar to the culture of narcissism literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Both trace a historical arc from the certainty of tradition to the confusions of modernity. Both tell of the appearance of a new type of patient in the consulting room, suffering from the vaguely defined complaints of emptiness, futility, and discontent. And both confidently link clinical phenomena to the temper of the times. Identity thus brought psychoanalysis to the center of a wide-ranging cultural conversation about the American self. As significant, it was the occasion for integrating important but marginalized analytic theories that were not concerned, as was classical analysis, with the ego’s defensive operations, but rather with the self’s growth and mastery—not with drives but with capacities. Two decades before Heinz Kohut delineated the positive aspects of narcissism, Erikson was laying the groundwork for analysts to embrace the Kohutian project. Freudian psychoanalysis was focused on “introspective honesty in the service of enlightenment,” Erikson observed, but he noted it had attended little to the “varieties of cultural expression” that made for “zestful participation” in life as well as those that cultivated self-abandon and supported individuals’ passions. The English objectrelations analysts similarly wrestled with how to bring creativity and aliveness into the analytic ambit, addressing the question, as put by Winnicott, “of what life itself is about.” As Winnicott explained to a fellow analyst, “We differ from Freud. He was for curing symptoms. We are concerned with living persons, whole living and loving.” This was Erikson’s position as well, though he differed from his English colleagues in that he took on Freud’s followers, not Freud himself. Loyal to his Viennese forebear, when he invoked Freud it was often his Freud—the phenomenological Freud, the culturalist Freud—not the straitened master worshipped by systematizing disciples. Erikson turned to his Freud as an authorizing touchstone even as he staged a “quiet revolution” against foundational

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Freudian precepts, with analysts only later realizing that they, and psychoanalysis, had become Eriksonians without anyone noticing.6

Searching for Identity That Americans no longer knew who they were and what they were to become was, in the 1940s and 1950s, a given among psychiatrists and psychoanalysts and a staple of sociological reflection and popular commentary. Modern man, the argument went, had lost his sense of self and was in consequence fated to be forever searching for himself, unsure of who and what he was. The charge took various forms. Modernity diminished individuals’ significance and worth, resulting in a “loss of the sense of self”; it produced too many selves, forcing the individual to settle on a “real self”; it demanded that everyone realize “his own selfhood”; and it expected of the “real person” an ideal self characterized by wholeness, coherence, and integrity. The stakes were high. “Discovery of the real self can rescue a crumbling marriage, recreate a faltering career, transform victims of ‘personality failure,’ ” Cosmopolitan advised its readers in an upbeat paean to self-knowledge that appeared in 1959. As an observer, you can judge, appraise, like, and even hate your self, the magazine explained: “You can talk about it as if you were an object or a person outside of you.”7 It was part of Erikson’s genius to appropriate the social critics’ narrative of decline for identity, offering analysts a shorthand that could be used to bridge the divide between individual patients and social problems. Consider the analyst Allen Wheelis’s popular book, The Quest for Identity, published in 1958. Addressing “the malaise of our times”—a Laschian before his time—from “behind the couch,” Wheelis knit elements from various corners of the clinical and critical literature into a persuasive, if simplistic, narrative. From David Riesman he gleaned that the character of the American people had recently changed, and from Erikson that the problem was a deficient sense of identity. Wheelis told of village society superseded by mass society, moral absolutes by relativism, a properly punitive superego by an ethos of adjustment, Victorian repression by a celebration of sexual liberation, and the hysteric by the character-disordered indi-

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vidual. The “weary and skeptical” midcentury character he evoked was no match for the late-nineteenth-century’s sturdy bourgeois figure. Men in the nineteenth century were faced with few choices, vocational or otherwise, he argued; they knew early on who they were and what they would become. The framework of life was fixed and unchanging. Communities and values were stable, strong, and consistent. All of this changed with the dawn of the twentieth century. The pace of life quickened, fixed values became fluid, and the “hard inner core” that had earlier sustained men’s sure “sense of self” became ever more elusive.8 People no longer knew who they were. Identity became hard to achieve and, once achieved, hard to maintain. The phenomenon of not knowing who one was would come to be known as an identity crisis. Erikson coined the term and used it in the war years to describe the psychic deficits of veterans newly bereft of “a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity.” Applied first in a clinical setting to denote pathology, the term was quickly normalized as a description of an expected stage of adolescence and young adulthood. “Identity crisis” entered the popular language in the 1960s as a designation for a period of, as Erikson put it, “growth, recovery, and further differentiation.” Intelligent college students rationalizing their drug use; unionized social workers confounding negotiators with their psychoanalytic jargon; intellectuals without a cause, among them “the nation’s best minds”: all were suffering from identity crises.9 By the end of the decade, identity crises had become everyday events, “finding oneself” an obligatory step on the road to adulthood. The concept of identity quickly became naturalized, an integral, taken-for-granted component of professional and popular lexicons. At the same time, a broad swath of the analytic community began to label Erikson an outsider to the discipline, consigning him to what one later called a persisting “psychoanalytic limbo.” Erikson, they charged, violated one of ego psychology’s foundational principles, the strict separation between objectively observable facts and subjectively felt experience. His usage of “ego-identity,” they argued, confused what they insisted were the ego’s two referents: the first, more narrowly technical, an internal mental agency (along with the

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id and the superego), and the second, more expansive, “the self,” “one’s own person,” and the “total individual human being.” Ego psychologists maintained that Freud had been guilty of a similar offense, using the term “das Ich”—“the I,” translated as “ego” in the English of the Standard Edition—as ambiguously as Erikson later did. As Heinz Hartmann, the doyen of the ego psychologists, explained, Freud used it “in more than one sense, and not always in the sense in which it was best defined.” It was sometimes but not always clear if, in invoking the term, Freud had meant the mental agency or the whole person; Erikson’s critics charged that he, like Freud, simply ignored the distinction. Hartmann’s orthodox colleague Kurt Eissler declared that Erikson, while he might qualify as a psychotherapist, was no psychoanalyst, and other leading analysts agreed.10 There is something comic in their critique: the egopsychological defenders of the Freudian faith cleaning up after the master’s sloppiness and then using their purified and systematized theory to discipline the sloppy Erikson as insufficiently Freudian. It is in part Erikson’s inattention to the obsessive boundary policing of his colleagues, his exploiting of the ambiguity inherent in Freud’s texts, that accounts for his popularity. Erikson identified with the phenomenological aspects and the literary qualities in Freud, with his intellectual “freedom and enjoyment of inquiry,” not with the Freud as “former laboratory worker,” the scientist who traded in “transformable quantities of drive.” Erikson’s kinship with Freud was cemented by what he saw as their common interest in “man’s total existence”: the individual as he radiated outward to the community, fueled by the “anticipation of new potentialities” and engaged in understanding “the enigma of consciousness” as much as the inner depths that were also the subject of Freud’s “grim pursuit.” Erikson challenged the analyst’s single-minded focus on the origins of patients’ problems in early childhood. To him, it was just as important that the analyst look outward to the world patients shared with others, at “where they were going from where they were, and who was going with them.”11 The concept of identity, to Erikson’s mind a “conceptual necessity,” thus revived an aspect of Freud’s thought that eluded the

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orthodox analysts’ grasp. But it was not only to Freud that Erikson looked for inspiration. His distinctive experience as a youth and his experience as an immigrant to America, which he shared with his generation of analysts, many of them from Vienna, were just as formative. Born in 1902 in Frankfurt to a Jewish mother of Danish descent and a father he never knew, the young Erik was adopted by his mother’s second husband and, deceived by his parents about his true parentage, harbored doubts from the start, as he told it, about his own identity. Making his way to Vienna, he trained as a psychoanalyst, working with children and entering analysis with Anna Freud. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, and within six years had taken the surname Erikson, imaginatively becoming his own father—the son of Erik. America, with “its strangely adolescent style of adulthood,” offering the possibilities for “new roles and stances,” as he saw it, called forth “a whole new orientation” to patients’ troubles, as much social as individual.12 The stateless American Indians among whom he did early fieldwork, the World War II veterans plagued by the symptoms of shell shock, the young patients with whom he worked at the Austen Riggs Center in western Massachusetts: all were suffering from confusions of identity, questioning who they were and what they would become. Erikson allowed that it was almost self-evident that his experience of “the hard and heartless” experience of emigration and Americanization, which made many identities into a “super-identity,” nurtured his interest in identity and its crises. “We begin to conceptualize matters of identity at the very time in history when they become a problem,” he wrote elliptically in 1950, taking stock of the personal, political, and moral cataclysms wrought by the war and their effects on those who survived them. His turn to identity, he suggested, “seemed naturally grounded” in his own life history. Erikson presented himself as a conduit through which flowed historical currents, and the dislocations that opened up for him and millions of others who survived the war as “new forms of identity.”13 The concept, he was suggesting, was forged in the cauldron of history, not in the byways of psychoanalytic theory.

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Yet it was more Erikson’s curiosity and gift for observation than the historical accident of being in the right place at the right time that accounts for the widespread appeal of his work. His writings were accessible, his style lucid, and his tone almost conversational. He brought an eye for the telling detail to the big questions he addressed, invoking iconic cultural types (the Western rancher, the overprotective “Mom”) and colorful slogans drawn from American folkways (“where seldom is heard a discouraging word”) to drive home just how different were the American and European cultural milieus. In Europe, for example, he had heard talk among clinicians of American patients’ “relative ‘ego weakness.’ ” What he saw in America was not a weak ego but a different ego. It was not the synthesizing machine that was the old-world psychoanalyst’s ego, the ego that Anna Freud cast as an emotionless and reliable “mechanical apparatus,” but rather an ego that in popular usage denoted “unqualified if not justified self-esteem.” He was struck by the American penchant for “ego-inflating” behaviors, and characterized the tendency to engage in what he argued was fruitless but routine ego bolstering “for the sake of making people ‘feel better’ ” as a “national practice.” Boisterous bantering was everywhere, in speech, gesture, and “interpersonal relations.” The not inconsiderable ego strength of Americans was forged in opposition to the larger group, he suggested, adding “what is popularly called an ‘ego’ in this country, seems to be the defiant expression of the owner’s conviction that he is somebody without being identified with anybody in particular.” In the United States he discovered a dynamic nation of extreme contrasts and abrupt changes, of proud autonomy and exuberant initiative, and of “a fashionable and vain ‘ego’ which is its own originator and arbiter.” This “self-made ego” was neither European nor Freudian, but distinctively American in its ability “to reshape itself in interaction throughout life.”14 Reflecting in 1968 on identity’s rapid adoption, Erikson deemed it “a term for something as unfathomable as it is all-pervasive.” Erikson’s decrying of the faddish equation of identity with the question “Who am I” is suggestive of his desire to rein in the term’s popular referents. As with other such new and protean terms, however,

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once loosed, its meanings and uses were not Erikson’s, or anyone else’s, to control. In the twenty-odd years following the term’s introduction, psychoanalysts sporadically attempted to delineate its several, sometimes competing, dimensions. Yet, however carefully they drew distinctions between the metaphysical and psychological dimensions of identity, and however much they warned of its internal inconsistencies and contradictions, they were powerless to prevent its use in what Erikson called the demonstrative, desperate, and “almost deliberately confused ‘search’ ” that was consuming so many. The term made intuitive, if not strictly technical, sense.15 That its popular meaning became self-evident so quickly suggests that it struck a deep cultural chord. From this perspective, Erikson’s “invention” appears to be an inspired consolidation of cultural forces that were already sending many on quests, searching for their identities—or, at the least, prompting many to buy books telling them they should be searching. Erikson maintained that Freud had used the term identity only once, leaving Erikson free, one observer has noted, to invent it “almost without reference to his authority.” Unburdened with analytic associations, identity, in Erikson’s hands, was also a relatively nonideological term, free of any roots in the Marxist social psychology of the 1930s. Employing a concept of social character, which Erich Fromm defined as “the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group” nurtured by common emotional and material experience, popular yet controversial works in this vein such as The Authoritarian Personality, Wilhelm Reich’s Character Analysis, and Fromm’s Escape from Freedom had probed the lower middle class’s attraction to fascism, arguing that petty-bourgeois sexual repression and economic insecurity made the father figure promised by fascist movements attractive.16 Erikson’s identity, by contrast, represented a fresh start, a term with no class referents and one that could be applied to normal as well as disturbed individuals. Reconstructing the evolution of his own thinking on identity, Erikson pointed to two “conceptual ancestors,” Freud and William James, his characterization of them as “bearded and patriarchal

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founding fathers” conveying his respect while locating them firmly in the past. As Erikson saw it, Freud had articulated the historical and sociological dimensions of identity, James its metaphysical dimensions. In an address to the Viennese Society of the B’nai B’rith in 1926, Freud spoke of the “obscure emotional forces” that bound him to Jewry, “the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction.” Erikson termed Freud’s usage “ethnic” and invoked this moment several times to underscore the importance of communal allegiances in the formation of psychosocial identity, allegiances that, in his opinion, people searching for their identities and orthodox psychoanalysts too often slighted. Erikson somewhat unfairly suggested that Freud, with his “timeless elite of brooding neurotics,” was somewhat oblivious to the social upheavals of his times. Identity formation, Erikson insisted, could not be conceived of as apart from “contemporary crises in historical development,” whether of Martin Luther’s day or of his own. The world wars, political revolutions, and moral rebellions of the twentieth century had all undermined the foundations upon which human identity traditionally—and in Freud’s time—had been constructed. Freud’s weltanschauung, “highly dependent on [the] cultural conditions of a sedentary middle class,” was formed in the nineteenth century and remained there.17 The term identity appears a number of times in Freud’s writings; Erikson’s implicit claim that Freud had used it only once in an Eriksonian sense is closer to the mark. Indeed, Freud, like virtually every psychoanalyst writing before 1940, used the word identity to mean a person’s sameness across time. In “A Child is Being Beaten,” for example, Freud wrote, “The actual identity of the person who does the beating remains obscure at first,” using the term to denote perhaps the simplest dimension of identity—a person’s name. Or, again, in “Dreams and Telepathy,” he wrote of a woman recognizing the identity of the man she was dreaming about: “The original thus never divulged its identity.” Erikson was of course familiar with this meaning of the word. But when he wrote, in 1946, of the veterans under his care, that they “do not know any more who they are,” it

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was the subjective dimension of identity that he suggested these veterans had lost. That is, they had lost their ability to experience themselves as having “sameness and continuity” and a belief in their “social role.” They suffered from a disturbance in what he then started to call “ego-identity.” Conceiving of identity as a subjective phenomenon, felt from within and not ascribed from without, Erikson was subtly but significantly redefining the term and its referents.18 Writing to his wife in 1878, William James had voiced what was to Erikson’s mind this same subjective sense of identity. It was when a man feels himself “most deeply and intensely active and alive,” James had written, that a voice inside speaks, saying “ ‘This is the real me!’ ” James was here musing on character, not identity; he drew on the older meaning of the term having to with the sameness of the self and its attributes when writing in his 1890 textbook, The Principles of Psychology, about “the sense of personal identity.” Still, Erikson’s appropriation of James was inspired, for what he would call in 1968 an “exuberant awareness” of one’s identity was predicated on the sense of deeply felt realness and authenticity that James had privately articulated more than half a century earlier.19 Several psychoanalysts working prior to Erikson had already begun the process of theorizing a newly subjective dimension of identity. An Indian analyst, a Professor Haridas Bhattacharya, delivered a tantalizingly titled lecture, “The Psycho-logical Basis of Personal Identity,” in 1930, but we unfortunately have only a scant record of what he said. And another Indian analyst, G. Bose, writing in 1937 of a male patient’s sexual difficulties, described the man’s sense that he was losing control over his ego in sex, feeling as if his identity, his sense of control over who he was, was in danger of disappearing. Erikson’s teacher, the Viennese analyst Paul Federn, who had delineated healthy narcissism, was the first to conceptualize identity along the lines that Erikson would later popularize. In several papers published in the 1920s and 1930s, Federn wrote of what he called “ego feeling,” or “the sensation, constantly present, of one’s own person— the ego’s perception of itself,” and suggested that for some persons, preservation of identity was dependent upon this. Here we have the

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outlines of what would in Erikson’s hands become associated with a sense of identity: “The totality of feeling which one has of one’s own living person.” To Federn, there was no identity without an awareness of it. Identity was by its very nature a subjective experience in Federn’s thought.20 Through the 1950s, books and papers as well as magazine articles on identity and the allied concept of the “real self” proliferated. The first psychoanalytic papers with “identity” and “real self” in their titles appeared in 1949. In its popular usages, the “real self” referred to the psychological center or core of the individual. It was authentic and instinctual, the self divested of all demands society made on it. Searching for it would prove joyful and exhilarating, “the most fascinating treasure hunt of your life,” readers of Seventeen were told. “The real self is something to be discovered and created,” the sociologist Helen Merrell Lynd maintained in 1960 in Mademoiselle. “It is not a starting point, and never a finality, but a lifelong endeavor.” A decade later the title was different—“There Is No Real You”—but the message was the same. “The true self, the ‘me’ that is within us,” another sociologist wrote, “is constantly in the process of being created,” a compilation of our many selves. It was vital, alive, and spontaneous. Skeptics contended that the individual claiming “to have ‘found himself’ ” had in fact “found only a part of himself, the part he wishes to find,” but this was no impediment to the skilled psychoanalyst, who could work with even “this or that sample” of the real self.21 Erikson warned that awareness of the real self would not be realized through strenuous questing. The contemporaneous testimony of one Mrs. B., a forty-year-old who found herself after thirty-eight hours of analytic treatment, belied his pessimism. A subdued, anxious person, Mrs. B. had endured five years of intense suffering, including a stay in a sanatorium, before turning to psychoanalysis. Challenged by her analyst, Karen Horney, to figure out what she really wanted, she was plunged into a two-week-long paroxysm of despair at the realization of her selflessness, of her inability to want anything at all for herself. From the depths of her misery she saw clearly for the first time—“I saw it as a blinding light”—that she

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had not really lived at all but had been maintaining a pseudoself, her real self stifled by her neurosis. Was it possible, she asked, “that I had touched the key to the universe” in realizing that selflessness— “the fact and fear of not having a self,” of “not-being”—was “the secret of wretchedness”? Before, beholden to “the relentless system of ‘shoulds’ which dominated her,” she had “known nothing, understood nothing” because she did not exist. Now everything rushed to fall into place. The purpose of life was “to live and grow and express ourselves”; “Sum ergo sum” was enough to live by.22 The identity Mrs. B. discovered through her questing—she characterized it as “a long journey”—might be thought of as Jamesian not Freudian, subjectively felt rather than historically anchored. Both dimensions of identity would be developed more fully in the tumult of the 1960s, sometimes in tandem, sometimes separately. The ethnic or cultural dimension to which Freud gave voice would fuel various forms of identity politics, from black to women’s to homosexual movements of liberation. The Jamesian tradition was taken up by Horney and other neo-Freudians, who rejected Freud’s more stoic and tragic view of the inevitably compromised self, the self as “constituted out of conflicting inner demands,” in favor of a distinctively American liberationist notion of a creative self. This was the authentic self that was to be found doing what it wanted to do, rather than heeding the shoulds and oughts imposed by civilization. It was the self of Mrs. B. and the self of Mademoiselle’s Lynd, “distinguishing What I Am from What THEY Demand.” This self found expression in analytic conceptions of the self that centered on an intuitively felt sense of realness. In a Jamesian vein, for example, Winnicott described a “True Self” that did “no more than collect together the details of the experience of aliveness.” As he wrote, “Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself”—Mrs. B.’s sum ergo sum.23

Being Real That Mrs. B. could so exuberantly locate her identity—her “real self”—in an experience of little more than what Winnicott called

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“aliveness” was made possible by a major shift, registered in 1975 by the sociologist Ralph Turner, “in what are conceived as valid indications of what is real about ourselves.” The demand that the self be real and authentic first appeared in the 1940s. Once specified, realness, much like identity, was suddenly everywhere, an apparently unexceptionable attribute of personhood. Whereas formerly the self was something to be created or achieved, to be plumbed in altruistic acts or arrived at through hard work, the self was now an essence to be discovered by throwing off repressive social restraints—the “shoulds” that Horney saw ruling and impoverishing Mrs. B.’s existence. Cultural critics bemoaned the loss of these “shoulds,” seeing it as part of a more general decline in proper authority and values. To them, identity was ideally anchored in something more substantial than Winnicott’s “aliveness,” for example in Freud’s ethnic loyalties or in the pursuit of duties, ideals, morality, and altruism. But, as Turner astutely pointed out, the modern expressive self was not so altogether free of institutional and other constraints as critics imagined. It only appeared that way, in the absence of a theory detailing the pressures to which it was subject.24 Like identity, realness was hardly straightforward. Being “real” was to critics of youth culture in the 1960s simply a matter of shucking off societal constraints through participation in encounter groups and “love-ins.” To the psychoanalysts who theorized realness, there was by contrast nothing natural about it; “realness” imposed its demands as relentlessly as the traditional morality to which it was so unfavorably contrasted. The capacity to be oneself, which Mrs. B. felt she had realized, was predicated on the abjuring of infantile fantasies and the “mastery of reality tasks” in one analyst’s formulation, an impossible to fully complete process of self-regulation that brought one face-to-face with painful feelings. Likewise, the Winnicottian true self’s spontaneity, authenticity, and creativity were not natural but produced in the context of a properly nurturing environment of perfectly calibrated, selflessly robust maternal care.25 Realness was not a natural state but a hard-won achievement. The philosopher G. E. Moore observed that “whenever a philosopher says something is ‘really real,’ you can be really sure that what

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he says is ‘really real’ isn’t real, really.” Riesman wrestled with this issue in his 1952 portrait of a thirty-two-year-old divorced woman who could “talk a good game”: what appeared on the surface as realness could be, misleadingly, a learned, not-altogether-real cultural style. Isabelle Sutherland, Riesman’s subject, was highly literate, a Ph.D. psychologist training to be a psychotherapist and undergoing analysis. Asked to name her best trait, Sutherland ventured it was that she was “alive and struggling, looking for things, pursuing ideals.” Asked to name her greatest achievement, she said it was that she had “come out of the worst of my neurosis”—Riesman explained that she’d had a character neurosis—“and become a real person.” Riesman judged her “consciousness of internal growth and change” rare and was struck by her capacity “to look at and reveal the self.” He characterized her as thoughtful, discriminating, and perceptive. Yet while commending her for achieving “a very considerable degree of self-transparency,” he wondered whether she might have “had it thrust on her by analysis.” Having caught glimpses of what he took to be the real Isabelle Sutherland shining “through her vocabulary,” he was not wholly convinced that what he was hearing from her was real and not a creation resulting from her mastery of the language of introspection and self-making. How, he wondered, was one to get behind “talk of autonomy to autonomy itself? Or behind behavior calculated to appear spontaneous to spontaneity itself?”26 Riesman, like Turner, saw that part of the difficulty in faithfully conveying the modern expressive self’s travails and triumphs lay in the inadequacy of the sociologist’s descriptive tools and in the necessarily limited nature of his world view. He admitted to ambivalence toward Sutherland, characterizing her as a colorless exemplar of “pedestrian other-direction,” a woman whose bland, psychiatrically inflected contentment he interpreted as “a dull lack of the sense of the tragic.” He acknowledged the difficulty of comprehending “the texture of undramatic autonomous living” such as hers, preferring as he did the nineteenth-century’s heroic, inner-directed figures, violent and grandiose as they may have been, to modernity’s milder types.27 How deeply people actually felt the anxieties that professionals saw burdening them is difficult to determine. In the early 1950s, as

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part of a larger study of self-understanding, the educational psychologist Arthur T. Jersild asked two hundred students enrolled in a New York City college to write compositions on the topics “what I like about myself” and “what I dislike about myself.” Jersild reported that the students wrote in mostly positive terms about their physical appearances and intellectual abilities. What really animated them, however, were the positive and negatives dimensions of their personalities, social attitudes, and relationships. Approximately 60 percent, both men and women, commented positively on qualities in themselves that Jersild classified under the rubric “inner resources,” qualities such as inner strength and drive, contentment, and self-respect that he thought spoke to individuals’ sense of their inner selves. Yet more than 70 percent faulted themselves for deficiencies around the same issues. Jersild judged his subjects well versed in “the universal language of the self” and commended them for holding rather mature self-conceptions. Many, he wrote, spoke from a secure sense of their own basic integrity and from inner conviction.28 Jersild’s findings hardly portray the self in crisis. As he reported, none of his subjects was unable to say who he or she was. Whether or not his subjects—so comfortable psychologizing, so focused on their inner selves—were undergoing what another generation of college students would call identity crises is impossible to determine.29 The concept of an identity crisis, even of an identity, was not yet in circulation. What is clear is that, when prompted to engage in selfreflection, they expressed psychological not moral dimensions of the self, and that Jersild saw this as something new. Twenty years later, the sociologist Turner addressed the identity question head on, surveying groups of adults and college students in order to determine whether they were as preoccupied with the quest for identity as social critics and psychiatrists assumed. He found that 80 percent of nearly one thousand adult Los Angelenos sampled never asked the question, “Who am I really?” Fourteen percent asked it sometimes, 3 percent often. By contrast, an overwhelming majority of UCLA students acknowledged that they were concerned with self-discovery and questing, confirming the popular stereotype in

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which college and identity problems were linked. Nearly half of both adults and students endorsed intimate revelation, telling “your deepest feelings to someone you trust,” as a route to self-discovery, a measure of the ubiquity of a psychological perspective (the other, more traditional routes Turner offered his subjects were working “hard at a difficult and challenging task” and altruism—helping “someone who needs your assistance”). Interestingly, university students in England and Australia were if anything more concerned with finding their identities than were their counterparts in California, with the English confounding deeply held conceptions of national character—“no Freud please, we’re British”—by their ringing endorsement of intimate revelation as a means to self-knowledge. Turner concluded that the prevailing “public imagery of the self” differed from that found in popular writing. Others agreed, with one writing that Americans were not nearly so “anguished, frustrated, and disoriented” as social critics portrayed them.30

American Superego If the ego in the land of democracy was strong, defiant, and inflated, its overlord the superego was, according to the psychoanalysts writing for both professional and popular audiences who were charting its fate, dangerously enfeebled, feckless, and feminized. The superego was understood as an agency of the personality that in its supervisory role was something like the conscience; as Wheelis explained, it was “judicial department of personality.” In analysts’ accounts, it was usually described as a harsh, prohibiting, and repressive agency that transmitted through the generations not only what was best but also what was most “coercive and threatening” in the past. According to analytic orthodoxy, the boy’s superego originated at the moment when he staved off castration at the hands of his father by renouncing his desires for his mother and identifying with the would-be castrator. In this identification, the boy made clear his desire to be like his father and at the same time took on the father’s superego, making “the parents’ strictness and severity, their prohibiting and punitive function,” his own.31

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It was precisely the threatening, all-powerful father, the father capable of castrating his own son, whom analysts worried was missing in the America of the 1940s and 1950s. Wheelis saw the superego’s decline in the transition from village society to mass society, arguing that the former nourished the superego and the latter undermined its foundations. Modernity, with its highways, radios, television, and mass consumer goods, brought values from the outside into the settled community, linking all Americans to one another. “The unquestioning acceptance of an unopposed pattern of life” challenged, the father’s authority and control over his wife and children diminished.32 The notion that in the United States not men but women had the upper hand, or, in the colorful imagery Carl Jung employed in a 1909 letter to Freud, that within the family “the men have become a flock of sheep and the women play the ravening wolves,” was a venerable analytic truism. Girls in America, where “the father ideal appears to be downgraded,” Freud told his Viennese colleagues in 1910, feel superior to boys in everything and “lose their respect for the male sex”: “The American girl cannot muster the illusion that is necessary for marriage.” Jung, for his part, considered the phenomenon of womanly rule of men a new development, never before seen, evidence of the hegemony of the “mother-complex” in the United States. “American culture really is a bottomless abyss,” he added. Freud would later see evidence of Frauenherrschaft—“petticoat government” in the Standard Edition—in the passage of national prohibition, which deprived people of their “stimulants, intoxicants, and other pleasure-producing substances.” In Europe, by contrast, fathers were powerful patriarchs and mothers subordinate but cosseted domestic creatures.33 The well-known psychologist Rollo May and the psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann made the popular case for the American father’s sorry demise. Mothers were dominant in the American family, argued May. As matriarchy replaced patriarchy, the son’s oedipal conflict with the father was relegated to the past. Bereft of a worthy opponent, the son could only struggle against the mother, a domineering, devious foe who robbed him of his potency and of his right

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to “his existence as a person.” Deprived of a masculine figure with which to identify, the son was left with a weak and diminished superego; homosexuality was a not uncommon result. FrommReichmann was even more caustic, seeing gender disarray everywhere. Hostile and aggressive women ruled the American family imperiously. Men waited on their wives, an inversion of old-world gender dynamics, which had wives waiting on their husbands, and the women were “not afraid of their husbands as European women are.” Domineering women wielding oversevere maternal authority spawned insecure, anxious, and guilty children filled with hatred toward the mothers who frustrated their strivings toward self-realization.34 Erikson was skeptical of his fellow analysts’ portrayals of the authoritarian, rejecting, frigid, and insufficiently maternal American mother. There was in the psychiatric and analytic case histories and in the professional literature “an undertone of revengeful triumph, as if a villain had been spotted and cornered,” he observed, as well as a “specific moralistic punitiveness.” Contrasting aristocratic Europe with democratic America, Erikson saw the American father’s relative weakness as a byproduct of political and social equality, with generations of men having abdicated “their dominant place in the family” out of a distaste for hierarchy. Women, animated by the same democratic ethos, were “possessed with the idea of freedom from any man’s autocracy.” Erikson noted that so equal was the parental balance of power that it was difficult for American men on the couch to summon up memories of the threatening oedipal father, the “overwhelmingly bigger” figure whose possession of the mother must be challenged. Fathers could instead be experienced as tender and understanding, their domestic subordination rendering them not rivals for the mother’s love but, at worst, somewhat pitiable disappointments and, at best, something akin to beloved and admired big brothers. “There are real friendships between fathers and sons,” Erikson observed. Fraternal images were filling “the gaps left by decaying paternalism.”35 It seemed to Erikson that the American boy was “on reasonably good terms with his superego.” Erikson had been raised psychoanalytically on the “rigidly vindictive and punitive” conceptualization

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of the superego, and knew well from his clinical work the “triumph of depreciation” its injunctions and disparaging inner voices could inculcate in adolescents unsure of their identities. From the start he voiced his dissatisfaction with analysts’ relentlessly negative construal of the superego’s functioning, arguing that Freud himself had stressed the ways in which it transmitted from one generation to the next not only prohibitions but also defining aspects of the social milieu in which individuals lived, from the “tastes and standards” of their social class to the “characteristics and traditions of the race from which they spring.” The Freudian superego, that is, was inescapably laden with the social. Erikson’s analytic predecessors, he claimed, were too focused on “man’s enslavement” to the superego, too focused on what society denied the growing child. By contrast, his aim was to emphasize what society, channeled through the superego, granted to the child: it kept him alive and seduced “him to its particular life style.” For all its enriching potential, the superego— conveying “mighty disapproval”—was yet a formidable adversary. Still, the fact that the father in America was less forbidding meant that the boy struggling to establish his identity faced a less fearsome opponent in the Americanized superego. Erikson thought this was not an altogether bad thing.36

In Search of Women’s Identity From the 1930s through the 1960s, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, cultural critics, and feminists engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of American women. This discussion was about the place of women in civic life, but it could also devolve into alarm about the large numbers of frigid women in the nation. It was carried out, for the most part, at a remove from the discussion of identity and the quest literature, in which Florence Nightingale— who reportedly had a terrible time finding herself—was virtually the only woman invoked. The first psychoanalytic investigations of American women’s identity took as their subject the prostitute, a measure of how impoverished these investigations were. Before the 1940s, the prosti-

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tute was treated as a foil against which men’s travails were played out, with her own subjectivity mostly ignored. In the decades following, however, discussions of her personality were organized around authenticity and realness. One analyst charged in 1945 that prostitution was pervaded by falseness: neither party revealed his or her “true self,” with everyone hiding behind “pseudo-personalities” and disavowing their identities. Another analyst, looking at the connections between nonprocreative sexuality and “the emergence and maintenance of identity in man,” told of a young woman—the only woman his comprehensive paper discussed—whose identity as a prostitute was layered over her morally alert “real self.” Periodically, mounting feelings of despair, inner isolation, and loneliness would propel her to prostitution, even as she knew this identity was not hers. She thereby exemplified the confusion women of her sort faced. Her doubled identity—at once whore and not whore—allowed her to protect something of what she considered her “real self.” She allowed men to use her body as if it were theirs, a thing or organ belonging to them, but kept her sanity by imagining her “real self” separate from her “consummated body.” She thus enacted quite dramatically the split between real and false selves that drew the censure of so many commentators. And she was evidence of the falseness of what the author characterized as “the feminine surrender to a man that writers and poets insist on ascribing to prostitutes.”37 Eventually, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists would probe the identity of the “normal” woman, just as, following Erikson’s lead and starting to explore identity as an aspect of personhood worthy of their attention, they probed the identity of the normal man, examining him at work, in the community, and in the family. It was far easier for analysts and social commentators to see work and sex, public and private, in balance when they looked at men. When they examined women, however, they connected everything—work, ambition, childrearing—to sex. Christopher Lasch’s bitter contention that, in his time, the prostitute exemplified “the qualities indispensable to success in American society” continued a long tradition of professional and popular commentary concerning the prostitute’s falseness, aggressiveness, and

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hostility to men. Writing in 1978, Lasch highlighted what he considered the many contradictions that characterized her: a loner, she depended on others “only as a hawk depends on chickens”; frigid, she attempted “to move others while remaining unmoved herself”; and hostile and scornful, she perfectly symbolized the ethos of the moment, in which hedonism was linked not to pleasure but to “the war of all against all,” and in which “even the most intimate encounters become a form of mutual exploitation.”38 Lasch framed the prostitute as a central figure in modernity. He saw her displacing the salesman, the Willy Lomanesque figure who in the postwar period wanted more than anything to be “well liked.” In his exemplariness, the salesman was symbolic of what C. Wright Mills called the “master occupational change” of the twentieth century that saw the prototypical man go from business entrepreneur and free farmer to white-collar employee, and from heroic to tragic. The white-collar employee was insecure, tormented, and powerless— a little man.39 The prostitute was not even that. Lasch’s choice of her to symbolize modernity is even more interesting in that by all accounts, men’s resort to prostitutes over the course of the twentieth century was, if anything, diminishing. Whereas visiting a prostitute had been almost a rite of passage early in the century, by the time Lasch was writing young men were far more likely to have their first sexual experiences with women of their own social class. The actual prostitute was fading as her cultural profile grew. Betty Friedan’s assertion, in her 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique, that identity lay at the core of the woman problem came just as psychoanalysts and psychiatrists were beginning to discuss what a “normal” sense of identity in women might look like. For much of the century, as we have seen, psychoanalysts had fiercely and divisively debated the question of femininity and its relation to lack. Shifting the grounds of the question or inquiry from “femininity” to the gender neutral “identity” promised women access to, among certain positive gains, the same sorts of issues and problems that plagued men. Addressing the problem of women’s identity, Friedan wrote, in language echoing Wheelis’s, of the American woman not

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knowing “who she is, or can be, or wants to be.”40 Critiquing Erikson for having defined identity as a male issue and for organizing his account of the life cycle around the crises men faced as they grew and aged, crises in which new beginnings were forged, Friedan argued that the issue for women was the absence of any such progression past adolescence. There was nothing to which women could aspire except marriage. Charged by Friedan with reinscribing the gender polarities that she was critiquing, Erikson nevertheless attempted to provide an account of women’s development focused not, like those of his analytic forebears, on “the so-called genital trauma” but on women’s “productive interior.” It was women’s “vital inner potential” that he highlighted, observing that analysts, with their obsessive attention to feminine lack and envy, had “made of womanhood an ubiquitous compensation neurosis marked by a bitter insistence on being ‘restored.’ ” Construals of female identity were biased toward “what a woman cannot be and cannot have,” when analysts might better consider “what she is, has been, and may yet become.” Young women uncertain of whether or not they could “have an identity” without yet having a mate could, he argued, develop themselves as workers, citizens, and persons, thereby forestalling the fulfillment of what all assumed was their destiny—motherhood. No woman need define herself by motherhood alone; modern conditions allowed her to choose, plan, and even renounce “her somatic tasks.” Erikson waxed lyrical in contemplating the “singular loveliness and brilliance” of young women not yet subjected to the constraints of maternity, their activity a transcendent aesthetic phenomenon symbolizing “the selfcontainment of pure being.” But he also envisioned lives for women marked by development continuing beyond the task of childbearing that popularly, and psychoanalytically, sealed their fate. In most endeavors the equals of men, women in Erikson’s expansive vision were defined, as were men, by their interests and capabilities, not by their biology alone. As he saw it, engineering, science, and a range of humanitarian endeavors touched by both would be enriched by women’s full and equal participation.41

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The Narcissism of Minor Differences “There are many good things to be said about Erikson,” Kohut argued to the clinicians gathered for a seminar he led in the mid-1970s. Identity could be seen as “a somewhat enriching concept,” though as more than a phenomenological description he felt “it leaves a good deal to be desired.” Considered within the framework of Erikson’s “socioculturally oriented psychology,” it was a workable concept, though of course, he added, “every concept was useful up to a point.” Identity was “a sophisticated configuration” that was, however, limited to the surface of the personality. Still, “one needs a surface psychology.” Erikson had “recently tried to be a bit more sophisticated,” but he was still trading in value judgments. Was it really the case that one needed an identity? Wasn’t Kohut’s own concept of the self far more useful, and properly psychoanalytic, referring as it did to “a structure that dips into the deepest reaches of the psyche”? The self “emerges in the psychoanalytic situation” and as such, he argued, felt intuitively near to experience, while identity was a foreign import, “not indigenous to psychoanalytic psychology,” that was almost sociological, having to do with “the observation of social behavior.” Others might “blame psychoanalysis for being inhospitable” to identity, but, Kohut emphasized, “I thought rather that the notion of identity would not be a congenial guest” at the analytic table. In a gossipy letter to a European colleague critical of Erikson, Kohut pointed out that “he is not so popular among American analysts as you assume,” before adding—perhaps gesturing toward his own contested status—“I too certainly don’t hate a rogue.”42 Erikson’s contention that Kohut “simply tried to do away with me” is hard to argue with. Strip away the manifest hostility, and it becomes clear that Kohut’s perspective on psychoanalysis shares more with Erikson’s than he admitted. Kohut sounded Eriksonian themes in rejecting the Freudian model of the past as the site of pathogenic trauma to be exhumed and thereby cured, in its place adopting the past as a resource for the individual searching “to establish a developmental continuity of his self.” Being cured, from this perspective,

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consisted in “feeling whole and historically continuous.” Kohut’s brief for the importance of experiencing “this sense of continuity, this indefinable sameness, identity,” over the course of life resonates with Erikson’s locating the sources of ego-identity not in “the mere fact of existence” but in the subjective awareness “of one’s selfsameness and continuity in time.” The Kohutian “group self” that needs supports as well as a “sense of its continuity” and connectedness through time sounds very much like the Eriksonian “group identity” that is transmitted in a variety of ways through the generations. Kohut’s view that among the more important aims of analysis is nurturing the self’s capacities for aliveness, “zest and joy,” echoed Erikson’s insistence that a felt sense of aliveness was “the vital condition of existence,” that “there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of ego-identity.” Kohut, like Erikson, refused to accept psychology’s instinctual energy as the only legitimate coin of the analytic realm, substituting for it the patient’s subjectively experienced emotions and feeling states.43 Reinterpreting the story of Oedipus, Kohut charged his colleagues with focusing on the murderousness in the myth instead of on the “normal intergenerational” joy fathers experience in securing their sons’ futures, and with missing altogether its most significant feature: that Oedipus was abandoned by his parents, “a rejected child” put out to die. Claiming primacy for overturning the oedipal shibboleth, Kohut wondered why no one else had done so before him. Two years earlier, in the same journal, the discipline’s flagship, Erikson had similarly underscored the myth’s intergenerational themes, advising fathers that they could moderate their sons’ oedipal guilt by emphasizing the future over the past and foregoing “inflated patriarchal claims,” and locating the origins of the tragedy in “Oedipus’s own rejection and expulsion by his parents.”44 Kohut may have been unaware of what Erikson wrote. What is more pertinent here is the convergence in their thinking. Kohut was able to marginalize Erikson in part because the latter was less interested in adult narcissism than in the salience of the child’s normal narcissism. Erikson argued that infantile narcissism was the necessary basis of a strong ego. Nurtured both by “sensual

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experience” of the mother’s body and by the “sensual enrichment” of the maternal environment, it assumed tangible form in the child’s “sense of omnipotence.” Good childrearing corroborated this omnipotence, allowing children to experience mastery and to receive recognition. Loving parents laid down the foundations of a “lasting fund of narcissism” that later would be transformed “into more mature self-esteem.” Erikson’s stance toward narcissism was positive, by his own account grounded in a capacious understanding of the sources of “human self-esteem” articulated by Freud but forgotten by his followers, who told “only half the story.” That infantile narcissism offered critical support to the growing personality and that it was gradually “transformed into aim-inhibited self-esteem”—that, in short, narcissism was an asset, not a mark of pathology and developmental arrest—were the cornerstones of Kohut’s reformulation of narcissism, in which can be seen echoes of Erikson’s writings.45 Kohut’s insistence on the unbridgeable differences between his own work and Erikson’s appears, in historical retrospect, a bit too vehement to be taken at face value. Erikson did not join the 1970s debate about the narcissistic American. At that point he was focused largely on identity. But he did lay some of the critical groundwork for the new narcissism. He reappropriated (or slyly invented) for analysts a phenomenological and optimistic Freud, a Freud who traded not in drives but in feelings, whose superego was not only repressive and disapproving but also productive and supportive, and whose narcissism could be equated with self-esteem. And he did critics the favor of sketching the first iteration of the “new patient” argument that would prove central to their indictments of the American as narcissist. Kohut could insist that identity and self were irreconcilable, and while many analysts took him at his word, he could do nothing to stop anyone from yoking the concepts together. Otto Fenichel, for instance, ventured that an “adequate sense of identity” was premised on individuals’ ability to obtain steady supplies of approbation and self-esteem from their environment, making identity sound very much like healthy narcissism. And a number of the analysts who dismissed Erikson wove identity quickly and seamlessly into their

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discussion of narcissism, offering hundreds of variations on the claim, as put by one, that hidden behind “narcissism are problems of identity emergence and maintenance.” Lasch, too, mixed identity and narcissism to argue that narcissism was rooted in problems of identity (identity as causal), that narcissists were guilty of “obliterating the other’s identity” (identity as target), and that the identity of the vapid performing self was assembled from the detritus of mass culture (identity as aspect of the self). In 1959, Philip Rieff could argue that problems of identity were symptomatic of neurotic cultures; by 1978 Lasch was associating them with narcissistic cultures.46 Identity proved malleable, familiar, and indispensable to analysts and critics from the moment Erikson highlighted it. Erikson was a wellknown and beloved teacher and popular intellectual, addressing his work to a public beyond the discipline that for so long rejected him. He missed but did not need the credit his colleagues refused him, perhaps finding vindication in their belated acknowledgement that, despite their systematic efforts to marginalize him, they had succumbed unawares to his vision of analysis and made it their own.

CONCLUSION: N A R C I S S I S M T O D AY

Classically oriented American analysts were able to maintain control of their discipline, in part by continuing to overlook and marginalize dissenting voices within it, until Kohut and Kernberg mounted challenges to their hegemony. The 1970s analytic revolution recouped these dissenting voices for mainstream psychoanalysis and shifted the center of the analytic conversation to narcissism. Social critics realized that within psychoanalysis talk of narcissism was suddenly everywhere and, appropriating the “new narcissism” for their own purposes, associated it with catastrophic cultural decline, loss of moral bearings, and a surfeit of hedonistic self-indulgence. They stressed narcissism’s Kernbergian malignancies while largely ignoring its healthy, life-sustaining dimensions, which were the centerpiece of the Kohutian challenge to the field. Compared to the object relations theorists or even the more phenomenologically inclined Viennese analyst Paul Federn, the generation of midcentury ego psychologists who were Erikson’s contemporaries and Kohut’s teachers entertained a notion of the self and its needs that was relatively impoverished. Still, the intellectual environment and analytic tradition in which the ego psychologists worked—in which Freud was a live presence—were far richer than the critics’ traditions, and few analysts signed on to their vision of a straitened, reproving narcissism. By the 1980s, a good portion of the

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analytic community had woven the concept of a normalized narcissism, necessary to sustain life, into their practice. Only recently have cultural commentators caught up with them. Narcissism has lately found its champions. The figures of the vacuous consumer, the “ego-addled” brat, and the preening celebrity are alive and well in best-selling books with titles like The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement and The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America and in articles like “Generation Whine” and “The Online Looking Glass” that excoriate Americans for their inflated self-esteem and shallow materialism. Yet we can see how much has changed since narcissism’s 1970s public debut in New York Times columnist David Brooks’s recently voiced lament that “grandiosity is out of style.” Collectively chastened by a financial crisis that was “fueled by people who got too big for their britches,” Brooks argues that we have traded boldness for caution, and calls for “a grandiosity rebound” to encourage the unpleasant, “ridiculously ambitious” people who can revive the nation’s onceformidable prosperity. “Most of all,” he writes in a challenge to the Laschians still among us, “there has to be a culture that gives two cheers to grandiosity,” even as he highlights the character flaws and limitations of the grandiose. Bold and creative, ruthless and soulless: Brooks’s cultural ideal, the entrepreneurial wizard as twenty-firstcentury narcissist, “has the vices of his virtues.”1 Many other cultural commentators have been wrestling with the virtues of narcissists’ vices, trying to comprehend why it is that the people we consider narcissists are those, as one put it, “who attract as well as repel us.” Why is it that we are susceptible to narcissists’ charm even as we suffer their contempt? How can someone appear infectiously, intoxicatingly self-confident and self-sufficient one day and angrily aggressive, manipulative, and needy the next? “Welcome to the contradictory universe of narcissism,” reads the subtitle of an article in Psychology Today. Variations on the notion that “if narcissists were just jerks, they would be easy to avoid” point to a sophisticated understanding of the narcissist’s paradoxical nature, a Kernbergian figure commanding our fascinated attention. “Do we really find selfish, narcissistic jerks more attractive?” asks an article reporting on the

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research of several psychologists; the answer is, predictably, “yes” and the finding is replicated in study after study. Scientific American tells us that research shows that people perceive “narcissists as more likeable” than non-narcissists. “People usually find them extroverted, confident and charismatic,” a psychologist tells the Wall Street Journal, adding, “Those are sexy traits.” The narcissist may initially “be hard to resist,” but we can find consolation in the certainty that over time their appeal will fade.2 No matter: by then they will have found other victims to seduce into intoxicating submission. Kohutian healthy narcissism is enjoying a popular resurgence alongside its Kernbergian counterpart. “Healthy narcissism can help you succeed,” a popularizing psychologist claims; “feeling good about you usually radiates an inviting glow that improves personal and professional relationships.” Or, as an equally upbeat psychoanalyst explains, “the healthy part of narcissism says, ‘I am a whole and wonderful person with something great inside of me.’ ” Healthy narcissism, the revived Kohutian argument goes, “fuels drive and ambition” as well as the “desire to be recognized for one’s accomplishments.” Among its “documented” benefits are that it “makes you attractive, successful, lovable and good in bed.” A psychologist suggests that narcissism and “an inflated sense of self” could be beneficial, even necessary, for the young adults “just beginning to form their own, unique identities.” Reading the popular literature on healthy narcissism, it is hard not to feel that Kohut has achieved his goal—if, beyond psychoanalysis, only posthumously—of wresting the concept of narcissism from the realm of pathology. The claims, recently advanced, that narcissism is necessary to feeling “that one’s life has meaning and importance” as well as to sustaining “all forms of public life” could easily have come from his pen.3

The Narcissistic Leader Brooks is not alone in his enchantment with the extraordinary and “ridiculously grand” individual who can “build new industries and amass large fortunes.” Since the 1970s, in a little noticed psychoana-

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lytic byway, experts on the workplace have been analyzing leaders and assessing their narcissism, seeing in the most successful among them an appealing Kohutian “absolute self-confidence and certainty” and an intensely experienced Kernbergian need “for power and prestige.” Endowed with healthy narcissism and undermined by their malignant narcissism, these powerful leaders embody many of the contradictions long thought characteristic of narcissists. Narcissism explains their effectiveness: their charisma, creativity, tenacity, and appealing self-confidence. And it provides an explanation for their failings: their callousness, bullying, self-absorption, paranoia, and destructiveness. At their best they are bold, thoughtful, and constructive, and generate a “positive vitality.” At their worst, they are ruthlessly Machiavellian in pursuit of their goals, willing to trample anyone and anything. The psychoanalyst and leadership guru Michael Maccoby, in articles and in his popular 2003 book The Productive Narcissist, repeatedly invokes Steve Jobs as exemplary of this narcissist, a visionary leader in whom the irresistibly charismatic and brutally exploitative are fused. Mobilizing the couch in the service of the corporation, Maccoby warns that if such a leader is to succeed, he would be well advised to enter analysis “to overcome vital character flaws.”4 How much has been sacrificed in slighting the positive dimensions of narcissism may be seen in looking at the charismatic leader as narcissist that has recently captured public attention. Maccoby early on grasped what was at stake in focusing so exclusively on pathology. Commenting in 1978 on Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, Maccoby charged him with failing to distinguish “pathological character from normal types of social character” and with condemning a range of activities (like jogging and a preference for health foods) “that express a realistic concern for self-preservation.” Maccoby faulted Lasch for arguing that narcissism was more prevalent in the present than in the past and asserted, contra Lasch’s pathologizing claims, that “everyone has narcissistic tendencies.”5 Over the last forty years, Maccoby and like-minded colleagues have soldered together, in the figure of the powerful man as narcissist, the healthy

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dimensions of narcissism, largely ignored by social critics, and the malignant narcissism that has dominated popular discussion since the 1970s. There is no comprehending this powerful figure without taking account of both dimensions of narcissism. Ernest Jones offered the first analytic account of the narcissist as leader in his 1913 paper “The God Complex.” Characterized by their “colossal narcissism,” Jones’s God-men were known for the “excessive admiration” they had for their own “powers, knowledge, and qualities.” Jones highlighted the paradoxes of these men’s characters, in particular their “exaggerated desire to be loved” coupled with a glorious independence of anyone else’s opinion. He described their aloofness, inaccessibility, and self-importance as well as their tendency to devalue and to reject as worthless any idea not of their own, minimizing “what was new in it and then claiming that they had always been familiar with it.” Hungry for praise and admiration, they harbored megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence. Jones’s attempts to distinguish his God-men from God himself calls to mind the observation of one Oracle Corporation employee regarding CEO Larry Ellison that “the difference between God and Larry is that God does not believe he is Larry.”6 Freud, too, wrote of a male narcissist who has a remarkably contemporary feel. His tantalizingly brief 1931 sketch of the character type he called narcissistic serves as a reference point for any number of recent treatments of the leader as powerful but dangerously flawed narcissist. Maccoby invokes Freud’s characterology in support of his own portrait of the high profile, “larger-than-life leaders” he argues are ascendant in the business world. “These are the doers,” Maccoby asserts; they are “independent and not easily overawed.” Freud wrote that “people belonging to this type impress others as being ‘personalities,’ ” and Maccoby quoted him approvingly: “They are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders, and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development.” Freud also took note of this type’s independence, aggressiveness, and “readiness for activity” as well as the fact that, having but a weak super-ego, he was “not open to intimidation.” Leaders, Freud suggested, created the illusion they loved their followers but were them-

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selves “absolutely narcissistic” in needing no one’s love in return: masterful, self-sufficient, “self-confident and independent.”7 Both Jones’s and Freud’s powerful male narcissists all but disappeared from the analytic literature until, in the 1940s, some analysts referenced their work as they began exploring the appeal of narcissistic leaders. What were the sources of their charisma and their capacity to fascinate? Why were people submissive to narcissistic personalities and so willing to accept the illusory satisfactions they offered over reality’s more substantial rewards? Why did some individuals barter away their independence, allowing themselves to be dominated by charlatans proffering magic? The émigré analyst Christine Olden, trained in Berlin and writing in 1941 from Los Angeles, saw the transaction between leader and led as complementary. She argued that dependent types were like infants in choosing the “security and protection” that dominating types offered, and suggested that submission was eroticized—a mix of hunger, excitement, and longing for inclusion in the ambit of “an almighty personality” whose seeming independence of normal human needs rendered him Godlike in his followers’ estimation. Olden’s colleague Annie Reich wrote a contemporaneous paper on “extreme submissiveness in women,” asking why some women willingly renounced their active, masculine strivings and self-esteem, projecting these onto their lovers’ penises— which they then worshipped and to which they would then abjectly submit. Reich saw in these women the same hunger for attention and inability to distinguish erotic from other needs that Olden highlighted. Both saw their subjects seeking fusion with an omnipotent other.8 These and other midcentury analysts plumbed the all-too-human longing to “participate in omnipotence” that current theoreticians of the narcissistic dynamics of leadership see as central to narcissism’s allure. As analysts saw it, social hierarchy was maintained less only in part by force than by the willing submission of one individual to another. Passive surrender to the feared and admired great figure offered a pleasurable, though illusory, means of sharing in his power. Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents of the lost omnipotence of childhood, referring to the pleasure he imagined infants

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derived from their self-sufficiency and “limitless narcissism.” It was evident, he wrote in “On Narcissism,” that “another person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism,” and he argued that adults were thus willing to debase themselves in submission to narcissists promising a return to abandoned infantile omnipotence.9 The narcissist’s omnipotence, self-sufficiency, and charisma were the sources of his attraction. Charisma has long been central to discussions of leadership. Weber used the term to characterize the authority exercised by leaders endowed by their followers with superhuman or “exceptional powers or qualities.” He argued that charismatic authority derived from the person not the office, and emphasized that it was followers’ “attributions of specialness” to leaders that ensured their domination. Charisma as conceived by Weber and deployed by those working in his wake was relational, a quality that inhered not in the individual but in the transaction between leader and led. Since its popularization in the 1950s, charisma has proven an extraordinarily productive concept in political thought, in popular discourse, and in thinking about narcissistic leaders.10 Sociologists and political theorists alighted on charisma as Weber’s work appeared in translation in the 1940s. Daniel Bell brought it into popular discourse, slipping the then-esoteric term into a 1947 Fortune magazine article. Charisma quickly took hold. It was used to characterize Malcolm X (“a handsome, coffee-colored man . . . who displays a charismatic demagoguery”) and the Labour Party prime minister Harold Wilson (“utterly relaxed, never falsely convivial” on the campaign trail); one-time presidential contender Scoop Jackson (“a rather short, dumpy man in a baggy suit” who “just got tired of reading he was dull and decided to do something about it”) and Texas governor turned presidential contender John Connolly (“he does possess a certain feral shrewdness”); and, not surprisingly, the redoubtable Jesse Jackson, whom the periodical Black Enterprise featured with less than complete assurance as “The Last Charismatic Leader?” James Bond, Martin Luther King, and the Kennedys had it; Hubert Humphrey, Ralph Abernathy, and the Nixons did not. Seventeen noted the mysterious air of the charismatic, “the

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impression that they’re leading the way, have some knowledge you don’t have.” Mademoiselle, telling its readers “how to get it,” highlighted the “animal magnetism” and “capacity for self-transcendence” displayed by charismatic individuals, the ease with which they made others feel valued. And Good Housekeeping, defining charisma as “that special something that attracts us to certain people even if we can’t understand why we are attracted,” counseled optimistically that even dullards could one day hope to possess it given the right mix of enhanced self-confidence and released “inner joy.”11 In the 1970s, theorists of leadership began exploring the charismatic narcissism of the successful leader. Arguing that narcissism was “a key trait in some of the world’s most creative and generative leaders,” they maintained that only those with ambition, high selfesteem, and deep reservoirs of narcissism were at all likely to reach the top. The leader’s task was to draw on the stores of healthy narcissism—ambition and creativity—that had fueled his rise while not giving full rein to the grandiosity and aggression that in equal measure enabled his ascendance. These scholars adopted a stance of brutal realism in the face of what they suggested were sentimental and fantasy-driven desires for caring, empathic, and sensitive consensus leaders. The model of leadership advocated in Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, Jim Collins’s Good to Great, and Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was fine for conservative times and for conservative industries but ineffective in times of change and flux. “Bland, opaque, and gray in demeanor and personality,” leaders in this tradition had neither the vision nor the internal resources to lead organizations in a time of dizzying technological change and globalization.12 Charismatic leaders, by contrast, were exciting, compelling, and fascinating. Emerging at times of opportunity and crisis, they were figures of obsessive interest and intrigue, able to conscript others to join in their grandiose visions and to lull them into submission—to extract from them “awe, devotion, and reverence”—by offering to gratify their needs. Such leaders were skilled in the use of empathy to figure out what others wanted, endowed with, in Kohut’s words, “the uncanny ability to exploit, not necessarily in full awareness, the

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unconscious feelings” of subordinates.13 They were narcissistic in their grandiosity; their followers were deficient in self-esteem, perpetually seeking care, protection, and love from them. It was this dynamic that rendered the narcissistic leader effective but also at the same time dangerous. Narcissistic leaders continue to be championed in the management literature as assertive, self-confident, tenacious, and creative. An appealing grandiosity eases their organizational ascent, as they dazzle investors, enchant fellow employees, and charm the media with their charisma and “seemingly unlimited strategic acumen.” Then, all too often, “stunning bouts of folly” and recklessness ensue: misusing corporate funds, “risky decision making,” or flagrant ruleand lawbreaking. The drive and daring that ensure their success are implicated in their fall; their capacities are also their weaknesses, two sides of the same coin much like Freud had originally proposed. A variety of experts sees a similar dynamic in these leaders, summoning up scenarios in which leaders inevitably “crash and burn,” following a trajectory from “genius-to-folly.” The leader’s narcissistic investment in self is, they explain, both “resource and hazard,” manifest in an independence of others’ opinions as well as in, more darkly, a tendency to surround himself with obsequious yes-men.14 In the management literature, charisma and the fascination associated with it are indispensable to successful leadership but paradoxically undermining of it at the same time. Analytically inflected discussions of leadership start from the premise that domination and submission, as well as conflict and aggression, are inevitably part of organizational life. “Organizations operate by distributing authority and setting a stage for the exercise of power,” the psychoanalyst and Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik wrote, and it was pointless to deny that rivalry, dislike, and competition were rife in them.15 In the leadership literature, it is assumed that everyone has dependency needs: dependency is a fact of life, not a badge of shame. If not for dependency needs, why would anyone follow and whom would leaders lead? The current cultural ambivalence surrounding narcissism comes into sharp relief when leadership is at issue. A regular stream of

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books and articles by Maccoby and his acolytes reminds us that while we may neither like nor trust the visionary executives—the big innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jack Welch—who “change the world,” we cannot do without them. “We are in a time of great upheaval that needs visionary leaders and charismatic personalities,” writes Maccoby.16 These leaders are dangerously charismatic creatures who entice us into exciting submission before viciously turning on us, every bit as paradoxical in their makeup and as impossible to resist as were Jones’s God-men and Freud’s “personalities.”

A Twenty-first Century Epidemic? The question of whether we once again find ourselves in an age of narcissism has recently captured public attention, with a variety of pundits, psychologists, and self-styled Internet-based experts weighing in on both sides. Those answering in the affirmative argue that narcissism is dangerously on the increase and visible everywhere: in rampant consumerism and failed marriages, on Facebook and Twitter, in the executive suite and the halls of government. To them, narcissism again explains everything that is wrong with American culture. The situation is far more dire now than it was in the 1970s. The critics see the civic bonds that Lasch believed were fraying threatened anew by an epidemic of individualistic, self-seeking, and selfpromoting behaviors especially evident among the young, the most narcissistic generation in history. In this view, the so-called “Generation Me” suffers from an excess of vanity, entitlement, and ill-gotten self-esteem. The evidence is there—the claim is that 10 percent of twenty-somethings and 25 percent of college students exhibit narcissistic pathology—and the prognosis is not good.17 The case for the precipitous rise in narcissism among Americans today rests largely on surveys—especially the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI)—administered to college students from 1980 to the present, and is made most vociferously by the psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, who compiled and interpreted results from thousands of tested students in their widely cited 2009 book, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.

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Research psychologists have used the NPI since its development in 1979 to measure and predict narcissistic behavior. The test, which can be found on the Internet, asks subjects to choose between two responses to forty questions. Among them are questions measuring grandiosity, entitlement, and exploitativeness, for example, “I insist upon getting the respect that is due me” versus “I usually get the respect that I deserve”; “I find it easy to manipulate people” versus “I don’t like it when I find myself manipulating people”; and “I will never be satisfied until I get all that I deserve” versus “I take my satisfactions as they come.” These questions measure dimensions of narcissism that both researchers and clinicians consider pathological, and there is agreement that they do this well.18 Psychologists critical of the NPI argue, however, that a number of the test’s questions measure not pathological narcissism, as its proponents claim, but the positive traits of high self-esteem, psychological health, assertiveness, and confidence. Among these questions are “I think I am a special person” versus “I am no better or worse than most people”; “I see myself as a good leader” versus “I am not sure if I would make a good leader”; and “I am assertive” versus “I wish I were more assertive.” The first of each of these paired responses increases a subject’s score on the NPI, and in the aggregate provide evidence for the ubiquity of narcissism. From the 1950s to the late 1980s, the percentage of teenagers agreeing with the statement that appeared on another test, “I am an important person,” jumped from 12 to 80—an increase larger than any seen on the NPI. Twenge and Campbell consider this finding an especially significant sign of the increase in narcissism. “We think feeling good about yourself is very, very important,” Twenge told a journalist in 2008. “That never used to be the case back in the ’50s and ’60s.”19 Some psychologists—Campbell among them—have argued, however, that high scores on the NPI may in fact be indicative of healthy narcissism. The test as it is used now cannot distinguish (nor was it meant to) between pathological narcissism that has negative implications for others and healthy narcissism that is, many clinicians would argue, benign or even a sign of mental health and the foundation for robustly engaging with others and the social environment.

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Campbell acknowledges that narcissists, with their high self-esteem, may in fact be happier, more satisfied, and more successful than their nonnarcissistic peers. He admits that research shows that the social psychologists’ narcissists are happier than the clinicians’, who conform more to Lasch’s fragile, empty, and depressed modal type. It is possible, Campbell writes, that the narcissists who end up in psychiatrists’ offices and on analysts’ couches are failed narcissists, those “not doing their ‘job’ correctly”—the job consisting in “achieving and winning.” He concludes that “narcissism may be a functional and healthy strategy for dealing with the modern world,” invoking Freud’s 1931 sketch of the narcissist as a larger-than-life personality striding confidently across the world’s stage.20 It may be, as one psychologist told a reporter, that “eighty percent of people think they’re better than average,” but, he added, it was also the case that “psychologically healthy people generally twist the world to their advantage just a little bit”—echoing Freud’s observation that “confidence in success . . . not seldom brings actual success along with it.” And, to be sure, self-esteem can sometimes appear frustratingly reflexive, as in the statement of one young woman that “I am always confident in myself because it will lower my selfesteem if I’m not.” Easily held up to mockery, self-esteem and “unflappable self-confidence” could yet have real effects. Consider the case of a Harvard student recently profiled in the Boston Globe, raised in poverty by an overworked single mother, who credited her high school teacher’s lesson that students should “realize the genius in their inner self” with empowering her to follow her dream of becoming a skilled debater. In the same article, a twenty-four-year-old from an equally deprived Boston background, who started his own company, said he was grateful that his confidence kept him “a little ignorant, maybe even a little arrogant,” because otherwise he would never have done anything. It is possible that rising scores on the NPI reflect this kind of self-esteem. As two psychologists argue, higher overall scores may indicate not an increase “in egotism and selfcenteredness” or “narcissism at all” among the young but may instead reflect “positive, rather than negative societal change.”21 They may also reflect the fact that the popular language of self-esteem is

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relatively new; the first generation of children raised on it were born in the 1980s and 1990s. Some argue that there is nothing new in the current condemnations of the fecklessness of the young—that, in the words of one psychologist, “every generation is the ‘Me’ generation.” The notion that overconfident youth will have its deserved comeuppance is hardly novel. In the 1960s, the older generation poked fun at the identity crises of the young, asking whether they were uniquely miserable in their angst—was their collective crisis not just the personal crisis of the past in an updated form? In the 1970s, as we have seen, bemoaning the narcissism of the young—their “fatuous self-absorption”—was a minor industry; from the perspective of 2008, one self-described Boomer wrote that he found “the notion that today’s students are even in the running for narcissistic self-absorption with my own cohort absolutely hilarious.” The essayist Logan Pearsall Smith has quipped that “the denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of elderly people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood,” and any number of assessments of youth today as lazy, irresponsible, overconfident, and entitled supports his contention. As Time magazine has pointed out, the young were denounced by their teachers as pleasure-seeking and “so selfish” in 1911 and there was no shortage of condemnations of jazz-crazed flappers in the 1920s. Is posting photos on Facebook any more obnoxious “than 1960s couples’ trapping friends in their houses to watch their terrible vacation slide shows?”22 Psychologists’ disagreements are not confined to the professional journals but, rather, featured in the popular media. “New Study Finds ‘Most Narcissistic Generation’ on Campuses, Watching YouTube” raises alarms; “Students Not So Self-Obsessed After All” reassures. The New York Times regularly assesses the state of the narcissism question, with articles featuring some psychologists warning of cultural disaster and others maintaining “that the dire warnings of a rise in selfishness were baseless.” Separate from this is a lively, complex, and ongoing conversation about narcissism focused less on the issue of its prevalence than on dealing with its alluring dangers. Books and websites offer nuanced, sophisticated portrayals of narcissistic

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pathology as well as advice on identifying, dealing with, recovering from, and, most useful of all, altogether avoiding narcissists, whether at work or in intimate relations. Freeing Yourself from the Narcissist in Your Life; Narcissistic Lovers: How to Cope, Recover and Move On; Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up’s Guide to Getting over Narcissistic Parents: the list is long, the operative concepts variants of how to manage, recover from, and otherwise deal with, or distance yourself from, what one title terms “infuriating, mean, critical people.” Much of this advice channels a Kernbergian vision, characterizing the narcissist as an interpersonally enticing but dangerous figure who snares unwitting victims in his charismatic net while callously draining them dry. Unlike the narcissism of the research psychologist’s NPI, this popular narcissism can be every bit as paradoxical as the analyst’s. The Everything Guide to Narcissistic Personality Disorder, for example, offers a complex version of narcissism in nontechnical language.23 And, ordinary people wounded by narcissists offer wrenching testimony on the web to the confusing allure of the narcissist, as well as to the devastation that often follows in its wake, drawing on the writings of professionals but also on readings in the press and popular books. In the leadership literature focused on the charismatic narcissist, which employs an analytic understanding of narcissism, malignant and healthy narcissism are given equal weight; the leader’s strengths are also her vulnerabilities. In the popular discussion, by contrast, the negative findings and alarming numbers offered by research psychologists tend to dominate. Consider self-esteem, which research psychologists and psychoanalysts conceptualize differently. To many research psychologists, high self-esteem is symptomatic of narcissism, and healthy narcissism seems a “vague and somewhat meaningless way of describing ‘all human efforts.’ ”24 For analysts, by contrast, it is more often low self-esteem that is problematic (as in, overly inflated self-esteem is not what it appears to be, often interpreted as a narcissistic defense against actual low-esteem), and healthy narcissism is seen as a clinically useful concept. Self-esteem to analysts is fungible, and since the 1970s they have envisioned people regulating their self-esteem in the interest of maintaining positive

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feelings about themselves. There is nothing new about this process, often called narcissistic. Talk of self-esteem is not cause for alarm.

Gendered Vanity Just how limited the popular conversation about narcissism is can be glimpsed in the current conversation about female vanity, which barely registers analytically but figures centrally in popular condemnations of modern women as narcissistic: overly obsessed with outward appearances, entitled and self-absorbed, holding—as one woman admitting to guilt of the same put it—“an inflated sense of our own fabulousness.” Condemnations of fashion and the female vanity on which it purportedly depends are everywhere, and it is easy to cast women as hapless victims of media-fueled bodily narcissism—“beautifully painted and clothed with an empty mind” is how one woman recently surveyed characterized “how people are becoming.”25 Vanity, aesthetic appreciation, envy, self-possession, beauty, exhibitionism: this is where talk of female narcissism started and where, in much of popular discourse, we are today. The dictum that narcissism—and the self-admiration symptomatic of it—is more pronounced in women than in men went largely uncontested in the theorizing of Freud and his colleagues. And the purportedly greater female disposition to exhibitionistic display—especially evident in the project of self-making around clothing—is a staple of both the historical and contemporary discussions. But the continuities these similarities suggest are illusory. The earlier discussion was as much concerned with the pleasures as with the pathologies of narcissism. It envisioned a self reveling in sensuous experience of the world, and examined the ways individuals brought the objects among which they lived into the “Me.” In place of the richness of the early analysts’ explorations of vanity and expressiveness, we now have censoriousness and disdain for women’s desires. The psychoanalyst J. C. Flügel argued in 1930 that clothing engendered envy, jealousy, petty triumph, spitefulness, struggle, and painful contests for superiority among women. Men were almost completely indifferent to female attire, Flügel argued. “Women dress

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much more to please their own vanity and to compete with other women” than to elicit male admiration, he observed, wistfully imagining women tempering their self-satisfied narcissism and turning their attention to men—other than their dressmakers. Flügel worried that women’s capacity for heterosexual object relations was diminished by the narcissistic satisfactions offered by wearing, displaying, and competing with one another through the medium of their attire. Some recent psychoanalytic commentators in effect assent to Flugel’s observation while adding a positive dimension to it, exploring the many ways in which the circulation of clothing among women—shopping, dressing, admiring, evaluating—constitutes a concretely apprehensible and “highly ambivalent” form of object relations expressive of the emotions rooted in the earliest relationship to the mother—“love, hate and envy.” Clothing shoulders a heavy expressive load in women’s lives from this perspective, serving as “a way of displaying the body, as an indicator of economic power, as an incitement to envy, and as a sexual enticement.”26 “For all of Generation Me’s lifetime, clothes have been a medium of self-expression,” writes Twenge in Generation Me, highlighting the individuality that now is expressed through dress in contrast to the rules and conformity of the past. Raised on a “free to be you and me” ethos that advocates wearing what one wants to, “not just what other folks say,” today’s young are interested in things “that satisfy their personal wants and help them express themselves as individuals.” People increasingly dress for themselves, Twenge argues, for comfort rather than to elicit the approval of others. Narcissists today are inordinately interested in “new fads and fashion,” and like to both display and look at their bodies. Vain and self-centered, they spend a lot of time focused on looking good.27 All of this here presented as new and alarming would have been familiar to Louis Flaccus, our early-twentieth-century psychologist of clothing, who more than a century ago surveyed students about clothing’s relation to the self. Flaccus and his subjects celebrated the material pleasures of clothing. He expounded on the ways certain sorts of clothing were allied with a “slackening of self-restraint” and recognized “the sensual delight in one’s body as body” as an exemplary

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expression of the “joy of living,” none of which he associated with narcissism. Given the NPI’s dichotomous choice between “my body is nothing special” and “I like to look at my body,” the subject wishing to keep her score low will chose “nothing special.” Not for her the exuberance and exhilaration of Flaccus’s subjects, “glad to be alive” in donning the loose clothes appropriate for an outing, glorying in the “ ‘I don’t care’ feeling” such garments encouraged and delighting in the “delicious feeling about tripping up one’s usual sober self.” Among Flaccus’s subjects were avid shoppers, but there is none of the reproving disdain of today’s commentators on narcissism in his work, which is awash in self-feeling, pleasure, sensation, illusion, and the delights of appropriation, of clothes “gradually becoming part of ourselves.”28 The contemporary Laschian perspective that casts all consumption as pathological is of little use in distinguishing between shopping that is experienced as pleasurable and shopping that is experienced as a compulsion, even an addiction, that must be engaged in at the price of unbearable psychic distress. As exemplary of the latter, consider, for example, the woman cited in a 2000 article who likened “extended clothes-shopping” to an injection and another who described “how she got the shakes if she was deprived of the opportunity of shopping because she was on holiday in a remote location.” Surely, a robustly conceptualized theory of consumption would allow that the meanings shopping has for these women, who speak of it in the idiom of substance abuse, differ from those it had for Flaccus’s enchanted subjects or Twenge’s, female and male alike, instead of characterizing them all as narcissistic in their materialism. Since the mid-1980s, a body of literature by psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, as well as sociologists, on compulsive shopping has explored these meanings, offering testimony to their complexity, as well as, in some cases, to how rudimentary understanding of the phenomenon can appear. This literature casts compulsive shopping as a largely female disorder that, variously, offers “escape from psychic pain,” represents a “flight from feminine identification,” is a form of self-harm akin to delicate self-cutting, and— here we are back in the company of Freud and his colleagues—is

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at root “a deferred reaction to anxiety over castration, the first cognizance of the lack of a penis.” Market researchers and the social scientists who study them are a step ahead of disapproving social critics, having devised elaborate and largely value-free taxonomies to classify shoppers and their habits: apathetic or recreational, indifferent or gratified, browsers or buyers. They have shown that women tend to cast shopping for clothing—including window-shopping without purchasing—as a legitimate indulgence and a harmless means to pursue pleasure, much as did the early theoreticians of dress. Recall that in that early discussion, men as well as women indulged in the sensuous delights of clothing. Since then, however, men have managed to define shopping as work not play, enabling them to satisfy their impulses to consume—cars, appurtenances of household and yard, electronic gadgets—even as they disavow them by associating them with women and feminine desire.29 Flügel took comfort in observing that women did not on the whole laugh at men for their prickliness about clothing, though he had to admit this was likely due more to indifference than to any kindly regard they might have had for men. Now, however, as men emulate the clothes and body consciousness that were once solely women’s province, the laughter prompted by the narcissistic baby boomer male’s “ungraceful descent into middle age” is audible. Expensive antiaging potions disguised as shaving cream; plastic surgery promoted not as cosmetic but as an “investment that pays a pretty good dividend”; diet advice parading as tips for eating out—“it’s almost impossible to tell whether you’re reading a copy of Men’s Health or Mademoiselle,” writes a female journalist, gleefully observing of the men subjected to the tyranny of impossible beauty ideals that has long been women’s lot that “at least the burden of vanity and selfloathing will be shared by all.” Writing of the vogue for uncomfortably tight, low-rise jeans among his peers, a male journalist contends that “American men have come to vanity late and practice it with the zeal of the newly converted.” He sees men co-opting a peculiarly female vanity—even, more concretely, their jeans, with men scouring women’s departments for suitably low cut varieties—and decrees, “we need to suffer to look good,” testifying to their narcissism

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in spending stupidly on “hair cuts and shirts rather than car stereos and television sets.” Flügel would not have been surprised at these men’s seeking out the “erotic, masochistic” feelings imparted by the too-tight pants that drew this journalist’s ire, and he might not have fully comprehended but surely would have approved of the “superfucking macho” orientation—or, at the least, of the heterosexual side of the phenomenon—they signified, his concern always that men were insufficiently invested in their own attractiveness to women. Maybe men, a contemporary journalist muses, are finally copying women, now that women wield real power in the world.30

We are told that today’s young narcissists—much like the MeDecade narcissists of the social critics—have been coddled from birth and have grown into entitled, materialistic, shallow adults, obsessed with their appearances and addicted to shopping. What is to be done? The critics’ remedy, in the 1970s, was in part to reinstate a culture of remissive “shalt nots” and “shoulds” whose passing was lamented by Philip Rieff and Lasch. The “fixed wants” of times past— associated in Rieff’s history with obedience, limitations, renunciation, abstinence, and deprivation—were to be restored through a program of asceticism in those who had tasted the delights of impulse release. Writing in 1960, the adman Ernest Dichter suggested— in effect addressing social critics’ recuperative fantasy—that those who decried their own materialism on Sundays while living in a world of material plenty the rest of the week were guilty of a mild hypocrisy. “Agreed, we should drop our interest in worldly possessions,” he wrote. But how were we to actually renounce this “only too human desire?” Dichter’s charge that we “steadfastly refuse to accept ourselves the way we actually are” is as apt today as it was more than fifty years ago.31 In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff ruefully expressed his doubt that “Western men can be persuaded again to the Greek opinion that the secret of happiness is to have as few needs as possible,” voicing the narcissistic fantasy of the self without needs that animates the literature of lament.32 The position of self-sovereignty

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that Rieff and other critics ascribe to the nineteenth-century bourgeois is descriptive of an unrealizable fantasy of independence and autonomy that serves as foil to the modern’s purported neediness and enmeshment. This popular strain of commentary is nothing but the narcissism of the theorist, revealing his desire to inhabit a persona without needs and attachments. Such was Freud’s fantasy as well. In short, the culture of narcissism might in the end be more the province of the orthodox analyst and the ironic, detached, and contemptuous critic of modernity than of the self-absorbed adolescent, the shopaholic woman, and the aging Boomer still in search of his self.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Ferenczi,

Sándor Ferenczi, Sex in Psycho-Analysis: Contributions

Contributions

to Psycho-Analysis, trans. Ernest Jones. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1916.

Ferenczi, Diary

Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont, trans. Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Ferenczi, Final

Sándor Ferenczi, Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Michael Balint, trans. Eric Mosbacher et al. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955.

Ferenczi, Further

Sándor Ferenczi, Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Jane Isabel Suttie et al. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1950.

IJP

International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.

JAPA

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Jones, Freud

Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 1, The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856–1900; Vol. 2, Years of Maturity, 1901–1919; Vol. 3,

274

Abbreviations The Last Phase, 1919–1939. New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957 (page numbers in notes refer to the edition in the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing Digital Archive).

Kohut, Curve

Heinz Kohut, The Curve of Life: Correspondence of Heinz Kohut, 1923–1981, ed. Geoffrey Cocks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Kohut, Lectures

Heinz Kohut, The Chicago Institute Lectures, ed. Paul Tolpin and Marian Tolpin. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1996.

Kohut, Search

Heinz Kohut, The Search for the Self. Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut: 1950–1981, ed. Paul H. Ornstein. 4 vols. New York: International Universities Press, 1978–1991.

Kohut, Seminars

Heinz Kohut, The Kohut Seminars on Self Psychology and Psychotherapy with Adolescents and Young Adults. New York: Norton, 1987.

Minutes

Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, trans. M. Nunberg. 4 vols. New York: International Universities Press, 1962–1976.

Standard Edition

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974.

Published Freud Correspondence Correspondence between Freud and Ernest Jones, Karl Abraham, Sándor Ferenczi, and Carl Jung, and to Wilhelm Fliess, is referenced by date in the notes following, and may be found in the volumes below as well as in the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing Digital Archive.

Abbreviations

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The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908– 1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993. The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907– 1925, trans. and ed. Ernst Falzeder, trans. Caroline Schwarzacher with the collaboration of Christine Trollope and Klara Majthényi King. London: Karnac, 2002. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Vol. 1, 1908– 1914, ed. Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder, and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, trans. Peter T. Hoffer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Vol. 2, 1914–1919, ed. Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, trans. Peter T. Hoffer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Vol. 3, 1920–1933, ed. Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, trans. Peter T. Hoffer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. The Freud/Jung Letters. The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.

NOTES

1. The Culture of Narcissism 1. “Appetite”: P. Conrad, writing in the Observer in 1980, quoted by Barry Richards, “The Politics of the Self,” Free Associations 1 (1980): 43–64, at 46. “Getting your head together”: Kenneth L. Woodward, “Getting Your Head Together,” Newsweek, 6 September 1976. On Carter’s speech, see Daniel Horowitz, Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The “Crisis of Confidence” Speech of July 15, 1979 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005). See also Kevin Mattson, What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 2. A reporter for the New York Times defined “narcissistic” in 1954 as “love-of-self,” and a writer for Time equated it with typical adolescent selfabsorption. “Analysis of the self”: Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” (1976; earlier version 1973), in Wolfe, The Purple Decades: A Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1982), 278. “Transformation of humanity”: Peter Marin, “The New Narcissism,” Harper’s, October 1975. 3. “Collective narcissism”: “Is the Pot User Driven—or in the Driver’s Seat?” Time, 25 July 1969. “Newly minted Californians”: “Laboratory in the Sun: The Past as Future,” Time, 7 November 1969. “Golden twilight”: Lance Morrow, “In Praise of Older Women,” Time, 24 April 1978. “Understanding the Struggle”: Edwin Schur, The Awareness Trap: Self-Absorption Instead of Social Change (New York: McGraw Hill, 1977), 4–7. Philip Slater, The Pursuit

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of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). “Holds the key”: Lasch, “The Narcissist Society,” New York Review of Books, 30 September 1976. Books: Henry Malcolm, Generation of Narcissus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Marie Coleman Nelson, ed., The Narcissistic Condition: A Fact of Our Lives and Times (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1977); Aaron Stern, ME: The Narcissistic American (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979); and Richard M. Restak, The Self Seekers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982). Bruce Mazlish, “American Narcissism,” Psychohistory Review 10 (Spring/Summer 1982): 185–202, makes a point at 185 similar to the last here. Among other evidence of and guides to the temper of the times are Ernest van den Haag, Passion and Social Constraint (New York: Stein and Day, 1963 [1957]); Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965 [1960]); Clemens E. Benda, The Image of Love: Modern Trends in Psychiatric Thinking (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961); Fred J. Cook, The Corrupted Land: The Social Morality of Modern America (New York: Macmillan, 1966); Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970); Robert Liebert, Radical and Militant Youth: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry (New York: Prager, 1971); Richard King, The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Nathan Adler, The Underground Stream: New Life Styles and the Antinomian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Herbert Hendin, The Age of Sensation (New York: Norton, 1975); Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for SelfFulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981); and Peter Clecak, America’s Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the 60s and 70s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 4. For an instance of narcissism referring to self-love, see Murray Illson, “Yule ‘Neurosis’ Sifted in Report,” New York Times, 5 December 1954, which reports psychoanalysts “discussing the narcissistic—love-of-self—character neurosis.” “Unseemly self-regard”: Thomas Sugrue, “Goddesses—Or Women?” New York Times, 26 September 1948. “Sensual self-absorption”: Charles L. Mee, “In Brief,” New York Times, 4 May 1969; Mee quotes another author asking, apropos of graffiti on Madison Avenue exhorting New Yorkers to “Kiss the Beautiful Lining of Her Coat,” “but why make love to someone else’s possessions when it is so easy to preserve your independence by making love to your own?” 5. “Impulse gratification”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 22, “perpetually” at xvi, “propaganda” at 71.

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6. “Moralistic platitudes”: Ibid., 31, “normal primitive” at 36, “parental introjects” at 178, “grandiose object images” at 36. 7. “Everyone talks”: David Gelman, “Where Are the Patients?” Newsweek, 27 June 1988, citing an article published 33 years previously. “Scarcely a play”: Lionel Trilling, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 12. On psychoanalysis in the United States, see Nathan G. Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971); and Hale, The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in America: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Eli Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Knopf, 2004) is a sparkling overview of the psychoanalytic century; and George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), astutely examines the discipline’s early years. Zaretsky, “Charisma or Rationalization: Domesticity and Psychoanalysis in the United States in the 1950s,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Winter 2000): 328–354, at 332, notes that while in Europe interest in psychoanalysis was limited to elites, “in the United States it quickly became a mass phenomenon,” boasting the largest number of analysts in the postwar period of any nation worldwide. 8. “Cast a spell”: Jackson Lears, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” New Republic, 2 October 1995. “Definitive indictment”: reader review of Culture of Narcissism on amazon.com. Newsweek named the book one of the decade’s four defining works: Cynthia H. Wilson, “A Chronology of the ’70s,” Newsweek, 19 November 1979. 9. “Preached back to us”: Henry Allen, “Doomsayer of the Me Decade: Christopher Lasch on America as a Nation of Narcissists,” Washington Post, 4 January 1979. “Said a million times”: reader review on amazon.com. “Hardly original”: Valerie Lloyd, “Me, Me, Me: The Culture of Narcissism,” Newsweek, 22 January 1979. “Way of looking”: Casey Blake and Christopher Phelps, “History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch,” Journal of American History 80 (1994), 1310–1332, at 1317. 10. “Civilized hellfire”: Frank Kermode, “The Way We Live Now,” New York Times, 14 January 1979. “Penchant”: Michael Kammen, “A Whiplash of Contradictory Expectations,” Reviews in American History 7 (1979), 452–458, at 456. “Aggrieved tone”: Louis Menand, “Man of the People,” New York Review of Books, 11 April 1991. Dennis H. Wrong, “Bourgeois Values, No Bourgeoisie? The Cultural Criticism of Christopher Lasch,” Dissent (Summer 1978): 308–314, at 310, writes of his impression he had “been listening to Lasch’s bill

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of indictment for most of my life,” adding “and I wasn’t born, alas, yesterday.” “Warmed-over”: Maurice R. Green, “The Culture of Narcissism,” Journal of the Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry (1981): 330–331, at 330. “Explanatory”: Edward M. Weinshel, “The Mind of Watergate: An Exploration of the Compromise of Integrity,” International Review of PsychoAnalysis 8 (1981): 121–124, at 122. “Dour critic”: “Gratification Now Is the Slogan of the ’70s, Laments a Historian,” People, 9 July 1979. Among critics of Lasch for inconsistency, getting it wrong, and so on, are Colleen D. Clements, “Misusing Psychiatric Models: The Culture of Narcissism,” Psychoanalytic Review 69 (1982): 283–295, arguing at 284 that Lasch uses narcissism “in a psychiatrically incorrect way”; and Paul L. Wachtel, The Poverty of Affluence: A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989), chap. 10. See also “A Symposium: Christopher Lasch and the Culture of Narcissism,” Salmagundi 46 (Fall 1979): 166–202; John Alt and Frank Hearn, eds., “Symposium on Narcissism: The Cortland Conference on Narcissism,” Telos 44 (Summer 1980): 49–125. For a relentless critique of Lasch’s own relentlessness, see Paul Zweig, “Collective Dread: The Literature of Doom,” Harper’s, July 1979. 11. “Imperial self”: Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984), 15. “Exaggerated form”: Culture of Narcissism, 8, “approval” at 40, “wealth” at 39. 12. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978 [1976]); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1978 [1977]). “Free himself”: David Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 135, “symbolized plenty” at 166. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). On Potter, see Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), a superb guide to the postwar landscape of affluence-induced cultural anxiety; and Robert M. Collins, “David Potter’s People of Plenty and the Recycling of Consensus History,” Reviews in American History 16 (1988): 321–335. Brook Lindsay, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture (New York: Collins, 2007), offers an updated view, from the right. For an example of concern about affluence in the media, see “Alienated Youth Called Isolated,” New York Times, 12 May 1967, quoting a psychiatrist who “regards affluence as a ‘real stress, a very serious problem.’ ”

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13. David Riesman, in collaboration with Reuel Denny and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950); William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). “In love”: “The Man with the Rotary Hoe,” Time, 21 January 1957. 14. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Culture and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). 15. Slater, Pursuit of Loneliness. Slater was enough the Freudian, however, to observe at 106 that “it is a paradox of the modern condition that only those who oppose complete libidinal freedom are capable of ever achieving it.” “Whole cultural revolution”: William Braden, The Age of Aquarius: Technology and the Cultural Revolution (Chicago: Quandrangle Books, 1970), 257– 258, quoting a conversation with Lasch. 16. “Serene self-possession”: Perry Miller, “The Shaping of the American Character” (1955), in Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 3. “Hedonism on the rise”: David Riesman with Robert J. Potter and Jeanne Watson, “Sociability, Permissiveness, and Equality: A Preliminary Formulation” (1960), in Riesman, Abundance for What? (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993 [1964]), 218; cited by Lasch, who vehemently disagreed with the authors’ interpretation of the hedonism they observed, deeming it a fraud that disguised “a struggle for power” in Culture of Narcissism, 66. “Bank account”: Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 141– 142. “Permitting the average”: Whyte, Organization Man, 17–18, quoting Ernest Dichter, a Viennese immigrant, on sanctioning hedonism. “Goal of life”: Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001 [1960]), 112. “Symbols”: Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence, 51, “animalistic,” 61. I am indebted here to Horowitz’s account of Dichter’s work in Anxieties of Affluence, 48–64. 17. Jules Henry, Culture against Man (New York: Vintage, 1965), “first commandment” at 19 (italics in original), “resistance” at 20; “urge” at 93; “imaginative monetization” at 84. Henry describes at 84 an ad from 1960 for a men’s electric shaver featuring a woman seductively draped on a red background, one leg extending from under her white dress while her expression conveys “a honeyed atmosphere of enticement and exploitation,” saying “Gimme, gimme, gimme.” “Seduction of the consumer”: Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 71. 18. “Boundlessness”: Bell, Cultural Contradictions, xx, “self-control” at xvi, “tension creates” at xxv.

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19. “Produced little”: Ibid., 81, “bourgeois culture” at 79, “breakup” at 55. Dichter, Strategy of Desire, argued at 169 that “if we were to rely exclusively on the fulfillment of immediate and necessary needs, our economy would literally collapse overnight,” assenting to Bell’s understanding of capitalism’s dynamic. See Russell Jacoby, “Narcissism and the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Alt and Hearn, “Symposium on Narcissism,” for a fluent articulation of the left critique, which, in contrast to Bell, sees hedonism supplanting Puritanism: “The imperative to buy and enjoy displaced the religion of save and sacrifice.” Jacoby does not, like Bell, see the hedonism in Puritanism but is among the few to see the restraint within the new hedonism, positing that in its “inner structure . . . the hedonism of narcissism is parsimonious” (63–64). 20. On Freud and the economics of his day, see the suggestive paper by Bernard Shull and Silas L. Warner, “Viennese Zeitgeist and the Economics of Sigmund Freud and the Psychology of Austrian Economics,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 14 (1986): 1–13; see also Lawrence Birken, “Freud’s ‘Economic Hypothesis’: From Homo Oeconomicus to Homo Sexualis,” American Imago 56 (1999): 311–330. There is a voluminous literature on Freud’s economic point of view; for a concise overview, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988 [1973]), s.v. “economic.” Salman Akhtar, “Things: Developmental, Psychopathological, and Technical Aspects of Inanimate Objects,” Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis 11 (2003): 1–44, a fascinating paper, is a notable exception to the general slighting of materiality in analytic writing. 21. “Later generation”: David Riesman, “The Themes of Work and Play in the Structure of Freud’s Thought,” Psychiatry 13 (1950): 1–16, at 2. “Genuine affinity”: Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1959]), 17. 22. “Endless ambiance”: Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1966]), 12, “more substantial” at 243. “Mass production”: Rieff, Freud, 371. “Gorgeous variety”: Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 241. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958 [1904– 1905]), serves as authorizing touchstone for critics on the issue of asceticism. For an analytic perspective, see Peter C. Shabad, “The Unconscious Wish and Psychoanalytic Stoicism,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 27 (1991): 332–350. 23. “Man has satisfied”: Galbraith, Affluent Society, 117. See also John Kenneth Galbraith, “Economics in the Industrial State: Science and Sedative.

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Economics as a System of Belief,” American Economic Review 60 (1970): 469– 478; Riesman, “Egocentrism: Is the American Character Changing?” Encounter 55 (August–September 1980), 19–27, at 24; Riesman, “Abundance for What?” (1957), in Riesman, Abundance for What?, 304. 24. “From oikos”: Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 22, “limited” at 223–224. Bell’s portrait of the ancient household is similar to that sketched by Ferdinand Tönnies in Community and Civil Society [Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft], ed. Jose Harris, trans. Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1887]), 40–42, of the premodern household, its ethic of self-sufficiency modeled on that of the Greco-Roman villa, and its ethic of consumption expressed in the communal sharing of food, as well as “all other goods.” 25. “Contrivance”: Galbraith, Affluent Society, 130. “Vast effort”: Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 29. “Useful citizen”: Galbraith, Affluent Society, 75. For a critique from the left of the unmooring of needs characteristic of modernity, see Paul Goodman, “The Empty Society,” Commentary 42 (November 1966): 53–60, at 54: “In the 18th century, Adam Smith thought that one started with the need and only then collected capital to satisfy it,” a situation he contrasted with the present’s “dream[ing] up a use” for new technologies after the fact. 26. Lasch, Minimal Self, for example, maintained at 33 that “fantasy ceases to be liberating when it frees itself from the checks imposed by practical experience of the world,” to which one might object that it is such freedom that is in the first instance constitutive of fantasy. On questioning needs, see Nancy Fraser, “Talking about Needs: Interpretive Contests as Political Conflicts in Welfare-State Societies,” Ethics 99 (1989): 291–313. “Complaint”: Galbraith, “Economics in the Industrial State,” 472. “Their satisfaction”: Galbraith, Affluent Society, 123. “Over and above”: Ian Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate (New York: Julian Press, 1952 [1935]), 60–62; Suttie did not cite Keynes, but traveled in circles that would have been familiar in general with his work. Ernest Beaglehole, in Property: A Study in Social Psychology (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), makes a point similar to Suttie’s, quoting at 309 the businessman Lord Edensoke from H. G. Wells’s novel Meanwhile: “Besting people and feeling that the other fellow realizes or will presently find out that he has been bested was subtler and far more gratifying” to Edensoke than anything else. Beaglehole offers a broad synthesis of contemporary psychological and psychoanalytic thinking on the relations between persons and property (at 254–321).

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27. See Harvey A. Kaplan, “Greed: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,” Psychoanalytic Review 78 (1991): 505–523, at 516, on the discipline’s early focus on restraint. 28. Freud’s Berlin colleague Karl Abraham wrote foundational papers on the oral and anal characters: “Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character,” IJP 4 (1923): 400–418, “objects of all kinds” at 413; and “The Influence of Oral Erotism on Character-Formation,” IJP 6 (1925): 247–258. 29. “Social facts”: Otto Fenichel, “The Drive to Amass Wealth,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 7 (1938): 69–95, at 70. 30. “Narcissistic requirement”: Ibid., 77, “real significance” at 85. “Would not conceive”: Paul Schilder, “Psychoanalysis of Economics,” Psychoanalytic Review 27 (1940): 401–420, at 406. Fenichel in “Drive to Amass Wealth” observed along similar lines at 93 that “money has certainly not originated because people for unconscious reasons needed a faeces-corpse symbol. Instead money was made necessary only by the development of an economic system.” “Eating, housing, clothing”: Fenichel, abstract of Schilder, “Psychoanalysis of Economics,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12 (1943): 293–295, at 294. 31. Arthur Nikelly, “The Pathogenesis of Greed: Causes and Consequences,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 3 (2006): 65–78, esp. 66– 69. For examples of disturbed spending behaviors, see Edmund Bergler, “Psychopathology of Bargain Hunters,” in Ernest Borneman, The Psychoanalysis of Money (New York: Urizen Books, 1976), 271, and Abraham, “Anal Character,” 411. 32. “Psychoanalysis at its nadir”: Borneman, Psychoanalysis of Money, 63– 64; Smiley Blanton, “The Hidden Faces of Money,” in Borneman, Psychoanalysis of Money, “to convert money” at 267, “good at making money” at 266. Blanton was an American analyst and the author of Diary of My Analysis with Sigmund Freud (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1971). Among analytic papers on greed are Robert Waska, “Craving, Longing, Denial and the Dangers of Change: Clinical Manifestations of Greed,” Psychoanalytic Review 89 (2002): 505–531; Ryan Lamothe, “Poor Ebenezer: Avarice as Corruption of the Erotic and Search for a Transformative Object,” Psychoanalytic Review 90 (2003): 23–43; Frances Bigda-Peyton, “When Drives Are Dangerous: Drive Theory and Resource Overconsumption,” Modern Psychoanalysis 29 (2004): 251–270. For a variety of psychological, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic perspectives on pathological consumption, see April Lane Benson, ed., I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2000); see also Shirley Lee and Avis Mysyk, “The Medicalization of Compulsive Buying,” Social Science and Medicine, 58 (2004): 1709–1718.

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33. “Fenichel, “Drive to Amass,” 72. 34. “Possessions”: Ibid., 80 (emphasis in original). William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950 [1890]), 291–293, 312–313. Beaglehole, Property, surveying the literature, concluded at 315 and 319 that “one may no longer conceive of property . . . simply in terms of an end-object satisfying basic need.” Rather, the self’s “sentiments of possession and of ownership” were highly developed and culturally patterned, with property “the economic basis of freedom and personality development.” 35. Donald W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—a Study of the First Not-Me Possession,” IJP 34 (1953): 89–97. Philip Cushman, in Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), sees Winnicott unwittingly shaped by consumerism, in for example what Cushman sees as his casting of child development as a process of consumption—“of the proper objects.” Cushman, siding with reality over illusion, at 260–261 faults Winnicott for “unknowingly inducing the illusion of omnipotence in our children” and wonders whether his work contributes to the “construction of a self whose primary characteristics are an endless, sybaritic sense of entitlement and a manipulative, coercive need to control others?” Cushman here misses that the Winnicottian child gradually abandons his omnipotence and, more problematically, that illusion in Winnicott is about more than omnipotence: it is the site for the subject’s creation of meaning. “We are what we have”: Russell W. Belk, “Possessions and the Extended Self,” Journal of Consumer Research 15 (1988): 139–168, at 139; Belk reviews the work of the psychologists Gordon Allport (Personality [New York: Holt, 1937]), David McClelland (Personality [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1951]), and Ernst Prelinger (“Extension and Structure of the Self,” Journal of Psychology 47 [1959]: 13–23), who tested “60 normal enlisted soldiers.” “My belongings”: Prelinger, “Extension and Structure,” 22; notably, Prelinger, at 13, sees the analyst’s conceptualization of an inner “object world” corresponding to the psychologist’s conceptualization of—in a Jamesian key—“a ‘self’-region,” defined as “the area of experience which an individual perceives to be his own ‘self.’ ” 36. “Real expressive power”: Dichter, Strategy of Desire, 86. Bruno Latour in Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 1–16, at 13. 37. Belk, “Possessions and the Extended Self,” 141; Dichter, Strategy of Desire, 93; Latour in Brown, “Thing Theory,” 13; James, Principles of Psychology, 293.

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38. “Age-old” Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 72–73. “Synthetic desire”: Galbraith, Affluent Society, 127. 39. “We all began”: Michael Beldoch, “The Therapeutic as Narcissist,” Salmagundi 20 (Summer–Fall, 1972): 134–152, at 139. “Short essay”: Freud, “Libidinal Types” (1931), Standard Edition 21:216–220. On the conceptual confusion surrounding narcissism from Freud’s time on, see the essays collected in Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” eds. Joseph Sandler, Ethel Spector Person, and Peter Fonagy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 40. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 241. On needs as a narcissistic humiliation, see Nancy McWilliams and Stanley Lependorf, “Narcissistic Pathology of Everyday Life: The Denial of Remorse and Gratitude,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26 (1990): 430–451. 41. “Personality of America”: Miller, “Shaping of the American Character,” 13. “Psychiatrist’s contemporaneous dictum”: Benda, Image of Love, 86. “Concise characterization”: Paul L. Wachter, “The Politics of Narcissism,” The Nation, 3–10 January 1981. “Individuation”: Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1962), 22. 42. Constance Rosenblum, “Narcissism: An Old Habit Comes Back,” Van Nuys Valley News, 24 September 1978. Riesman in Kenneth Woodward, “The New Narcissism,” Newsweek, 30 January 1978, and Barbara Utley, “The New Narcissism Reflects an Image of Social Change,” Chicago Tribune, 25 February 1978.

2. Heinz Kohut’s American Freud 1. “Chicago’s Dr. Kohut Heralded as Modern Day Freud,” Denver Post, 16 May 1974. Georgie Anne Geyer, “Dr. Kohut—the Freud of Today,” Chicago Daily News, 20 May 1974. “A Chicago Psychoanalyst Puts the World on the Couch,” Chicago Daily News, 9 May 1974. “Charismatic genius”: Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 262. “First truly American analyst”: Kohut to Tilmann Moser, 4 December 1973, in Kohut, Curve, 296. “Messiah”: Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (New York: Knopf, 1981), 119, and Lois Timnick, “Rift May Threaten Freudian Theory,” Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1979. “Electrifying effect”: Jean Dietz, “Heinz Kohut—The Man and the Message,” Psychiatric News, December 1980. On analysts’ interest in narcissism, see Charles K. Hofling and Robert W. Meyers, “Recent Discoveries in Psychoanalysis: A Study of Opinion,” Archives

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of General Psychiatry 26 (1972): 518–523, reporting at 520 that in a 1969 survey psychoanalysts ranked “treatment of narcissistic characters” second among the most important technical advances in their field in the previous thirty years. 2. I borrow here from the title of Adam Phillips’s subtle and suggestive essay, “Narcissism, For and Against,” in his Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). 3. “Broad kind of concept”: Kohut, “Interview for Educational Television in Rome, Italy, July, 1969,” Kohut Papers, box 1, folder 15, Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. “Fred”: Constance Rosenblum, “Is That Narcissus Gazing in the Disco Mirror?” Baltimore Sun, 25 July 1978, one among many iterations of the same article, in Kohut Papers, box 1, folder 10. “Emptiness of life”: Giovanna Breu, “Is Dr. Heinz Kohut beside Himself?” People, 26 February 1979. 4. “Concern for one’s self”: Kohut, “Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 27 (1972): 360–400, at 364. “Navel gazing”: Kohut, “Psychoanalysis in a Troubled World,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 1 (1973): 3–25, at 22. 5. “Complete and true American”: Kohut to Moser, 4 December 1973, in Kohut, Curve, 296. “A nobody”: Kohut to Paul Ornstein, in Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 75, “beloved” at 135. Slightly altered, the quote also appears in Susan Quinn, “Oedipus vs. Narcissus,” New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1980. 6. “Looking away”: Kohut in Quinn, “Oedipus vs. Narcissus.” Bernard Brickman, “The Curve of Life: Correspondence of Heinz Kohut, 1923–1981,” JAPA 45 (1978): 589–592, refers at 591–592 to the analysts who “reviled and shunned him at meetings,” many of them “former friends and admirers.” Kohut was well enough known among American analysts in 1969, before the publication of his major books, to be ranked fifth in a list of those named as influential and important in the survey conducted by Hofling and Meyers, “Recent Discoveries in Psychoanalysis,” 519. “Wipe the floor”: Strozier, Heinz Kohut, 132. “Mawkish”: Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis, 119. “Basic cultural value systems”: Kohut to Anna Freud, 4 August 1964, in Kohut, Curve, 98–103. “Adapting psychoanalysis”: Kohut to Moser, 4 December 1973, in Kohut, Curve, 295– 296. “Daring new paths”: Kohut, “The Future of Psychoanalysis,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 3 (1975): 325–340, at 328. 7. “Mr. Psychoanalysis”: Kohut in Quinn, “Oedipus vs. Narcissus”; the honorific appears many times in the analytic literature. Kohut, “Introspection, Em-

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pathy, and Psychoanalysis—an Examination of the Relationship between Mode of Observation and Theory,” JAPA 7 (1959): 459–483. For Kohut’s memories of the reception of this paper, see Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and the SemiCircle of Mental Health,” IJP 63 (1949): 395–407, at 395. Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1971). Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 2001 [1977]). “Surge of independent initiative”: Kohut, “Future of Psychoanalysis,” 328. “Need of the Freud within”: Kohut to Henry D. v. Witzleben, 7 April 1977, in Kohut, Curve, 345. 8. Kohut to Kurt R. Eissler, 12 October 1952, in Kohut, Curve, 64. Kohut also related the story to Alexandre Szombati, 12 July 1968, and to Peter B. Neubauer, 12 July 1968, in Kohut, Curve, 207–208 and 208–209. 9. Kohut’s biographer Charles Strozier, who wrestled with his subject’s penchant for playing fast and loose with the truths of his own life, cast a skeptical eye on this particular incident, noting that the only evidence of its having actually transpired comes from Kohut himself: Strozier, Heinz Kohut, 58. “Personal myth”: Kohut, “Future of Psychoanalysis,” 327. The passing of the psychoanalytic torch imagery is Ernest Wolf’s in “Viennese Chicagoan,” in Heinz Kohut and the Psychology of the Self, ed. Allen Siegel (New York: Routledge, 1996). Paul L. Montgomery, “Heinz Kohut, Whose Theory Opposed Freud’s, Dead at 68,” New York Times, 10 October 1981. 10. “Freud’s departure”: Quinn, “Oedipus vs. Narcissus.” “Father figure”: Kohut, “Future of Psychoanalysis,” 328; “Self-confirmation”: Kohut to v. Witzleben, 7 April 1977, in Kohut, Curve, 345. “Independent self”: Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach, ed. Charles B. Strozier (New York: Norton, 1985), 262, “fancy idea” at 250. “Rejected child”: Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi-Circle,” 404, “in its childhood” at 405. 11. “Exuberant enough”: Kohut to Roger Petti, 24 March 1981, in Kohut, Curve, 427. “Psychoanalytic locker-room”: Kohut, Seminars, 6. Kohut returned to this issue repeatedly. See, for example, his letter to the editor of Newsweek, 25 January 1978, in Kohut, Search, 4, at 569. 12. “Intense experience”: Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure?, 53. “Remobilized and reintegrated”: Kohut to Robert Sussman, 8 April 1967, in Kohut, Curve, 165–166. “Line of development”: Kohut, “Thoughts on Narcissism,” 362. “Curve”: Geoffrey Cocks, “Introduction,” to Kohut, Curve, 1–2.

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13. See Morris N. Eagle, Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical View (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), 36, for a summary of Kohut’s basic model. Kohut, “The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders—Outline of a Systematic Approach,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 23 (1968): 86–113, offers his own succinct summary; “instinctual fuel” at 87. 14. “Social pathology”: Kohut to Alexander Mitscherlich, 22 February 1965, in Kohut, Curve, 111. “Not new”: Kohut to Margrit Hengärtner, 22 March 1977, in Kohut, Curve, 342. “Overinvolved”: Kohut to Evan Brahm, 7 February 1977, in Kohut, Curve, 335. Kohut was cited along these lines in many newspaper and magazine pieces, for example, Quinn, “Oedipus vs. Narcissus”; and Barbara Utley, “The New Narcissism Reflects an Image of Societal Change,” Chicago Tribune, 25 February 1978. “Gleam in the mother’s eye”: Breu, “Is Kohut beside Himself?” 15. “World of yesterday”: Kohut, “Psychoanalysis in a Troubled World,” 23, “groping” at 22, “way station” at 21. “Just as necessary”: Kohut, “Interview for Educational Television.” “Hypocrisy”: Kohut, “Thoughts on Narcissism,” 365. “Meek acceptance”: Kohut, “Psychoanalysis in a Troubled World,” 21. 16. “Debasement”: Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978 [1976]), xv, “untrammeled” at 16, “watershed” at 7, “idolatry” at 19. 17. “Imperial self”: Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984), 15. Lasch’s patently favorable stance toward Kohut misled some readers into classifying him as a Kohutian. Michael Kammen, “A Whiplash of Contradictory Expectations,” Reviews in American History 7 (1979): 452–458, writes, at 452, that Kohut is apparently Lasch’s “contemporary guru.” 18. “Cult of personal relations”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 51. “Primitive man”: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition 21:115. “Price of entry”: Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1959]), 372; “Control release dialectic”: Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), 92; see also Abram de Swaan, “The Politics of Agoraphobia: On Changes in Emotional and Relational Management,” Theory and Society 10 (1981): 359–385, esp. 380. 19. “Brandished”: Fred Siegel, “The Agony of Christopher Lasch,” Reviews in American History 8 (1980): 285–295, at 292. “Unbehagen”: Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities, 254–257. “Intergenerational strife”: Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi-Circle,” 395–407, at 402.

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20. “Topsy-turvy”: Kohut to Anthony T. Di Iorio, 24 June 1981, in Kohut, Curve, 430–431, referring to a piece in Time magazine (1 December 1980, 76). “Tom, Dick, and Harry”: Kohut, “Psychoanalysis in a Troubled World,” 6, “man’s consciousness” at 25. 21. Robert S. Wallerstein, “The Growth and Transformation of American Ego Psychology,” JAPA 50 (2002): 135–168, at 147, writes that at an early selfpsychology conference, Kohut privately told him, “I’m not sure how enduring my own psychoanalytic contributions will, in the end, turn out to be, but you’ll have to admit that I’ve sure shaken up the ego psychology establishment.” Wallerstein adds that Kohut “was, of course, correct, and it has never been quite the same since.” 22. “No mythology”: Kohut to Siegmund Levarie, 10 September 1951, in Kohut, Curve, 63. “Whole new world”: Kohut to Anna Freud, 4 August 1964, in ibid., 98–103. 23. “Modern natural science”: Wallerstein, “Growth and Transformation,” at 139 (citing Roy Schafer on Heinz Hartmann), “precious gift” at 145. I am indebted here to Wallerstein’s superb history of the ego psychologists. 24. “I don’t want”: Douglas Kirsner, “Self Psychology and the Psychoanalytic Movement: An Interview with Dr. Heinz Kohut” (21 June 1981), Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 5 (1982): 483–495, at 486, “reformation” at 485. See also Kohut to Tilmann Moser, 7 March 1981, in Kohut, Curve, 425, arguing against the notion his work represents a new paradigm. On the association of Kuhn and paradigms with Kohut, see Michael Ferguson, “Progress and Theory Change: The Two Analyses of Mr. Z,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 9 (1981): 133–160; Eagle, Recent Developments, 35–74; Vann Spruiell, “Kohut’s ‘Paradigm’ and Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 52 (1983): 353– 363; Isabel S. Knight, “Paradigms and Crises in Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 54 (1985): 597–614; and James S. Grotstein, “Chapter 8: Melanie Klein and Heinz Kohut: An Odd Couple or Secretly Connected?” Progress in Self Psychology 15 (1999): 123–146, at 135–136, among many other papers. Robert M. Galatzer-Levy, “Chapter 1: Heinz Kohut as Teacher and Supervisor,” Progress in Self Psychology 4 (1988): 3–42, at 4: “All analysts are able to formulate clinical phenomena in terms of the psychology of drives, but self psychologists are most likely to be satisfied by explanations in terms of the newer paradigm. They regard drive psychology explanations in the same way that post-Copernican astronomers viewed epicentric computations of the planet’s positions—historically interesting, sometimes practical, but fundamentally unsatisfactory.” The term paradigm was rarely used in the analytic literature prior

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to 1960; between 1960 and 1980, it appeared in 378 papers included the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing digital archive. It quickly became associated with narcissism; the New York Times dubbed narcissism modernity’s “paradigmatic complaint.” For optimistic readings of the scientific status of psychoanalysis, see also Maxwell S. Sucharov, “Chapter 11: Quantum Physics and Self Psychology: Toward a New Epistemology,” Progress in Self Psychology 8 (1992): 199–211; and Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, “Changes in Science and Changing Ideas about Knowledge and Authority in Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 65 (1996): 158–200. “Jeremiahs”: Kohut, “Future of Psychoanalysis,” 332. 25. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 [1962]). “Litmus test”: Knight, “Paradigms and Crises,” at 610, discusses analysts’ use of the concept as “a kind of . . . litmus test for separating science from nonscience.” “Revolution”: “Kohut’s Restoration of the Self: A Symposium,” Psychoanalytic Review 65 (1978): 615. “Physics”: Kohut, Restoration, 31. See K. R. Eissler, “Irreverent Remarks about the Present and Future of Psychoanalysis,” IJP 50 (1969): 461–471, proclaiming that “only in Freud’s writings does one find paradigms,” that Freud had “extracted all the paradigms that could be gained from the observation of patients on the couch,” and that the psychoanalytic situation was “depleted with regard to research possibilities,” it having yielded to science all it contained. Since Freud’s death, Eissler maintained, psychoanalysis had entered a period of “normal science,” where it would forever remain, with analysts busying themselves proposing “variations and permutations” on Freud’s paradigms. If there was indeed a “crisis” in the field, it was only that of theoretical lethargy sparked by the recognition that all possible psychological phenomena were explicable within the parameters of Freud’s theorizing. 26. “Welcome absence”: Martin James, “The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychological Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders,” IJP 54 (1973): 363–368, at 363. See Kohut to James, 18 June 1973, in Kohut, Curve, 278–280, written upon receiving an advance copy of James’s review, in which the charge of “unconscious plagiarism”—subsequently excised before publication—was leveled, with the qualification that such was “an endemic force in psychoanalysis.” James was recycling a charge he had earlier made, that “plagiarism is endemic in the world of ideas, and in psychoanalysis priorities are especially hard to place”: James, “The First Year of Life,” IJP 48 (1967): 118–121, at 118. “Strangely unable”: Gerald J. Gargiulo, “Kohut’s Restoration of the Self: A Symposium,” Psychoanalytic Review 65 (1978): 616–

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617, at 616. “Failing”: Saul Tuttman, “Kohut’s Restoration of the Self,” Psychoanalytic Review 65 (1978): 624–629, at 625. Criticism of Kohut for the inadequacies of attribution may be found in Ruth R. Imber, “Reflections on Kohut and Sullivan,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 20 (1984): 363–380; Gudrun Bodin, “From Narcissism to Self-Psychology: An Introduction to Heinz Kohut’s Authorship,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 20 (1997): 134– 136; and Neil McLaughlin, “Revision from the Margins: Fromm’s Contributions to Psychoanalysis,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 9 (2000): 241– 247. “Honors thesis”: Strozier, Heinz Kohut, 56. “Optimal”: Kohut to unnamed, 12 September 1972, in Kohut, Search 2:867–869. “Retrospectively locate”: Kohut, “Originality and Repetition in Science,” in Kohut, Search 3:227. 27. “Not on nature”: Kuhn, Structure, 35. “His gifts”: Kohut to John E. Gedo, 26 October 1966, Kohut, Curve, 153; “Yours is a youthful review,” Kohut wrote. “Only in retrospect”: Kuhn, Structure, 35. “Has happened”: Heinz Hartmann, “The Development of the Ego Concept in Freud’s Work,” IJP 37 (1956): 435–438 (cited by Kohut in self-defense: “Originality and Repetition in Science,” 227), discussing Maria Dorer, Historische Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse (Leipzig: Meiner, 1932): “Her statement that Freud’s psychology was in the main derived from earlier sources is quite obviously wrong, and Jones’s objection to it is indisputable. What happened to that historian of preanalysis has happened to other historians before: looking at even the greatest work from the angle of ‘precursors’ only, one cannot help finding similar ideas in the history of human thought.” There can be no doubt that the so-called Ferenczi renaissance in the 1990s that saw his work newly translated in English, the subject of countless books, analytic papers, and conferences, was due in some part to Kohut’s channeling of his work, which complicates the charges leveled against him. Kohut’s new paradigm made Ferenczi newly visible, and the Kohut who borrows from Ferenczi and builds on his work is perhaps best considered a good Kuhnian rather than a morally compromised plagiarist. The charge concerning Kohut’s use of Ferenczi was common: Arnold Goldberg, “Response: There Are No Pure Forms,” JAPA 47 (1999): 395–400, writes at 397: “I cannot possibly count the times I have read that Kohut neglected Ferenczi.” 28. “Gut level”: Eagle, Recent Developments, 74. 29. A typically enthusiastic appreciation of Ferenczi’s readmittance to the discipline argues that his “creative research has suddenly been catapulted to the center of current clinical interest” and characterizes him as “the underground clinician, the uncelebrated psychoanalyst’s psychoanalyst,” going on to place

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him at the center of the field c. 1990 and arguing that his work “is one, if not the, major precursor” to the psychoanalysis of the day: Benjamin Wolstein, “The Hungarian School,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 27 (1991): 167–175, at 167. 30. Kohut, Restoration, 290.

3. Otto Kernberg’s Narcissistic Dystopia 1. “Culture of our time”: Otto Kernberg in Maya Pines, “New Focus on Narcissism Offers Analysts Insight into Grandiosity and Emptiness,” New York Times, 16 March 1982. 2. “Trust and confidence”: Kernberg in Susan Bridle, “The Seeds of the Self: An Interview with Susan Bridle,” http://www.chmc-dubai.com/Personality %20Disorders, accessed 9 September 2013; originally appeared in What Is Enlightenment? 17 (Spring-Summer 2000). “Squeezing a lemon”: Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1985 [1975]), 233; also in Kernberg, interviewed by Linda Wolfe, “Why Some People Can’t Love,” Psychology Today (June 1978): 55–59, at 57. 3. “Envy”: Kernberg, “Sanctioned Social Violence: A Psychoanalytic View Part I,” IJP 84 (2003): 683–698, at 686, “sadism” at 693, “rationalized aggression” at 685. “Lifeless shadows”: Kernberg, “Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities,” JAPA 18 (1970): 51–85, at 57, “dethroned” at 60. “Hamburger”: James F. Masterson in Pines, “New Focus on Narcissism.” “Candy machine”: Donald Kaplan in “Narcissus Redivivus,” Time, 20 September 1976. See also Douglas LaBier in “Life of a Yuppie Takes a Psychic Toll,” U.S. News and World Report, 29 April 1985, reporting the words of a male patient: “I treat women like you would a can of soda: You consume it, and you crush the can when it’s empty and throw it away.” “Hungry”: Kernberg, “Factors in the Treatment,” 57. 4. “Hungry, enraged”: Kernberg, “Factors in the Treatment,” 57. “Feelings of insecurity”: Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, 228–229. 5. “Hell is other people” is a line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1954). Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003 [1985]), 27–31. 6. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition 21:111– 115. I am indebted here to José Brunner’s brilliant reading of Freud’s essay, in Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), esp. 172– 175. Brunner, a student of Gellner’s, edited and wrote the forward to the 2003 edition of the Psychoanalytic Movement.

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7. Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 60–61. “Primary mutual hostility”: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 112. 8. Kernberg in “ ‘Most-Cited Psychoanalyst’ Continues Pioneering Ways,” Psychiatric News 43, no. 7 (2008). 9. Chandra Rankin, “An Interview with Otto Kernberg, MD,” psychotherapy.net (2006), at http://www.psychotherapy.net/interview/otto-kernberg; the colleague was Herman van der Waals, author of “Problems of Narcissism,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 29 (1965): 293–311. Traces of Kernberg’s early work at Menninger may be found in Robert S. Wallerstein, 42 Lives in Treatment: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (New York: Other Press, 2000 [1986]), “the report of the Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation, 1954–1982.” 10. Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 339. See Kernberg, Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 20–21, for his own succinct summary of his position. Milton Klein and David Tribich, “Kernberg’s Object-Relations Theory: A Critical Evaluation,” IJP 62 (1981): 27–43, offers a critique, as well as a summary of critiques, of Kernberg’s synthesizing impulse. “Primary autism”: Kernberg, “Freud Conserved and Revised: An Interview with David Scharff,” in The Psychoanalytic Century: Freud’s Legacy for the Future, ed. Scharff (New York: Other Press, 2001), 46. 11. “Carry around”: Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations, 11. “One patient”: Kernberg, “Structural Derivatives of Object Relationships,” IJP 47 (1966): 236–252, at 237–238. This was Kernberg’s second publication in the analytic literature. He diagnosed this man as borderline; I use this example to illustrate his early turn from classicism to the British object relations tradition. 12. “Harsh and haughty”: Kernberg, “Structural Derivatives,” 238. “Loved and admired”: Kernberg in “Narcissism. The American Contribution: A Conversation of Rafaelle Siniscalco with Otto Kernberg,” JEP, number 12–13 (Winter-Fall 2001). “Patients displaying”: Kernberg, “Structural Derivatives.” “Bite the hand”: Kernberg, “Notes on Countertransference,” JAPA 13 (1965): 38–56, at 50. See also Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, 243–248. 13. “Center of things”: Kernberg, “Factors in the Treatment,” 72. “Narcissistic idealization”: Kernberg, “Contrasting Viewpoints Regarding the Nature and Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities: A Preliminary Communication,” JAPA 22 (1974): 255–267, at 260, “transitory nature,” at 265.

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“Wind up empty”: Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, 237; see also Kernberg, Love Relations, 151. 14. “Phony pathology”: Kernberg in Rankin, “Interview with Otto Kernberg.” “Aren’t we all”: Kernberg in “Why Some People Can’t Love,” 55. “You are doing all right”: Kernberg in “Conversation with Siniscalco.” 15. “Self-fulfillment and creativity”: Kernberg, Internal World and External Reality: Object Relations Theory Applied (New York: Jason Aronson, 1980), 129. “Indirect and complex”: Kernberg in “Conversation with Siniscalco.” “Futility and emptiness”: Kernberg, “Further Contributions to the Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities,” IJP 55 (1974): 215–240, at 239. “Early childhood development”: Kernberg in “Why Some People Can’t Love,” 59. 16. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), discusses Kernberg at 39–41, “tells us most” at 34. “Both abused and overused”: Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, 16. “Lasch’s work”: Kernberg in “Conversation with Siniscalco.” “Quintessential consumer”: “Gratification Now Is the Slogan of the ’70s, Laments a Historian,” People Magazine, 9 July 1979. “Narcissistic needs”: Kernberg in “Why Some People Can’t Love,” 59. 17. “Go underground”: Kernberg in “Why Some People Can’t Love,” 59. “Self-help ethic”: Paul Ornstein in Pegg Levoy, “Mirror, Mirror . . . Do I Look Sick to You?” Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 December 1978. “Feel good”: Kernberg in “Conversation with Siniscalco.” “Narcissistic needs”: Kernberg in “Why Some People Can’t Love,” 59. 18. Kernberg in “Why Some People Can’t Love,” 59. “Get in touch with”: Lasch, “Gratification Now,” 35. 19. “Absent the hateful”: Kernberg in Susan Quinn, “Oedipus v. Narcissus,” New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1980. “Inner program”: Kohut in Lois Timnick, “ ‘Kohutian Movement’ Denied: Rift May Threaten Freudian Theory,” Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1979. “Supraindividual participation”: Kohut in Psychiatric News, January 1966, Kohut Papers, Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, box 1, folder 10. 20. “Normal narcissism”: Kernberg in Bridle, “Seeds of the Self.” See also, Kernberg, “Normal Narcissism in Middle Age,” in Internal World and External Reality, 121–134. In “Contrasting Viewpoints,” for example, Kernberg argued, at 257–258, that Kohut focused too exclusively on “the vicissitudes of development of libidinal cathexes” while all but ignoring “the vicissitudes of aggression.” “Tyranny”: Kohut, Lectures, 33.

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21. “Fuller life”: Pines, “New Focus on Narcissism.” “Eternal youth”: Kernberg, “Contrasting Viewpoints,” 265. “Doing their own thing”: Kohut, in Timnick, “ ‘Kohutian Movement’ Denied.” “Spitefully aggressive”: Kernberg in “Why Some People Can’t Love,” 56. On the patient as victim, see Jerome Saperstein and Jack Gaines, “A Commentary on the Divergent Views between Kernberg and Kohut on the Theory and Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 5 (1978): 413–423, at 420, an interpretation of Kernberg with which I am in agreement. Michael Robbins, “Current Controversy in Object Relations Theory as an Outgrowth of a Schism between Klein and Fairbairn,” IJP 61 (1980): 477–492, at 487, also takes this position; Randolf Alnoes, “Understanding and Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disturbances: The Kernberg-Kohut Divergence,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 6 (1983): 97–110, at 105, argues similarly. This professional commentary is echoed in the somewhat incoherent comments made by a reader, Mark Levy, 3 April 1910, of Borderline Conditions on amazon.com: “My main objection here; the patient is shown rather on the guilty side rather than on the ‘victimized by the family’ side. . . . Society is not responsible, the patient is. This position is not sustainable in 2010.” 22. “Inner program”: Kohut in Timnick, “ ‘Kohutian Movement’ Denied.” “To hate well”: Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, 308–310. 23. “Concerned only with aggression”: Kernberg in Rankin, “Interview with Otto Kernberg.” “Trivialization of personal relations”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 187. 24. “Aggression”: Kernberg, Love Relations, 22–25, “failure to condemn” at 180–181, “combat zone” at 91, “flatness” at 187. 25. Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 187–194. 26. Ibid., 188–191. 27. “Masculine ascendancy”: Ibid., 190, “cult of personal relations” at 51, “sexual ‘revolution’ ” at 200. G. D. Bartell, Group Sex (New York: Signet Books, 1971); Ingrid Bengis, Combat in the Erogenous Zone (New York: Knopf, 1972); Nena O’Neill and George O’Neill, Open Marriage: A New Lifestyle for Couples (New York: Avon Books, 1973); Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor’s Wife (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980); James R. Smith and Lynn G. Smith, Beyond Monogamy: Recent Studies of Sexual Alternatives in Marriage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Anna K. and Robert T. Francoeur, Hot and Cool Sex: Cultures in Conflict (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking (New

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York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). On the sexual revolution, see David Allyn, Make Love, Not War. The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000). 28. Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 187–203. 29. Ibid., 201–205. 30. “New lifestyles”: Kernberg, “Love, the Couple, and the Group: A Psychoanalytic Frame,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 49 (1980): 78–108, at 104–106. “So-called sexual revolution”: Kernberg, Love Relations, 186. “Hysterical, masochistic”: Kernberg, “Adolescent Sexuality in the Light of Group Processes,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 49 (1980): 27–47, at 42–44. “Pure sexual object”: Kernberg, “Mature Love: Prerequisites and Characteristics,” JAPA 22 (1974): 743–768, at 752. 31. “Instinctual desires”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 202. Kernberg, Love Relations, 38–42. 32. Lance Morrow, “Epitaph for a Decade,” Time, 7 January 1980, and “The Fascination of Decadence,” Time, 10 September 1979. 33. “Fumigating, refurnishing”: Morrow, “Epitaph.” “Only seventeen percent”: Daniel Yanklovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981), 59. 34. Lawrence Friedman, “Kohut: A Book Review Essay,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 49 (1980): 393–422, at 407, a reading of Kohut that I find especially persuasive. On Kohut as theorist of relationality, see also Stephen A. Mitchell, “Twilight of the Idols—Change and Preservation in the Writings of Heinz Kohut,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 15 (1979): 170–189. For a dissenting view, see Lynne Layton, “A Deconstruction of Kohut’s Concept of the Self,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26 (1990): 420–429.

4. Self-Love 1. The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon, ed. Joseph Devey (London: George Bell & Sons, 1882 [1619]), 207. On the term’s coining, see Havelock Ellis, “The Conception of Narcissism,” Psychoanalytic Review 14 (1927): 129–153, esp. 135–137, and Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Standard Edition 14:73n.1. “Exquisite”: Ellis, “Conception of Narcissism,” 134, “voluptuous” at 135. “Being enamoured of oneself”: Freud (10 November 1909), in Minutes 2:311–312. 2. “Every living creature”: Freud, “On Narcissism,” 73–74. “In addition”: Isidor Sadger (10 November 1909), in Minutes 2:307. “Everyone”: Sadger, Die

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Lehre von dem Geschlechtsverirrungen (Leipzig and Vienna: Deuticke, 1921), cited by Ellis, “Conception of Narcissism,” 140. “Intensive autoerotism”: Paul Federn (10 November 1909), in Minutes 2:311. 3. David M. Moss, “Narcissism, Empathy and the Fragmentation of the Self: An Interview with Heinz Kohut,” Pilgrimage 4 (Summer 1976): 26–43, at 33. 4. Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), Standard Edition 11:99–100 (emphasis in original). 5. “List”: Freud, “Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading” (1907), Standard Edition 9:245–247. “Obsession”: Freud to Jung, 2 December 1909. “Exceptional”: Jones, Freud 2:86. “Lecture”: Freud (1 December 1909), in Minutes 2:338–352. “Exasperated”: Freud to Jung, 2 December 1909. “Otherwise”: Freud to Jung, 6 March 1910. “Psychoanalytic pathography”: Ferenczi to Freud, 12 June 1910. “Only truly beautiful thing”: Freud to Lou AndreasSalomé, 9 February 1919. Ferenczi was not alone: Jung wrote Freud 11 August 1910, discussing some of the opposition to the work, that Freud was “right on every point. . . . What the rabble say about it is neither here nor there; the thing is beautifully done and leads to exalted spheres of knowledge,” going on to label critics “simpletons” and “duffers.” 6. “Passion”: Jones, Freud, 2:387, “illuminated” at 2:346. Later analysts also saw the work as autobiographical; see, for example, Joseph D. Lichtenberg, “Freud’s Leonardo: Psychobiography and Autobiography of Genius,” JAPA 26 (1978): 863–880. “Converted his sexuality”: Freud to Jung, 17 October 1909. 7. “My homosexuality”: Freud to Ferenczi, 17 October 1910. “Always prepared”: Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998 [1988]), 274–275. In Minutes 2 (18 November 1908): 61, Freud charged Wilhelm Stekel with “falling into the mistake for which he [Freud] has often reproved him: establishing a general principle from his personal experience” (brackets in original). 8. “Lady”: Freud, Leonardo, 91, “opened” at 82, “handsome” at 71–72, “real” at 133, “emotionally” at 99. 9. “Completely”: Ibid., 91,“robbed” at 117. 10. “Bliss”: Ibid., 117. “Prototype”: Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Standard Edition 7:222. “Erotic”: Freud, Leonardo, 129, “first” at 222. 11. “Peculiar”: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Standard Edition 5:398n.1, added 1911. Freud later reworked the favoritism into “his mother’s undisputed darling,” suggesting with reference to Goethe’s loss of his brother (which meant he did not have to share him with his mother), that such a man

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might retain through life “the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it”: “A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung Und Wahrheit” (1917), Standard Edition 17:156. “Violence”: Freud, Leonardo, 116, “tender seductions” at 131, “excessive tenderness” at 135, “poor forsaken” at 116, “like all unsatisfied mothers” at 117, “his destiny” at 115. 12. “Social feelings”: Freud (11 December 1912), in Minutes 4:136. “Retarding and restraining”: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition 21:103. “Push the father out”: Freud, Leonardo, 99. 13. “Let’s go to Sicily”: Freud to Ferenczi, 24 April 1910; “between whom and myself”: 14 August 1910. 14. “Fairy-tale feeling”: Freud to Ferenczi, 1 May 1910; “monotonous analyses”: 27 June 1910. 15. “Minute examination”: Jones, Freud 2:81. “Incredible feast”: Freud to Martha Freud, 15 September 1910, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 147–148. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. and ed. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (New York: New York Review Books, 2000 [orig. trans. 1955; orig. pub. 1903]). “Deferential respect”: Ferenczi to Groddeck, 25 December 1921, in The Sándor Ferenczi-Georg Groddeck Correspondence, ed. Christopher Fortune, trans. Jeannie Cohen, Elisabeth Petersdorff, and Norbert Ruebsaat (New York: Other Press, 2002), 8–9. “Never stops admiring me”: Freud to Jung, 24 September 1910. 16. “Riddle of paranoia”: Freud to Abraham, 18 December 1910. Freud analyzed the case of Schreber in Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911), Standard Edition 12. “In the matter”: Ferenczi to Freud, 17 January 1930. “Blindly dependent son”: Ferenczi, Diary, 185. 17. “Good intentions”: Ferenczi to Freud, 28 September 1910. “Often felt sorry for”: Freud to Ferenczi, 2 October 1910. 18. “Not that ψα superman”: Freud to Ferenczi, 6 October 1910; “gave no cause”: 17 October 1910. 19. “Mutually gratifying”: Freud to Fliess, 28 December 1887. “Oases”: Jones, Freud 1:331. “Slaking”: Freud to Fliess, 30 June 1896; “continual”: 2 May 1897; “strengthened”: 3 April 1898; “no one”: 7 May 1900. 20. This paragraph is indebted to the insights in Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000), 126–152, “caring” at 130. “Cannot write”: Freud to Fliess, 18 May 1898. “Your praise”: 14 July 1894.

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21. “Personal attraction”: Jones, Freud 1:321. “Document for scientists”: Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, “The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887–1902,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 24 (1955): 284–291, at 284 (emphasis in original). “Most intimate”: Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 3 January 1937, in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, “Introduction,” The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 7. “Slightly drab”: Gay, Freud, 60–61. 22. “New impetus”: Freud to Fliess, 18 June 1897; “solace, understanding”: 1 January 1896; “realized it was necessary”: 26 August 1898. “Highly remarkable”: Freud to Karl Abraham, 13 February 1911. “Once loved”: Freud to Abraham, 3 March 1911. “Something beyond”: Marie Bonaparte, unpublished notebook entry of 24 November 1937, cited by Masson, Complete Letters of Freud to Fliess, 3, and at 26 August 1896, n.1. Masson translates Freud’s characterization of Fliess’s wife, conveyed to Bonaparte as “ein böses Weib,” as “a bad woman”; in n.1 to Freud to Abraham, 13 February 1911, it is translated as “a malicious skirt”; “wittily stupid”: ibid. “Everything possible”: Bonaparte, notebook entry of 24 November 1937. 23. Jones, Freud 1:332. On the importance of Freud’s capacity for controlling his homosexual wishes, consider Ernest S. Wolf, reviewing Kurt R. Eissler’s Psychological Aspects of the Correspondence between Freud and Jung (title translated from the German original), in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 53 (1984): 450–454; Wolf notes that Eissler credits Freud with being aware of his “homosexual impulses” and “with having them perfectly under control.” “In which you divulged”: Ferenczi to Freud, 3 October 1910; “entirely concerned”: 6 October 1910; “I have now overcome”: 16 December 1910. “Homosexual drive components”: Ferenczi to Freud, 3 October 1910. “Since Fliess’s case”: Freud to Ferenczi, 6 October 1910; “result being”: 17 October 1910. 24. “Some piece”: Freud to Jones, 8 December 1912. “Incorporated in others”: Gay, Freud, 274. “Little Fliess”: Freud to Ferenczi, 16 December 1910. “Homosexual wishful phantasy”: Freud, “Case of Paranoia,” 62 (emphasis in original). 25. “Decried as a homosexual”: Ferenczi to Freud, 5 June 1910: “I, as has been confirmed to me by various sources, have been decried as a homosexual, evidently because I am concerned with homosexuality.” “Freud opposed Jones”: Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 32–33, “petition” at 31. “Homosexual ideas are to be found”: Alfred Adler (6 May 1908), in Minutes 1:394. “All human

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beings”: Freud, Three Essays, 144n.1, added 1915. “Extremely happy” and “Prussian woman”: Fritz Wittels (18 November 1908), in Minutes 2:58. “Alcoholism”: Hans Sachs (31 March 1915), in Minutes 4:289. “Suicides”: Adler (27 April 1910), in Minutes 2:503. “Philosophers”: Edward Hitschmann (1 April 1908), in Minutes 1:355–356. “Ancient art”: Hitschmann (3 November 1909), 298. “Have accomplished”: Wittels (18 November 1908), in Minutes 1:58. 26. “Precarious achievement”: Roy Schafer, “Problems in Freud’s Psychology of Women,” JAPA 22 (1974): 459–485, at 469. On homosexual men and objects, see Freud (13 February 1907), in Minutes 1:118, explaining that Havelock Ellis uses the term autoerotism “when only one person is involved . . . , whereas Freud uses it when there is no object; for example, those who masturbate with images [Bilderonanisten] would not be considered autoerotic” (brackets in original). “In functions”: Kohut, Lectures, 40. “Road to homosexuality”: A. A. Brill, “The Conception of Homosexuality,” Journal of the American Medical Association 61 (1913): 335–340, at 338, cited in Gustav Bychowski, “The Ego of Homosexuals,” IJP 26 (1945): 114–127, at 114. 27. “Always preferred boys”: Freud (27 May 1908), in Minutes 1:405. Freud invoked this scenario of rivalry transformed into love in “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality” (1922), Standard Edition 18:232. “A year later”: Freud (26 May 1909), in Minutes 2:258. 28. “Large agglomerations”: Jung to Freud, 20 February 1910. “Friendship leagues”: Ferenczi, “The Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homoerotism)” (1914), in Ferenczi, Contributions, 296. Freud to Abraham, 17 January 1909: “Hirschfeld is certainly an agreeable colleague because of his well-sublimated homosexuality.” “Social feeling”: Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms, 232. Freud to Jones, 8 March 1920: “The social instincts are indeed made up of both, libidinous and selfish, components, we always considered them as sublimations of the homosexual feelings.” “Love for women”: Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Standard Edition 18:141. Reginald O. Kapp, “Sensation and Narcissism,” IJP 6 (1925): 292–299, at 296–297, notes that “a whole number of the world’s greatest thinkers”—“all of them at the narcissistic end of the scale”—have never married, among them “Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Newton” and many more. 29. “Mutual affection”: Ferenczi, “Nosology of Male Homosexuality,” 315–317. “Homosexual fixation”: Ferenczi to Freud, 17 January 1916. Jones would later remark of Ferenczi that “he had a great charm for men, though less so for women”: Freud 2:178.

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30. “Introduced the terms”: J. C. Flügel, “Sexual and Social Sentiments,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 7 (1927): 139–175, at 147, “man” at 140, “private” at 146. “Sexuality and sociality”: Robert M. Riggall, “Sexuality,” IJP 8 (1927): 530–531, at 530. “Objectless”: R. W. Pickford, “Déjà Vu in Proust and Tolstoy,” IJP 25 (1944): 155–165. “Autistic”: Carl M. Herold, “Critical Analysis of the Elements of Psychic Functions—Part III,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11 (1942): 187–210, at 200. “Inability to cathect”: G. Pederson-Krag, “International Journal of Group Psychotherapy,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 25 (1956): 455. “Hypercathexis of the self”: Gustav Bychowski, “The Ego and the Object of the Homosexual,” IJP 42 (1961): 255–259, at 256. 31. “Gentle”: Otto Fenichel, “Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): 260–308, at 277. H. Nunberg, “Homosexuality, Magic and Aggression,” IJP 19 (1938): 1–16, at 3. “Passionate and evanescent”: Bychowski, “Ego and the Object,” 257, “instantaneous” at 258. 32. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 88. 33. “Give up his own personality”: Freud, “On Narcissism,” 76. “Ferenczi disagreed”: Ferenczi to Freud, 7 June 1914. Ferenczi, “Introjection and Transference” (1909), in Contributions, 35–93. 34. Paul Federn, “On the Distinction between Healthy and Pathological Narcissism” (1936), in Federn, Ego Psychology and the Psychoses, ed. Edoardo Weiss (New York: Basic Books, 1952), 323–364. Federn, at 360, described the fantasy of “a young and otherwise exceptionally talented American” who “phantasied over and over again that during his lifetime a colossal statue was erected on an island, depopulated expressly for this purpose, in his honor as the greatest ex-president of the United States”—perhaps the first specifically American narcissist in the analytic literature. 35. “Experiential orientation”: Paula Heimann, “Notes on the Anal Stage,” IJP 43 (1962): 406–414, at 413. “Capacity”: Joseph D. Lichtenberg, “The Development of the Sense of Self,” JAPA 23 (1975): 459–484, at 477. “Inner freedom”: Alice Miller, “Depression and Grandiosity as Related Forms of Narcissistic Disturbances,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 6 (1979): 61–76, at 62. “Growth and mastery”: Bernard Apfelbaum, “On Ego Psychology: A Critique of the Structural Approach to Psycho-Analytic Theory,” IJP 47 (1966): 451–475, at 452. “Feelings of triumph”: Henry Harper Hart, “Narcissistic Equilibrium,” IJP 28 (1947): 106–114, at 108. “Capacity to enjoy life”: Martin S. Bergmann, “The Place of Paul Federn’s Ego Psychology in Psychoanalytic Metapsychology,” JAPA 11 (1963): 97–116, at 103. “Mental harmony”: Marjorie Brierley, “Notes on Psycho-Analysis and Integrative Living,” 28 (1947): 7–105,

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at 91. “Feelings of self-liking”: Nathan P. Segel, “Narcissistic Resistance,” JAPA 19 (1969): 941–954, at 943. “Full mutuality”: Paula Heimann, “The Evaluation of Applicants for Psychoanalytic Training—The Goals of Psychoanalytic Education and the Criteria for the Evaluation of Applicants,” IJP 49 (1968): 527–539, at 535. 36. “Selbstgefühl”: Freud, “Zur Einführung Des Narzissmus,” Gesammelte Werke 10:138–170 (“On the Introduction of Narcissism”); Freud used the term more in this essay than in any other of his published works. Elsewhere, the editors of the Standard Edition translated Selbstgefühl as “self-esteem”—for example in the case of Dora (“Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” [1905 (1901)], Standard Edition 7:84, and in Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays [1939], Standard Edition 23. The Standard Edition “On Narcissism” appeared in 1957. It is somewhat ironic, given that—as a widely cited paper published in 1970 puts it—“one of the most important current meanings of the term narcissism” was “its use as a synonym for self-esteem” that the editors of the Standard Edition chose to use “self-regard” rather than “self-esteem” in “On Narcissism.” (Sydney E. Pulver, “Narcissism: The Term and the Concept,” JAPA 18 [1970]: 319–341, at 324.) And it is tempting to speculate that a good deal of the confusion in the analytic literature around the question of how Freud conceived of the relationship between narcissism and self-esteem might have been avoided but for the vagaries of translation. Erik H. Erikson, “Ego Development and Historical Change—Clinical Notes,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2 (1946): 359–396, esp. 380. Among other native German speakers who used the term are Karen Horney and Christine Olden. “Editor’s note”: Sándor Rádo, “The Problem of Melancholia,” IJP 9 (1928): 420–438, at 421–422. “Similarly envisioned”: Fenichel, “Neurotic Acting Out,” Psychoanalytic Review 32 (1945):197–206. See also Fenichel, “Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis— Concluded,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 3 (1946): 223–302, at 286, on “the social regulation of self-esteem.” “Self-inflation”: Annie Reich, “Pathologic Forms of Self-Esteem Regulation,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 15 (1960): 215– 232, at 218. The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “self-esteem”, dates the term to 1657. For a late-nineteenth-century usage in psychology, see William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890). Conceptualizing self-esteem much like psychoanalysts would, James writes, at 307, that “we ourselves know how the barometer of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to another” and, at 310, offers a formula for determining self-esteem: “It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed

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potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success.” 37. “Theoretical embarrassment”: C. Hanly and J. Masson, “A Critical Examination of the New Narcissism,” IJP 57 (1976): 49–66, at 50. Kohut, “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism,” JAPA14 (1966): 243–272. “Grossly put”: Kohut, Lectures, 280. “Narcissism disappears”: Kohut, Seminars, 8–9, “social workers” at 19, “the sign” at 5 (emphasis in original). See also Kohut’s comments at a panel on narcissism at the 1961 annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, in which he held that “value judgments frequently seemed to interfere in considerations” of narcissism, adducing as an example the assertion “that object love is good and narcissism bad”: James F. Bing and Rudolph O. Marburg, “Narcissism,” JAPA 10 (1962): 593–605, at 603. 38. “Homosexuality and narcissism”: Kohut, Lectures, 40, “narcissistic glow” at 41. “World’s greatest lovers”: Kohut, Seminars, 19, “bucked analytic wisdom” at 29–30, and Kohut, Seminars, 279–280. 39. Kohut, Lectures, 43. 40. “Images in our mind”: Kernberg, “A Contemporary Reading of ‘On Narcissism,’ ” in Joseph Sandler, Ethel Spector Person, and Peter Fonagy, eds., Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 143. “Too much in love”: Kernberg, interviewed by Linda Wolfe, “Why Some People Can’t Love,” Psychology Today, June 1978. “Love only themselves”: Kernberg, Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 145. “Spoil, depreciate, and degrade”: Kernberg in “Why Some People Can’t Love.” It is worth noting that Kernberg (in “A Contemporary Reading,” 141–143) sees “self-esteem regulation” as a significant aspect of Freud’s essay, while Paul H. Ornstein credits Kohut with offering “a new view . . . in which self-esteem regulation plays a dominant role”: “From Narcissism to Ego Psychology to Self Psychology,” in Sandler et al., Freud’s “On Narcissism,” 191. 41. “Recast as self-esteem”: using Google’s ngram viewer to graph “self love” and “self-esteem” (in American English) from 1960–2000 shows that the usages of self-love remain constant while those of self-esteem steadily increase. “Simple psychological fact”: Frieda Porat, “How Much Do You Like Yourself?” Good Housekeeping 186 (June 1978), 184–185. Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A New Concept of Man’s Psychological Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1971 [1969]). Wikipedia and other websites credit Branden with founding the self-esteem movement, as do Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement

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(New York: Free Press, 2009), 63. Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend: Conversations with Two Psychoanalysts (New York: Random House, 1971). Maj-Britt Rosenbaum, “What Makes a Woman a Good Lover,” Mademoiselle, September 1981. “Remarkably productive”: Phyllis Lee Levin, “How to Succeed as a Teenager,” New York Times Magazine, 18 April 1965. Quizzes in Porat, “How Much Do You Like Yourself?”; Alan D. Hass, “Do You Like Yourself?” Catholic Digest, September 1978; and Marsha Rabe-Cochran, “How High Is Your Self-Esteem?” Seventeen, April 1978. “We Black people”: Susan L. Taylor, “Personal Notes on Self-Love,” Essence, July 1982. “Have a sense of purpose”: Wayne M. Dyer, “You Are What You Think!” Essence, March 1982. “No one”: Wista Johnson, “Self-Esteem: How to Grow (and Glow) on Your Own Love,” Essence, October 1982. “Mental harmony”: Brierley, “Psycho-Analysis and Integrative Living,” 91. “Believe me”: Porat, “How Much Do You Like Yourself?” 184. 42. “Poll”: “America Seems to Feel Good about Self-Esteem,” Newsweek, 17 February 1992. “California”: David Gelman, “Pondering Self-Esteem,” Newsweek, 2 March 1987; Siobhan Ryan, “The Self-Esteem Task Force—Making California Feel Good,” Newsweek, 1 June 1990. “Minnesota”: Jerry Adler, “Hey, I’m Terrific,” Newsweek, 16 February 1992. Lasch, “For Shame: Why Americans Should Be Wary of Self-Esteem,” The New Republic, 10 August 1992. 43. “Record of a psychologist”: H. H. Schroeder, “Self-Esteem and the Love of Recognition as Sources of Conduct,” International Journal of Ethics 19 (1909): 172–192, at 173. “General prescription”: Adler, “Hey, I’m Terrific.” “Professional view”: Gregg Levoy, “Mirror, Mirror . . . Do I Look Sick to You?” Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 December 1978. 44. “Vital for satisfaction”: James Masterson in Daniel Goleman, “Narcissism Looming Larger as Root of Personality Woes,” New York Times, 1 November 1988. “Mental well-being”: Robert Michels in Goleman, “Analyzing the New York Syndrome,” New York Times Magazine, 4 November 1984. “Such a thing”: Susan Price in Alexandra Penney, “Showing Some New Muscle,” New York Times, 15 June 1980. 45. Robert Michels in Goleman, “New York Syndrome.”

5. Independence 1. “Enlightened childrearing”: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 230. “There is no such thing”: Heinz Kohut, Self Psychology and

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the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach, ed. Charles B. Strozier (New York: Norton, 1985), 262, “you need” at 238, “try and give up” at 262. 2. “Screaming and beating”: Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911), Standard Edition 12:219n.4. “His Majesty”: Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Standard Edition 12:91. 3. “Provided one includes”: Freud, “Formulations,” 221–222n.4. “Would he theorize”: Jim Swan, “Mater and Nannie: Freud’s Two Mothers and the Discovery of the Oedipus Complex,” American Imago 31 (1974), 1–64. Freud, “Female Sexuality” (1931), Standard Edition 21:221–244. “Think of any need”: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition 21:72. 4. “Without wants”: Ferenczi, “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality” (1913), in Contributions, 218–220. “For all of us”: Alice Blint, “Love for the Mother and Mother-Love,” IJP 30 (1949): 251–259, at 254. 5. “Revival”: Freud, “On Narcissism,” 91, “new” at 75, “themselves” at 88 (emphasis in original). 6. “Purely hypothetical”: Christopher Dare and Alex Holder, “Developmental Aspects of the Interaction between Narcissism, Self-Esteem and Object Relations,” IJP 62 (1981): 323–337, at 326. “Tautological”: H. Shmuel Erlich and Sidney S. Blass, “Narcissism and Object Love—The Metapsychology of Experience,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 40 (1985): 57–79, at 61. “Unnecessary concept”: Robert Caper, “Response,” IJP 79 (1998): 390–391. “No recognizable state”: J. O. Wisdom, “Comparison and Development of the PsychoAnalytical Theories of Melancholia,” IJP 43 (1962): 113–132, at 119. Heinz Henseler, “Narcissism as a Form of Relationship,” in Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” ed. Joseph Sandler, Ethel Spector Person, and Peter Fonagy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 210, writes that primary narcissism can be considered a “myth [that] yet tells us something true.” For a defense of primary narcissism, see, for example, André Green, “The Analyst, Symbolization and Absence in the Analytic Setting (On Changes in Analytic Practice and Analytic Experience)—In Memory of D. W. Winnicott,” IJP 56 (1975): 1–22. Daniel Greenberg, “Instinct and Primary Narcissism in Freud’s Later Theory: An Interpretation and Reformulation of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ ” IJP 71 (1990): 271–283, discusses the theoretical difficulties the concept presented to what was at that point established Freudian metapsychology. “No real existence”: Ian Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate (New York: The Julian Press, 1952 [1935]), 30. On Suttie, see Howard A. Bacal, “British Object-Relations Theorists and Self Psychology: Some Critical Reflections,” IJP 68 (1987): 81–98.

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“Did not exist”: Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner, eds., The Freud-Klein Controversies, 1941–45 (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991), 253. See also Michael Balint, “Primary Narcissism and Primary Love,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 29 (1960): 6–43; and The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999 [1969]), 64–72. In “Primary Narcissism,” at 10, Balint wrote that “it is remarkable that the paper, On Narcissism, which introduced this theory does not contain a concise description of primary narcissism. Nevertheless, it is well known that primary narcissism became the standard theory used in describing the individual’s most primitive relationship with his environment, and in this connection Freud referred to it repeatedly in his later writings.” 7. For a reading of primary narcissism focused on the paradoxes of authority and nurturance, see José Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), esp. 149–151. “Both infant”: Peter Hammond Schwartz, “ ‘His Majesty the Baby’: Narcissism and Royal Authority,” Political Theory 17 (1989): 266– 290, at 273, “two” at 267. 8. “Freud’s life blood”: Jones, Freud 2:467. “Lordly feeling”: Jones, Freud 1:335, letter to Fliess, 16 April 1896 (translated by Masson, editor of the Freud/ Fliess correspondence, as “a cocky feeling”). “Like a woman”: Freud to Jung, 24 September 1910. 9. “Freud insisted”: Jones, Freud 2:467. “Anybody who had the privilege”: Fritz Wittels, “Freud: His Life and His Mind,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 17 (1948): 261–265, at 262. “Dazzled by the beauty”: Oskar Pfister to Frau Freud, 12 December 1939, in Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, ed. Heinrich Meng and Ernst L. Freud, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 145. “Had a wife like Martha”: Ernst Simmel, cited in Katya Behling, Martha Freud: A Biography, trans. R. D. V. Glasgow (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 67. “Talent to make life easier”: Freud to Mathilde Freud, 19 March 1908, in Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 271–272. “Remove from his path”: Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 43. 10. “Ministering angels”: Jones, Freud 2:468. “Occasioned discomfort”: Jenny Diski, “The Housekeeper of a World-Shattering Theory,” London Review of Books (23 March 2006), 13–14. See Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), at 157, on Freud’s daily routine. “Helping hand”: Behling, Martha Freud, 67. “Voluminous correspondence”: Ernst L. Freud, “Preface,” Letters of Freud, ix. On Freud’s writing, see also Steven Marcus,

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“Introduction,” Letters of Freud, v–viii, and Freud to Jung, 3 December 1910 (“I can never start writing before ten o’clock at night.”). David Galef and Harold Galef, “Freud’s Wife,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 32 (2004): 499–519, at 507, quotes the Freuds’ son Martin writing of his mother, with the family relocated to the mountains every summer, “exchanging her normal role of an ordinary, practical housewife for the cold and calculating organizing genius of a senior officer of the Prussian General Staff.” 11. “Form of pornography”: Gay, Freud, 61. “Packets”: Freud to Ferenczi, 15 February 1914. “Feminine ineptitude”: Jones, Freud 2:439; Freud to Ferenczi, 24 March 1912, n.1. “Sophie”: Freud to Jung, 31 October 1910. “Mistress of the typewriter”: Freud to Ferenczi, 6 August 1924; “Bernays oversaw”: 21 November 1909; and Freud to Jung, 5 March 1908. “Can’t take care”: Freud to Ferenczi, 21 November 1909. “I’ve just handed my Contribution to the Psychology of Love to a helpful member of the family to send off to you,” Freud wrote to Jung on 10 January 1912. 12. “Passionate friendship”: Jones, Freud 1:316, “manful” at 1:346. Jones, Freud 3:46, writes that “it would be a mistake to think that Freud felt any personal dependence” on his closest colleagues, “even on the one nearest to him, Ferenczi. All such traces of dependence had vanished for good after the break with Fliess.” 13. “Terrifying strength”: Jones, Freud 1:325, “complete opposite” at 1:324, “need of psychological dependence” at 1:343, “gratifying mutual admiration” at 1:333, “Freud’s need” at 1:328. Jones writes at 1:306 that learning of Freud’s complaining to Fliess (preparing the biography, Jones had privileged access to Freud’s letters to Fliess) was “surprising” to him, adding “it is so alien to the real Freud.” 14. “Emotionally involved”: Jones, Freud 2:33. “I now realize”: Freud to Jung, 7 April 1907; “crown prince”: 16 April 1909; “personality was impoverished”: 18 August 1907. There is a substantial literature on the Freud–Jung relationship. Among the most perceptive commentators are Leonard Shengold, “The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung,” JAPA 24 (1976): 669–683, questioning Jones’s assertion that the correspondence was more important to Jung than to Freud; Hans W. Loewald, “Transference and Countertransference: The Roots of Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 46 (1977): 514–527; and Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000), chap. 16. Shengold, “Freud/Jung Letters,” at 671 characterized the relationship as “a love story with

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a bad ending,” and Loewald, “Transference and Countertransference,” at 518, writes of the two that “they loved each other for a time, although never without reservations.” On Freud’s anxiety, see Freud to Jung, 11 November 1909: “It probably isn’t nice of you to keep me waiting 25 days . . . for an answer. . . . I don’t wish to importune you in the event that you yourself don’t feel the need of corresponding at shorter intervals”; Jung to Freud, 7 March 1909: “Please don’t chide me for my negligence”; Freud to Jung, 9 March 1909, in reply: “Many thanks for your telegram and letter, which (the telegram in itself did the trick) put an end to my anxiety. I evidently still have a traumatic hyperaesthesia toward dwindling correspondence. I remember its genesis well (Fliess) and should not like to repeat such an experience unawares.” Ernest L. Wolf, “Psychologische Aspekte des Briefwechsels zwischen Freud und Jung (Psychological Aspects of the Correspondence Between Freud and Jung),” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 53 (1984): 450–454, at 451, notes that “the weekly letter to Jung became the highlight of Freud’s existence, even a ‘Bedürfnis’ (need), according to Freud” (parens. in original). 15. “Quite certain”: Freud to Jung, 3 May 1908; “nothing can befall”: 26 September 1910; “otherwise we agree”: 5 March 1912. “Face of the loss”: Ferenczi to Freud, 20 July 1914. “Jung’s significance”: Freud to Ferenczi, 22 July 1914. “Alone, at last”: Ferenczi to Freud, 27 July 1914. 16. “Emotionally quite uninvolved”: Freud to Ferenczi, 28 July 1912. “Excessive emotional neediness”: Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19 (1994): 309–336, at 312. Fraser and Gordon see the inception of a psychologically tinged dependency in the 1950s, later than do I here. 17. “Girlish”: Felix Boehm, “The Femininity-Complex in Men,” IJP 11 (1930): 444–469, at 466. “Morbid”: Karen Horney, Self-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1942), 190–247. “Paralyzing”: Smith Ely Jelliffe, “The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,” Psychoanalytic Review 24A (1937): 83–103, at 97. “To be really progressive”: J. C. F. [J. C. Flügel], “The Ego and the Id,” IJP 8 (1927): 407–417, at 413. Some have theorized that Freud turned to Oedipus as a solution to the problem of dependency, among them Swan, “Mater and Nannie,” and Jessica Benjamin, “The Oedipal Riddle: Authority, Autonomy, and the New Narcissism,” in The Problem of Authority in America, ed. John P. Diggins and Mark E. Kann (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). “Biological”: Jones, “The Early Development of Female Sexuality” (1927), in Jones, Papers on Psycho-Analysis, 5th ed. (London: Maresfield Reprints, 1977 [1948]), 441.

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“Physiological”: Benjamin, “Oedipal Riddle,” 204. “Obvious physiological reasons”: Jones, “Female Sexuality,” 462. “Enterprise, responsibility”: Jones, “Some Problems of Adolescence” (1922), in Papers on Psycho-Analysis, 396. Annie Reich theorized what she termed Hörigkeit (extreme submissiveness) as a particular pathology of womanhood: “A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Extreme Submissiveness in Women,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 9 (1940): 470– 480, and “Narcissistic Object Choice in Women,” JAPA 1 (1953): 22–44. 18. “Psychic dependency”: Suttie, Love and Hate, 173. “Anxious consideration”: Jones to Suttie, 14 June 1923, cited in Vincent Brome, Ernest Jones: Freud’s Alter Ego (New York: Norton, 1983), 144. “Mature dependency”: W. R. D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London: Routledge, 1999 [1952]), 34–42; the concept was not discussed in the analytic literature until the 1970s. 19. “Consumption”: Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984), 33, “hedonistic” at 15. On Lasch and dependency as feminine, see Lasch, “The Emotions of Family Life,” New York Review of Books, 27 November 1975, cited in Benjamin, “Oedipal Riddle,” 222. 20. Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 71–74. 21. “Complete dependence”: Lasch, Minimal Self, at 34, “elderly” at 42. 22. “Important consequences”: Ibid., 36, “housekeeping” at 43. On feminist scholarship, see Victoria de Grazia, “Introduction,” to The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 7. 23. I am here indebted to de Grazia’s “Introduction,” and her “Changing Consumption Regimes,” in de Grazia, Sex of Things, esp. 14, both masterful overviews. 24. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books, 1994 [1899]), 81–83. 25. “Poultry-raising”: U. G. Weatherly, “How Does the Access of Women to Industrial Occupations React on the Family?” American Journal of Sociology 14 (1909): 740–765, at 740–742. “Large leisure class”: Maurice Parmelee, “The Economic Basis of Feminism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (November 1914): 18–26, at 19. “Partners to parasites”: Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (London: Virago Press, 1978 [1929]), cited by Hilary Land, “The Family Wage,” Feminist Review 6 (1980): 55–77, at 57. Both Lorine Pruette,

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“The Married Woman and the Part-Time Job,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 143 (May 1929): 301–314, at 303, and Amey E. Watson, “The Reorganization of Household Work,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 160 (March 1932): 165–177, at 168, used the term parasite in reference to the modern housewife. The charge also surfaced in Rosalind Cassidy, “Careers for Women,” Journal of Educational Sociology 17 (1944): 479–491, at 484: “The Russians have long been disdainful of our parasite class of women,” who, she wrote, “demand great luxury and give nothing in return to the social process.” 26. “Done for love”: Watson, “Reorganization of Household Work,” 169–173 (emphasis in original). “Buy everything”: “The American Family in Trouble,” Life Magazine, 26 July 1948, cited in Selected Studies in Marriage and the Family, ed. Robert F. Winch and Graham B. Spanier (New York: Henry Holt, 1974), 19. “Drudgery of housecleaning”: Arnold W. Green, “The Middle Class Male Child and Neurosis,” American Sociological Review 11 (1946): 31–41, at 37. “Large and satisfying world”: Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 126. Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), at 5, noted that in the cultural figure of the middle-class “Lady of Leisure,” the parasitism of women was valorized. Ernest R. Groves, The American Woman: The Feminine Side of a Masculine Civilization (New York: Emerson Books, 1944), at 370, argued that parasitism was “more rare than people suppose, even in families of great wealth,” testimony to the commonness of the charge. David Potter registered the argument, writing in 1959 that “some embittered critics have retorted that modern woman, no longer a processor of goods, has lost her economic function.” He argued that women had become consumers rather than producers and that managing a family’s consumption was “no mean task”: “American Women and the American Character,” in American Character and Culture in a Changing World: Some Twentieth-Century Perspectives, ed. John A. Hague (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 218–219. 27. “Provide for their own needs”: Lasch, Minimal Self, 33. Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Lasch became well known for his hostility to feminism; consider, as exemplary, his explanation for feminism’s appeal to professional women in his Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995): “Female careerism provides the indispensable basis of their prosperous, glamorous, gaudy, sometimes indecently lavish way of life” (cited by Michiko Kakutani,

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“Sounding Like Quayle Blasting Cultural Elites,” New York Times, 13 January 1995). 28. “Phony value”: Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities, 262, “alive” at 234. In Kohut, Search 3:377, for example, Kohut writes of “Mr. X’s” need “to develop an independent and vigorous self.” Kohut wrote to an unnamed colleague in 1978 that from the perspective of self psychology, “a value-laden demand for psychological independence is nonsense—almost as nonsensical as would be a demand that the human body should be able to get along without oxygen”: Kohut, Search 4:572. Michael Balint, “Three Areas of the Mind— Theoretical Considerations,” IJP 39 (1958): 328–340, at 337, used air to make a similar point; writing of the infant’s primary relatedness, he argued that “we use the air, in fact we cannot live without it, we inhale it and then exhale it . . . without paying the slightest attention to it.” For independence in the egopsychological tradition, see Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: Norton, 1945), 464. 29. “Fearful or stubborn”: Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis—an Examination of the Relationship between Mode of Observation and Theory,” JAPA 7 (1959): 459–483, at 475. In Search 1:173 (1953), Kohut argues that dependence is among the analytic terms leading “a sham existence in the no-man’s-land between biology and psychology.” 30. “Remobilized”: Kohut to Robert Sussman, 8 April 1967, Kohut, Curve, 165–166. “Moral view”: Kohut, Search 3:324. See also Kohut, Search 4:521, 573. 31. “Independent self”: Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities, 262. “Vibrantly alive”: Kohut, Search 3:133. David Riesman, “The Themes of Work and Play in the Structure of Freud’s Thought,” Psychiatry 13 (1950): 1–16, at 6, registers the strangeness of Freud’s view that “man needs to be driven into reality. . . . Children, [Freud] felt, naturally did not want to grow up; they must be forcibly socialized, forcibly adapted to reality. . . . In all this, Freud patronizes infancy and childhood.” “Supposedly joyous”: Kohut, Search 4:702. “Severe psychopathology”: Kohut, letter to unnamed conference participant, September 1978, in Kohut, Advances in Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1980). 32. “Psychological abstraction”: Kohut, Search 1, 180. “Not bother you”: Kohut, Seminars, 10–11. 33. Kernberg in Kenneth Woodward, “The New Narcissism,” Newsweek, 30 January 1978. “Normal needs”: Kernberg, “Factors in the Psychoanalytic

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Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities,” JAPA 18 (1970): 51–85, at 55–56; see also Kernberg, “Further Contributions to the Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities,” IJP 55 (1974): 215–240. “Autarkic kingdoms”: Joyce McDougall, “The Narcissistic Economy and its Relation to Primitive Sexuality,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 18 (1982): 373–396, at 381. “Greatest threat”: Brian Bird, “A Specific Peculiarity of Acting Out,” JAPA 5 (1957): 630–647, at 639. 34. “Inordinate fear”: Ben Bursten, “Some Narcissistic Personality Types,” IJP 54 (1973): 287–300, at 290. See Kenneth Eisold, “Freud as Leader: The Early Years of the Viennese Society,” IJP 78 (1997): 87–104, on the politics of dependency among Freud and his colleagues. “I care for nobody”: Suttie, Love and Hate, 231. “Infantile dependency”: Freud to Jung, 22 December 1912; also cited in François Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 15. “His Dependence”: Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud’s Mission: An Analysis of His Personality and Influence (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), 38–54, “idolizing” at 40. See Breger, Darkness in the Midst of Vision, on Freud’s regulation of closeness with his epistolary intimates. Consider the sardonic comment of Wilhelm Stekel, “On the History of the Analytic Movement,” Psychoanalysis and History 7 (2005): 99–130, at 125: “Many students of Freud were lucky enough to live far away from the master, and they were able to deal with his sensitivities.” Kohut, Search 2:806, writes that “we must admire the cleverness of Freud’s choice of Fliess [as correspondent and proto-analyst], with whom he was not in direct contact most of the time—the behind-thecouch distance and invisibility of the ordinary analyst was here replaced by the distance between Vienna and Berlin.” 35. “Abiding primacy”: Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi-Circle of Mental Health,” IJP 63 (1982): 395–407, at 399. “Way of life”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, xv, “fear of dependence” at 231. In his more technical discussions of psychoanalytic theory, Lasch could align himself with the revisionist analytic tradition that saw dependency as a fact and self-sufficiency as illusory, and treated the denial of the former and desire for the latter—and here the two analytic traditions are in agreement—as narcissistic. That his vernacular and analytic voices argued contrary positions went largely unnoticed.

6. Vanity 1. “Normal feminine vanity”: Otto Rank, “A Contribution to the Study of Narcissism,” abstracted in Leonard Blumgart, “Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische

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und psychopathologische Forschungen,” Psychoanalytic Review 7 (1920): 79– 109, at 100. “Lost penis”: J. Hárnik, “The Various Developments Undergone by Narcissism in Men and Women,” IJP 5 (1924): 66–83, at 68; see also Hárnik, “Pleasure in Disguise, the Need for Decoration, and the Sense of Beauty,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1 (1932): 216–264. 2. Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Standard Edition 14:esp. 88–89. 3. Ibid., 89. 4. “Sense of power”: Louis W. Flaccus, “Remarks on the Psychology of Clothes,” Pedagogical Seminary 13–14 (1906–1907): 61–83, at 70. “Selfish ruthlessness”: John E. Gedo, “The Enduring Scientific Contributions of Sigmund Freud,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 29 (2001): 105–115, at 113. 5. “Pride and acquisitiveness”: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 59. Lasch discussed vanity only in passing, at 31, faulting Erich Fromm for misusing the clinician’s narcissism in too readily equating it with vanity and self-glorification, and lauding Richard Sennett for his deployment of the “well-known clinical fact” that “narcissism has more in common with selfhatred than with self-admiration.” 6. “Clothes fetishists”: Louis Rose, “Freud and Fetishism: Previously Unpublished Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society” [meeting of 24 February 1909], Psychoanalytic Quarterly 57 (1988): 147–166, at 156. “General command”: Freud (15 March 1911), in Minutes 3:199. “Parts of a woman’s body”: Rose, “Freud and Fetishism,” 151; all other quotations at 155–156. Arleen Kramer Richards, “Ladies of Fashion: Pleasure, Perversion or Paraphilia,” IJP 77 (1996): 337–351, briefly discusses Freud’s remarks. Freud also discussed clothes fetishism in a letter to Abraham, 18 February 1909. Freud would later explain in his 1927 essay “Fetishism” (Standard Edition 21:147–158) that the fetish was a substitute for woman’s missing penis, specifically the “quite special penis” (at 152) that the boy believed his mother possessed before the moment he had to confront the lack that defined her difference from him. The fetish object in this iteration of the issue offered reassurance of male triumph over “the horror of castration” (at 154) visited on woman, allowing men to at once disavow and affirm the same—although it was not entirely clear to early analysts whether the horror was felt more keenly by men or by women, given that, as one pointed out, only a tortuous logic could ascribe to women, born without penises, a fear analogous to the man’s of losing his narcissistically invested organ. In his 1909 discussion of fetishism, however, Freud briefly alighted on the

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ground of pleasure and erotic exchange—suggesting the woman’s exhibitionistic “act of undressing” offered gratifications both to her and to the man she enticed thereby—before turning to what would become the more familiar ground of womanly lack and male horror. 7. “Psychic consequences”: J. Hárnik, “The Economic Relations Between the Sense of Guilt and Feminine Narcissism,” in “The Tenth International Psychoanalytic Congress,” Psychoanalytic Review 15 (1928): 85–107, at 95. For castration as a truism, consider the comments of Karl Abraham, “Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex,” IJP 3 (1922): 1–29, and Sándor Radó, “Fear of Castration in Women,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): 425–475; Radó writes, at 425,n.35 that illustrating his contentions by reference to case histories “would be a hopeless task,” so “widely distributed” and “available to all practicing analysts” was the clinical material. For a later example, see Heinrich Meng and Erich Stern, “Organ-Psychosis,” Psychoanalytic Review 42 (1955): 428–434, at 430: “Freud already has said that narcissism is more pronounced in females than in males.” “Authentic type”: Freud (21 February 1912), in Minutes 4:53–55. Freud further developed the argument, broached in the meeting, that characterizes maternal love as narcissistic, a love of self, in “On Narcissism,” 89–90—where love of the child is the pathway to “complete object-love” available to women. The “fact” of castration and the development of the castration complex, at first thought to exist only in men, is a complex issue. To his colleagues, Freud explained on 20 March 1912 (Minutes 4:80–81) that “the woman has no need of this fantasy [of castration], since she has come into this world already castrated, as a woman”; they meanwhile discussed “the woman’s fantasy of cutting off the penis,” here referring to the man’s penis, not hers, as well as their finding in male castration fantasies “the wish to be a woman.” In both of these instances the penis is male, not the fantasized female analogue. Abraham, “Manifestations,” 2–7, proposed a tidy theory of the girl’s sexual development, focused on the narcissistic injuries caused by her “poverty in external genitals” and her hope of “getting a child from her father—as a substitute for the penis.” Observation showed, however, that “the normal end-aim of development”—the girl’s acceptance of her passive sexual role and longing for a child—was frequently “not attained.” Freud’s fellow analysts applauded his solution to the obscurities of the issue in his 1925 “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1923–1925), Standard Edition 19:241–258, commending him for substituting penis envy for the logically implausible female castration complex in the girl’s developmental schema; see Radó, “Fear of Castration,” for

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an example. See also the comments of H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), who wrote of penis envy after hearing of it from Freud in the guise of a new theory he “does not dare write . . . because he does not want to make enemies of women”: “Now this strikes me as being a clue to everything”: H. D. to Bryher, 3 May 1933, in Arlene Kramer Richards, “Freud and Feminism: A Critical Appraisal,” JAPA 47 (1999): 1213–1238, at 1231. 8. “Made a woman”: Radó, “Fear of Castration,” 436. Radó writes at 433 of the “narcissistic shock,” the loss of self-esteem, and the “severe emotional upset” girls experience upon first seeing the penis. “Figure and face”: Hárnik, “Various Developments,” 69. “Powerfully erotic”: Rank (20 March 1912), in Minutes 4:80; also in Rank, “Contribution,” 100–103. Sabrina Speilrein (20 March 1912), in Minutes 4:79, argued that women were generally more erotic than men, adding that in women “anything can serve as a means of stimulation.” “Also features men”: Havelock Ellis, “The Conception of Narcissism,” Psychoanalytic Review 14 (1927): 129–153, at 134–135. The notion that women’s bodies were analogous to men’s penises can be found in the literature as late as the 1980s; consider, for example, Doris Bernstein, “The Female Superego: A Different Perspective,” IJP 64 (1983): 187–201, at 194: “Female narcissism as it is expressed in clothing and jewelry is usually interpreted as a displacement from the penis, i.e., girls treat their whole bodies as a penis to exhibit.” 9. “Gilded cage”: David Riesman, “The Themes of Work and Play in Freud’s Thought,” Psychiatry 13 (1950): 1–16, at 5, commenting on the enduring power of Freud’s analysis of women’s lot, in which he saw similarities to Veblen’s more ironically cast analysis: Women’s “very narcissism makes them desirable objects of display.” “Vicious circle”: J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (New York: International Universities Press, 1969 [1930]), 116, “man in civilian clothes” at 213–214. 10. “Ruinous competition”: Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, 114, 137–145, “ ‘excessive ‘modishness’ ” at 214. 11. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 88–89. See also Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), esp. 50–65. 12. Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, 101–110. 13. References to Flügel’s book are sprinkled throughout the analytic literature; see, for example, Elizabeth A. Reilly, “Skin Deep: Psychic Skin, SecondSkin Formation and its Links with Eating Disorders,” Free Associations 11 (2004): 134–174, at 160–167. “Silk, velvet”: Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, 88, “defiant use” at 188–189. Contrast Flügel’s celebration of women’s cosmetic

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practices with Hárnik’s interpretation of them as “narcissistic compensations”: Hárnik, “Pleasure in Disguise,” 11. 14. “Feeling of incompleteness”: Sylvia H. Bliss, “The Significance of Clothes,” American Journal of Psychology 27 (1916): 217–226, at 221, “attempt to remedy” at 224. Bliss was also the author of “The Origin of Laughter,” American Journal of Psychology 26 (1915): 236–246. 15. “Exquisite attire”: Bliss, “Significance of Clothes,” 224. “Commandeered his weapons”: H. Dennis Bradley, The Eternal Masquerade (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), 249. “Sexual apathy”: Herbert C. Sanborn, “The Function of Clothing and of Bodily Adornment,” American Journal of Psychology 38 (1927): 1–20, at 2. “Slothful effeminacy”: Bradley, Eternal Masquerade, 253. 16. “Mere vanity”: Sanborn, “Function of Clothing,” 8–9. “Source of pleasure”: Hermann Lotze, Microcosmos: An Essay Concerning Man and His Relation to the World, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1888), 590–591, a source for Sanborn. “Extension of personality”: Knight Dunlap, “The Development and Function of Clothing,” Journal of General Psychology 1 (1928): 64–78, at 67. “Inner necessity”: Sanborn, “Function of Clothing,” 10. “Pleasurable tang”: Flaccus, “Psychology of Clothes,” 70. “Other selves”: Bliss, “Significance of Clothes,” 226. 17. “Vanity and self-expression”: Flaccus, “Psychology of Clothes,” 62–63, in a study based on findings from 181 responses to the survey devised and distributed by the Clark University psychologist G. Stanley Hall. “Ready for all contingencies”: Flügel, “On the Mental Attitude to Present-Day Clothes: Report on a Questionnaire,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 9 (1929): 97– 149, at 121, “tends to make” at 123. “Feel a rise”: Flaccus, “Psychology of Clothes,” 73, “feeling of equality” at 76. “Heavenly sensations”: Flügel, “Mental Attitude to Clothes,” at 128, “gender difference” at 144. 18. “Skin and muscle erotism”: Flügel, “Mental Attitude to Clothes,” 148. “Sake of an idea”: Flügel, “Clothes Symbolism and Clothes Ambivalence,” IJP 10 (1929): 205–217, at 217 (emphasis in original). In his “Mental Attitude to Clothes,” Flügel presented the subject’s statement sans erection: “render him more potent” at 147–148. 19. There is remarkably little on clothing in the analytic corpus, a lack noted by Reilly, “Skin Deep,” 168. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994), esp. 14–29, brilliantly mounts a case for fashion as an imaginative art. She objects at 22–23 to Flügel’s position that men quit the field of fashion in the revolutionary moment, seeing modern men’s fashion as “an impressive achievement in modern visual design.” “Mere caprice”: Bliss, “Signifi-

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cance of Clothes,” 225. “Symbol of personality”: Bradley, Eternal Masquerade, 250. “Empty vanity”: Gerald Heard, Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924), 148. “Masquerade”: Bliss, “Significance of Clothes,” 226. “Two-sided”: Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, 145–148. 20. “Tolerate the male body”: Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, 212–213. “Feminine armor”: Ralph A. Luce, “From Hero to Robot: Masculinity in America—Stereotype and Reality,” Psychoanalytic Review 54D (1967): 53–74, at 64. 21. This paragraph draws on the richly imagined paper by Barry Richards, “Car Bodies,” Free Associations 1Q (1989): 97–105. On the automobile, see also B. J. Bolin, “Men, Women and Cars,” Psychoanalytic Review 45B (1958): 113–116, which equates the man’s car and the woman’s home; Eugene H. Kaplan, “Attitudes toward Automobiles: An Aid to Psychiatric Evaluation and Treatment of Adolescents,” Journal of the Hillside Hospital 10 (1961): 3–13; James V. Hamilton, “Some Cultural Determinants of Intrapsychic Structure and Psychopathology,” Psychoanalytic Review 58 (1971): 279–294, at 288; and Ben Bursten, “Some Narcissistic Personality Types,” IJP 54 (1973): 287–300, at 291. On men’s clothing in the 1960s, see Gert Heilbrunn, “How ‘Cool’ Is the Beatnik?” Psychoanalytic Forum 2 (1967): 31–55. 22. Joan Riviere, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” IJP 15 (1934): 329–339. 23. All quotes in ibid. Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” IJP 10 (1929): 303–313. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Riviere’s major publications may be found in Riviere, The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers, 1920– 1958, ed. Athol Hughes (London: Karnac Books, 1991). On Riviere, from the analytic perspective, see Hughes, “Joan Riviere: Her Life and Work,” in Hughes, Inner World, 1–43; Hughes, “Letters from Sigmund Freud to Joan Riviere (1921–1939),” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 19 (1992): 265–284; Hughes, “Personal Experiences—Professional Interests: Joan Riviere and Femininity,” IJP 78 (1997): 899–911; Hughes, “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade,” Psychoanalysis and History 6 (2004): 61–175; Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 352–365; Anton Kris, “Freud’s Treatment of a Narcissistic Patient,” IJP 75 (1994): 649–664; and obituaries by James Strachey and Paula Heiman, “Joan Riviere (1883–1962),” IJP 44 (1963): 228–235. See also Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), esp. chap. 8. Nonanalytic treatments include Stephen Heath, “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade,”

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in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1986), 45–61; Mary Ann Doane, “Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator,” Discourse 2 (Fall–Winter 1988–1989): 42–54; and Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), chap. 4. On coquetry, see the suggestive comments of Ellen Bayuk, “Fear of Fashion; Or, How the Coquette Got Her Bad Name,” ANQ 15, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 12–21. 24. On female self-sufficiency in the analytic tradition, see Kofman, Enigma of Woman, esp. 50–65. 25. “Holds and cherishes within”: Riviere, “New Introductory Lectures,” 337. “Turned to the widows”: Riviere, “The Bereaved Wife,” in Fatherless Children: A Contribution to the Understanding of Their Needs, ed. Susan Isaacs, Joan Riviere, and Ella Freeman Sharpe (London: Pouskin Press, 1945), 17. 26. Riviere, “New Introductory Lectures,” 335–337. 27. On Riviere as translator, see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998 [1988]), 465; Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud’s Women, 353; and Nina Bakman, “She Can be Put to Work: Joan Riviere as Translator Between Freud and Jones,” Psychoanalysis and History 10 (2008): 21–36. Biographical information from Diary of Joan Riviere, Joan Riviere collection, Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, P02-C-03. 28. Ernest Jones, “The God Complex: The Belief That One Is God, and the Resulting Character Traits,” in Jones, Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1951), 244–265. “Dominant note”: Riviere, “The Private Character of Queen Elizabeth,” IJP 3 (1922): 256–259, at 259. 29. Riviere, “Womanliness,” 304. 30. Ibid., 305–306. 31. “Foolish and bewildered”: Ibid., 308. “Transgressive scene”: Joan Scott, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27 (Winter 2001): 284–304, esp. 293–297. “Mask of womanly subservience”: Riviere, “Womanliness,” 311. 32. “Inner emotional needs”: Riviere, “Hate, Greed and Aggression,” in Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere, Love, Hate and Reparation (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1937), 50. 33. Flaccus, “Psychology of Clothes,” 64. 34. “Possess, acquire”: Riviere, “The Unconscious Phantasy of an Inner World Reflected in Examples from English Literature,” IJP 33 (1952): 160–172,

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at 164–167. “Human nature”: D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1953), in Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1989 [1971]), 2. 35. Riviere, “Hate, Greed and Aggression,” 15–16. 36. “Something good”: Ibid., 26. “Vanity and self-esteem”: Riviere, “Unconscious Phantasy,” 162. 37. “Essential parts”: Riviere, “Unconscious Phantasy,” 162, “suspicion and intolerance” at 160, “I shall always have him” at 167, “praise and recognition” at 161. See also Riviere, “The Inner World in Ibsen’s Master-Builder,” IJP 33 (1952): 173–180, esp. 174–175. For descriptions of behaviors that would now be considered narcissistic, see Riviere, “Hate, Greed and Aggression.” 38. The point about Freud’s and Riviere’s conceptions of narcissism is made by Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 137. “Hand-inhand”: Otto Kernberg, “Further Contributions to the Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities,” IJP 55 (1974): 215–240, at 235, “capacity to invest” at 220. 39. The term appears only twice in the analytic journal literature before Kernberg adopted it: Kernberg, “Structural Derivatives of Object Relationships,” IJP 47 (1966): 236–252, and through 1974 was used almost exclusively by him. 40. “Concept of man”: Kohut, Search 4:478. Kohut discussed the transitional object in Kohut, Seminars, 56–59, and in Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 2001 [1971]), xiv. In Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 [1977]), xiv, he wrote that among the terminological changes he had adopted was replacing the term “narcissistic transference” with “self-object transference.” “Throughout their lives”: Search 3:307. Arnold Modell, “The Missing Elements in Kohut’s Cure,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 6 (1986): 367–385, esp. 372–374, discusses similarities and differences between the two entities. 41. “Consolation and compensation”: Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 457–458, “as attractive as possible” at 540. 42. “Nonpossession”: Kohut, “On Female Sexuality” (1975), Search 2:785. “Who discovers”: “The Self in History” (1974), Search 2:776. “Chided”: “On Female Sexuality,” 783–791. 43. “Narcissistic soreness”: Freud, “Anatomical Distinction,” 140. “Flirtatiousness and whimsicality”: David Zippin, “Sex Differences and the Sense of

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Humor,” Psychoanalytic Review 53B (1966): 45–55, at 50. On the debut of gender neutrality, compare, for example, Philip Weissman, “Psychosexual Development in a Case of Neurotic Virginity and Old Maidenhood,” IJP 45 (1964): 110–120, and John E. Gedo, “Notes on the Psychoanalytic Management of Archaic Transferences,” JAPA 25 (1977): 787–803. On this question, I am indebted to the reading offered by Frank M. Lachmann, “Narcissism and Female Gender Identity,” Psychoanalytic Review 69 (1982): 43–61. 44. Pegg Levoy, “Mirror, Mirror . . . Do I Look Sick to You?” Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 December 1978.

7. Gratification 1. Christopher Lasch, “Gratification Now Is the Slogan of the ’70s, Laments a Historian,” People, 9 July 1970. 2. On the ubiquity of gratification in psychoanalysis, consider that it is discussed in circa 13,000 analytic papers and letters between Freud and his disciples. The corresponding numbers for several other key terms are narcissism (19,000), identity (14,500), and omnipotence (9,000). See Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: Norton, 1972 [1945]), 508, for gratification as unexceptionable: “The ego learns that it protects itself best against threats and procures a maximum of gratification if it judges reality objectively.” “Principle of indulgence”: Sándor Ferenczi, “The Principle of Relaxation and Neocatharsis” (1929), Final, 115; Ferenczi writes that this principle “must often be allowed to operate side by side that of frustration.” On Ferenczi’s “sicker” patients, see his “Child Analysis in the Analysis of Adults” (1931), Final, 128: “I have come to be a specialist in particularly difficult cases.” 3. For a comprehensive treatment of the restaging, see Arianne B. Palmer and William S. Meyer, “Gratification versus Frustration: The Legacy of the Schism between Ferenczi and Freud,” Clinical Social Work Journal 23 (1995): 249–269. See also Michael Balint, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999 [1969]), chap. 23 (“The disagreement between Freud and Ferenczi, and its repercussions”). 4. “If the world”: Balint, Primary Object Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique (London: Liveright, 1953), 63, in Bernard Brandchaft, “British Object Relations Theory and Self Psychology,” Progress in Self Psychology 2 (1986), 245–272, at 245. “Iatrogenic illness”: Samuel D. Lipton, “The Advantages of Freud’s Technique as Shown in His Analysis of the Rat Man,” IJP 58 (1977): 255–273, at 266. “Tacitly encouraged”: Peter C. Shabad, “The Unconscious

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Wish and Psychoanalytic Stoicism,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 27 (1991): 332–350, at 341. “Spoiling”: Ferenczi, “Child Analysis,” 136. “Coddling”: Ferenczi, “Relaxation and Neocatharsis,” 116. For an assessment of the current theoretical confusion around what it is analysts actually—and optimally should—do, see Lawrence Friedman, “Psychoanalysis: Practice and Technique,” JAPA 50 (2002): 727–732. 5. “Enfant terrible”: Ferenczi, “Child Analysis,” 127 (emphasis in original). “Most perfect heir”: Ferenczi, Diary, 184. The notion of the “wise baby” was first adumbrated in Ferenczi, “The Dream of the ‘Clever Baby’ ” (1923), in Ferenczi, Further 349–350, and it appears in several subsequently published papers. “State of frustration”: Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), Standard Edition 23: 231. 6. “Blood crisis”: Ferenczi, Diary, 212 (emphasis in original). “Formerly so lively”: Freud to Ferenczi, 21 July 1922. “Insensitivity of the analyst”: Ferenczi, Diary, 1. 7. “Unfeeling and indifferent”: Ferenczi, Diary, 1 (emphasis in original). “Fundamental rule”: Freud, “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912), Standard Edition 12:107. “Evenly-suspended attention”: Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis” (1912), Standard Edition 12: 111, “transmitting unconscious” at 115–116. 8. “What one should not do”: Freud to Ferenczi, 4 January 1928. Ferenczi incorporated portions of Freud’s letter in his essay “The Elasticity of PsychoAnalytic Technique” (1928), in Ferenczi, Final, 99, referring to Freud as “a colleague.” “Tact,” Ferenczi explained at 89, is “the capacity for empathy.” In 1930, Freud would tell Smiley Blanton, the American who had come to Vienna to enter analysis with him, that he felt his papers on technique were “entirely inadequate,” explaining that he did “not believe that one can give the methods of technique through papers. It must be done by personal teaching.” Freud argued that analysts conscientiously following his directions “will soon find themselves in trouble. Then they must learn to develop their own technique”: Blanton, Diary of My Analysis with Sigmund Freud (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1971), 48. “Like an elastic band”: Ferenczi, “Elasticity,” 95. “Own unrestrained complexes”: Freud to Ferenczi, 4 January 1928. 9. “One must ‘empathize’ ”: Ferenczi to Freud, 15 January 1928 (emphasis and brackets in English translation). “Empathy rule”: Ferenczi, “Elasticity,” 92, “dissection” at 89. 10. “Field of aesthetics”: Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherious Ikonomou, introduction to Robert Vischer et al., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems

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in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the Humanities, 1994), 1–85. On Lipps, see M. J. Blechner, “Epistemology: Ways of Knowing in Psychoanalysis (Panel Presentation)—Differentiating Empathy from Therapeutic Action,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 24 (1988): 301–310, at 302–303. “Stated quite clearly”: Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 31 August 1898. “Take up any attitude”: Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Standard Edition 18:110n.2. “Vile word”: Alix Strachey to James Strachey, 2 January 1925, in Bloomsbury Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–1925, ed. Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 170–171; also cited in George W. Pigman, “Freud and the History of Empathy,” IJP 76 (1995): 237–256, at 244. Pigman cites other English renderings of Einfühling in the Standard Edition: “have the feelings of,” “feel his way into,” “understand,” and “have an understanding sense.” 11. “Sympathetic understanding”: Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I)” (1913), Standard Edition 12:140. See Pigman, “Freud and Empathy,” 246, on the shortcomings of “sympathetic understanding.” 12. “Puts aside”: Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians,” 114, “own emotional life” at 115, “intimate attitude” at 118. The reflexive association of analysis with the practices of suggestion—telepathy and mediums, both of which he and Ferenczi discussed at length in their correspondence—threatened to undermine the hard-won scientific standing of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the British analyst Marjorie Brierley equated empathy and “true telepathy,” both of them “indispensable to sound analysis”: “Affects in Theory and Practice,” IJP 18 (1937): 256–268, at 267. 13. “Effected by love”: Freud to Jung, 6 December 1906. “Please us”: Freud (30 January 1907), Minutes 1:101 (emphasis in original). “False connection”: Freud, “The Psychotherapy of Hysteria in Studies on Hysteria” (1993), Standard Edition 2:303. 14. “Showdown”: Freud to Abraham, 29 July 1914. “Lacking in normality”: Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), Standard Edition 12: 168–169. 15. “Forget”: Freud, “Transference-Love,” 170, “charms” at 161, “suppress” at 164, “abstinence” at 165. Beate Lohser and Peter M. Newton, Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 192, argue that Strachey, in translating Freud’s “ein schönes Erlebnis”—“a beautiful experience”—as “a fine experience,” betrayed his own yearning for asepsis. It bears emphasizing that Freud conceived of abstinence as of a piece

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with drive psychology. As he explained, abstinence was necessary to ensure the patient’s frustration as motivation for the hard work of recovery from his or her illness and, as such, had to do, in his words, primarily with “the dynamics of falling ill and recovering.” Symptoms offered patients substitutive satisfactions, or gratifications, and as treatment progressed and symptoms were resolved, Freudian analysts were to ensure that their patients were sufficiently motivated to seek further relief by seeing to it that their suffering was not prematurely foreclosed. The patient in analysis must not be spoiled, Freud wrote, but “must be left with unfilled wishes in abundance. It is expedient to deny him precisely those satisfactions which he desires most intensely and expresses most importunately”: Freud, “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1919), Standard Edition 17:162–164. Freud worried the question of analytic cruelty in “Analysis Terminable,” esp. part 4. Jessica Benjamin, “What Angel Would Hear Me?: The Erotics of Transference,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 14 (1994): 535–557, at 542, notes that although Freud’s transference model “presumes the relation of male doctor to female hysteric,” he published only one case—his colleague Josef Breuer’s treatment of Anna O.—featuring this “heterosexual scenario”; Benjamin astutely notes “that the idealized and loving transference that Freud made paradigmatic” is to be found in the “homoerotic disciple relationship” between the training analyst and his male student. 16. “Horrible misery”: Freud to Fliess, 22 June 1894; “in abstinence”: 20 August 1893; “indescribably bleak”: 14 July 1894; “outrageously bad”: 22 June 1894; “severe cardiac misery”: 19 April 1894; “my case history”: 22 June 1894. 17. “State of frustration”: Freud, “Analysis Terminable,” 231 (echoing “Transference-Love,” 165). “Between the lips”: Erik Homburger Erikson, “Freud’s ‘The Origins of Psycho-Analysis,’ ” IJP 36 (1955): 1–15, at 5. 18. “Inner unrest”: Freud to Fliess, 4 December 1896. “Need and longing”: Freud, “Transference-Love,” 165. “Attracts people”: Freud to Fliess, 22 January 1898. “Renunciation and privation”: Eva Laible, “ ‘Through Privation to Knowledge’: Unknown Documents from Freud’s University Years,” IJP 74 (1993): 775–790, at 775, citing Freud’s 1911 contribution to a memorandum celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Society for the Support of Impecunious Jewish Students in Vienna, which had supported him in his medical studies thirty years previously. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. E. Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Books, 1963 [1922]), 237–238, writes that religiously prescribed asceticism did not constitute a withdrawal from the world but was gratifying and empowering. Commentary on Freud’s addiction to cigars peppers the analytic literature. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998

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[1988]), 169–170, writes of Freud’s fatal, helpless addiction, adducing Freud’s own statements to the effect that his habit was in the service of his “capacity for work and his ability to muster self-control”; Gay cites Freud’s writing to Fliess in 1897 that all addictions were substitutes for the “primal addiction”— masturbation. Kohut, “Creativeness, Charisma, Group Psychology” (1976), in Search 2:793–843, at 816–817, notes Freud’s “unbreakable bondage to cigar smoking,” seeing in it evidence of a “depression like state of procreative inner emptiness”—like Gay stressing its relation to Freud’s productivity—and citing a letter to Fliess (12 June 1895) in which Freud wrote of the “psychic rascal” (psychischen Kerl; translated by Masson as “psychic fellow”) within whom he had to appease with tobacco in order to work. 19. “Literal subordination” Ferenczi, Diary, 159, “total inhibition” at 185. Judith E. Vida, “Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary: Roadmap to the Realm of Primary Relatedness,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 21 (1993): 623–635, offers an astute reading of the Diary. “Older and more sensible”: Ferenczi to Freud, 15 May 1922. 20. “Boring”: Freud to Ferenczi, 10 November 1909; “disgusting”: 22 October 1909; “saturated”: 11 January 1930; “clear intent”: 11 October 1920. “Patients are a rabble”: Ferenczi, Diary, 93 (“neurotics are a rabble” at 185– 186). “Inclined to intolerance”: Freud to Ferenczi, 20 January 1930. To Abraham, Freud wrote (3 July 1912), “It is excellent that you should so soon have reached the utmost in your practice, but now turn the tables and start to defend yourself against the blessing. The first rule, if the flow continues, must be to increase your fees, and you must find time to work and rest. The answer to your question how I manage to write in addition to my practice is, simply, that I have to recuperate from Ψα [psychoanalysis] by working, otherwise I do not endure it.” “Inclined to intolerance”: Freud to Ferenczi, 20 January 1930. Blanton, Diary of My Analysis, 116. Gay, Freud, notes, at 278, Freud’s “consistent selfappraisal as a researcher more intent on science than on healing.” Freud told another American analyst, Abram Kardiner, that he was too preoccupied with theoretical issues to pay attention to therapeutic problems, adding, “I have no patience in keeping people for a long time. I tire of them, and I want to spread my influence”: Kardiner, My Analysis with Freud: Reminiscences (New York: Norton, 1977), 69. Consider also Ferenczi to Freud (22 November 1908), “I am still taking my patients’ affairs too much to heart”; Freud to Ferenczi (26 November 1908) notes his “indifference toward my patients”; Freud to Ferenczi (10 January 1910), “The need to help is lacking in me”; Freud to Jung (1 October 1910), after the summer holiday, regarding his seeing his “first batch of nuts to-

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day”; Freud to Ferenczi (16 December 1917), “I work all day . . . with nine fools.” 21. “Therapeutic enthusiast”: Freud, New Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis (1933), Standard Edition 22:151. “Cool”: Strachey, “Editor’s Note” to Freud, “Analysis Terminable,” 212. “Sufficiently elucidated”: Freud, ibid., 221. “Need to cure”: Freud, “Sándor Ferenczi” (1933), Standard Edition 22:229. “Boundless course”: Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 153. “Out of reach”: Freud, “Sándor Ferenczi,” 229. 22. Ferenczi, Diary, 92–95. 23. “Coolly aloof”: Ferenczi, “Relaxation and Neocatharsis,” 118. “Expectant silence”: Ferenczi, “Child Analysis,” 129–133. “To be adopted”: Ferenczi, “Relaxation and Neocatharsis,” 124 (emphasis in original). 24. Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child” (1933), in Ferenczi, Final. The earlier reference to hypocrisy, in this case of the parents, who in many passages in the essay are interchangeable with the analyst, is in “Child Analysis,” 133. 25. “Thunderstruck”: Freud, The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929–1939: A Record of the Final Decade, trans. Michael Molnar (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 131, citing Freud to Anna Freud, 3 September 1932. “Real rape”: Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues,” 161. On the meeting, see Ferenczi’s report, given to Izette de Forest, author of The Leaven of Love (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), who in turn passed it on to Erich Fromm, who published it in his biography of Freud, Sigmund Freud’s Mission: An Analysis of His Personality and Influence (New York: Harper and Row, 1972 [1959]), 62–65. On censoring, Freud to Max Eitingon, 29 August 1932: “He must be prevented from reading his essay. . . . Either he will present another one, or none at all,” unpublished letter in Arnold W. Rachman, “The Suppression and Censorship of Ferenczi’s Confusion of Tongues Paper,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 17 (1997): 459– 485, at 471. “Confused, contrived”: Freud to Anna Freud, 3 September 1932, in Freud, Diary, 131. “Harmless but stupid”: Freud to Eitingon, 2 September 1932, unpublished telegram in Rachman, “Supression and Censorship,” 473. “Affectionate adieu”: Fromm, Freud’s Mission, 65. “Technical impropriety”: Freud to Ferenczi, 2 October 1932. “Jones’s promise”: Rachman, “Suppression and Censorship,” 474–475. 26. On the fate of the essay, see Harold P. Blum, “The Confusion of Tongues and Psychic Trauma,” IJP 75 (1994): 871–882. Ferenczi proved prescient in his characterization of Jones as an unscrupulous tyrant who “does not disdain the weapons of slander” (Ferenczi to Freud, 25 December 1929), for Jones, who

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alone at the time had access to the unpublished correspondence between Ferenczi and Freud, did indeed slander him in his Freud biography—whether it was that Ferenczi strayed too much or, more insidiously, that late in his life he had developed destructive “psychotic manifestations” that were revealed in his “turning away from Freud and his doctrines” (Jones, Freud, 3:47), a charge conflating mental health and loyalty to Freud. “Narcissistic”: Ferenczi, Diary, 95. “Over-burdening transference”: Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues,” 164. “Mild, passionless atmosphere”: Ferenczi to Freud, 27 December 1931. 27. Ferenczi, Diary, 178. 28. Otto Fenichel, “Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 8 (1939): 57–87, esp. 63, was the first to use the term; references to it are sparse through the 1950s. 29. Freud, “Lines of Advance,” 162, distinguishes between analytic abstinence and popularly conceived abstinence, “refraining from sexual intercourse.” On analyst-patient sexual relations, see Glen O. Gabbard, “The Early History of Boundary Violations in Psychoanalysis,” JAPA 43 (1995): 1115–1136; Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (New York: Basic Books, 1992), esp. chap. 7; and Forrester, “Casualities of Truth,” in Proof and Persuasion: Essays on Authority, Objectivity and Evidence, ed. Suzanne Marchand and Elizabeth Lunbeck ([Turnhout] Belgium: Brepols, 1996): 219–262. Luciana Nissim Momigliano, “A Spell in Vienna—but Was Freud a Freudian?—An Investigation into Freud’s Technique between 1920 and 1938, Based on the Published Testimony of Former Analysands,” International Review of PsychoAnalysis 14 (1987): 373–389. Robert J. Leider, “Analytic Neutrality—A Historical Review,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 3 (1983): 665–674, at 668, concludes, after reviewing Freud’s statements on and practices around neutrality, that “from any viewpoint, Freud’s technique is considerably less austere and abstemious than one would expect.” 30. Momigliano, “Spell in Vienna,” 376, cites Freud’s saying to one such analyst, “I prefer a student to a neurotic ten times over” (Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954]). “Must be celebrated!”: Momigliano, “Spell in Vienna,” 383 (H. D., Tribute to Freud [New York: New Directions Books, 1984]). “Arms of his chair”: Roy R. Grinker, “Reminiscences of a Personal Contact with Freud,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 10 (1940): 850–854, 851. “Was not silent”: Blanton, Diary of My Analysis, 45 and 53. On the Wolf Man, see Gay, Freud, who at 291, writes that this was one of Freud’s “boldest, and most problematic, contributions to psychoanalytic technique”—a “contribution” that was in effect completely

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disavowed by his successors. “Horney”: Blanton, Diary of My Analysis, 65, “Ferenczi” at 67. “Adler”: Kardiner, My Analysis with Freud, 70, “too painful” at 71. “Jung”: Grinker, “Reminiscences,” 852. “You will see”: Blanton, Diary of My Analysis, 42. 31. “Authorities”: Siegfried Bernfeld, “On Psychoanalytic Training,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 31 (1962): 453–482, at 462. “Sovereign readiness”: Gay, Freud, 292, “sense of mastery” at 303. 32. “Freedom and naturalness”: Otto Fenichel, “Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 8 (1939): 164–185, at 184. Kurt Eissler, in a widely cited paper published in 1953, offered an austere vision of the analytic process, outlining what he called the “basic model technique”— with basic here interchangeable with the textbook Freudian. He argued that verbal interpretation was the analyst’s métier, and a salutary insight the normal neurotic patient’s response thereto. Eissler allowed, however, that for some patients insight was not sufficient (puzzling over “why a human being should refuse to make maximal use of” the riches insight offered), and for the treatment of these he introduced the concept of parameter, a term referring in his usage to the advice or commands an analyst might introduce into the treatment of more disturbed patients. For example, a phobic might be commanded “to expose himself to the dreaded situation despite his fear of it and regardless of any anxiety which might develop during that exposure,” and it might be necessary to threaten to break off treatment if he refused to do so—the model here being once again Freud’s treatment of the Wolf Man. See K. R. Eissler, “The Effect of the Structure of the Ego on Psychoanalytic Technique,” JAPA 1 (1953): 104–143; and “Remarks on Some Variations in Psycho-Analytical Technique,” IJP 39 (1958): 222–229. 33. Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation: An Examination of Its Development and Essential Nature (New York: International Universities Press, 1961), is the locus classicus of this line of critique. “Superfluous deprivations”: ibid., 21. “Overzealous and indiscriminate”: Stone, “The Psychoanalytic Situation and Transference—Postscript to an Earlier Communication,” JAPA 15 (1967): 3–58, at 3. “Arbitrary authoritarianism”: Stone, Psychoanalytic Situation, 52, “robotlike” at 39, “Vermont” at 48. 34. “Schematic perfection”: Stone, Psychoanalytic Situation, 107–108, at 80, “essential gratifications” at 80. 35. Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis—An Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observation and Theory,” JAPA 7 (1959): 459–483.

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36. Ferenczi, “Elasticity,” 87–89. 37. “Mystical character”: Freud to Ferenczi, 4 January 1928. “Conscious assessment”: Ferenczi, “Elasticity,” 100. “Eager to distance”: Kohut, “The Future of Psychoanalysis,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 3 (1975): 325–340, at 335–337. 38. “Mother-role”: Ferenczi to Freud, 1 September 1924. “You kiss your patients”: Freud to Ferenczi, 13 December 1931. “He is offended”: Freud to Eitingon, 18 April 1932, in Jones, Freud 3:183. 39. “Extremely ascetic”: Ferenczi to Freud, 27 December 1931. Ferenczi allowed one patient, Clara Mabel Thompson (a well-known American analyst), to occasionally kiss him: Ferenczi, Diary, 1–4; and Freud to Ferenczi, 13 December 1931, n.2. Thompson had, in Ferenczi’s words, “occasionally even kissed me” and had taken to claiming publicly that she was “allowed to kiss Papa Ferenczi, as often as I like.” “Aging Ferenczi”: Kohut, “Future of Psychoanalysis,” 339. “Rigorously controlled”: Kohut to Eissler, 18 April 1974, Curve, 306. “Specific, disciplined”: Kohut, “The Psychoanalyst in the Community of Scholars,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 3 (1975): 341–370, at 360. “Aiminhibited”: Kohut to Eissler, 18 April 1974, Curve, 306. “Cure-through-love”: Kohut, “Autonomy and Integration,” Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association 21 (1965): 851–856, at 854. 40. “Auxiliary instrument”: Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis,” 464. “Evenly suspended attention”: Kohut, “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism,” JAPA 14 (1966): 243–272, at 263. “Intrinsically significant”: Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure?, ed. Arnold Goldberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 37. 41. “Emits interpretations”: Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 [1977]), 253, “grossly depriving” at 255, “extra measure” at 261 (emphasis in original). 42. Kohut, Restoration, 254,n.2. Lichtenberg, “Introduction,” Progress in Self Psychology 13 (1997): xiii–xix, at xviii, notes that among analysts who trained in the 1950s and 1960s, “the fixed orthodoxy of neutrality and abstinence was preached vigorously but never followed exactly.” 43. Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (New York: Knopf, 1981), “fervid cult” at 4, “savagely fought” at 102, “hatchet job” at 88, “waves” at 118. 44. Ibid., 77. 45. Ibid., 119. 46. “Great personal kindness”: ibid., 110, “always been around” at 117. On the Freudian view of the disqualifying nature of the narcissistic neuroses, see,

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for example, Hans W. Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of PsychoAnalysis,” IJP 41 (1960): 16–33, at 27–28: “In the narcissistic neuroses the libido remains in or is taken back into the ‘ego’, not ‘transferred’ to objects. . . . [These] neuroses were thought to be inaccessible to psycho-analytic treatment because of the narcissistic libido cathexis. Psycho-analysis was considered to be feasible only where a ‘transference relationship’ with the analyst could be established.” “Narcissistically split”: Ferenczi, “Child Analysis,” 135–136. “Demanding”: Leo Stone, “The Widening Scope of Indications for Psychoanalysis,” JAPA 2 (1954): 567–594, at 584–587. “Developmental potential”: Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure?, 4. “Treat the analyst”: Malcolm, Impossible Profession, 117. For one example among many documenting the analytic treatment of “widening scope patients,” see Sandor Lorand, “Modifications in Classical Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 32 (1963): 192–204, esp. 202. Stephen Mitchell, “Wishes, Needs, and Interpersonal Negotiations,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 11 (1991): 147–170, at 151, captures the post-Kohutian evolution of analytic thinking on abstinence: “The more ominous the diagnosis, the less ascetic the experience.” 47. “Utter amazement”: Malcolm, Impossible Profession, 118. Kohut, “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z,” IJP 60 (1979): 3–27. Geoffrey Cocks, in his introduction to Curve, claims the paper is autobiographical, at 4–6. “Skeptics”: Randolf Alnoes, “Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disturbances: The KernbergKohut Divergence,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 6 (1983): 97–110. “Didn’t make sense”: Malcolm, Impossible Profession, 118. “Succeeded”: Arnold M. Cooper, “Review of How Does Analysis Cure?” JAPA 36 (1988): 175– 179, at 178. 48. “Kohut’s technique”: Philip Holzman in Susan Quinn, “Oedipus v. Narcissus,” New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1980. Morris Eagle, Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), 68, finds him guilty; Robert M. Galatzer-Levy, “Chapter 1: Heinz Kohut as Teacher and Supervisor,” Progress in Self Psychology 4 (1988): 3–42, at 30, finds him innocent, writing that in his own experience, Kohut “was entirely ‘classical,’ in the sense that only interpretation was given to the patient. The difference was that demands for direct gratification were not generally interpreted as resistances to insight but rather as attempts, often legitimate, to receive needed supplies from the analyst.” On Kohut and needs, see Anton O. Kris, “Helping Patients by Analyzing Self-Criticism,” JAPA 38 (1990): 605–636, at 610–616; and Lawrence Friedman, “Kohut: A Book Review Essay,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 49 (1980): 393–422, at 416. “Aloofness”: Morton Shane in Lois Timnick,

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“Rift May Threaten Freudian Theory,” Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1979. “Pleasure-seeking infants”: Kohut to “E” (1981), in Search 4:702. “Have to assimilate”: Malcolm, Impossible Profession, 118. On the simultaneous acceptance of Kohut’s technique and rejection of his theory, consider Kris’s statement that however much he disagreed “with some aspects of Kohut’s theories of the self,” he believed that Kohut “helped psychoanalysis embrace a more generally affirmative analytic stance”: in Steven H. Cooper, “Modes of Influence in Psychoanalysis,” JAPA 45 (1997): 217–229, at 218. Kris, “Helping Patients,” at 611, argues that the analyst Michael Basch was “right in stating that there has been: ‘widespread, albeit tacit, acceptance of Kohut’s technique side by side with a very vocal rejection of the theoretical implications behind those same refreshingly efficacious clinical recommendations.” Robert S. Wallerstein, “How Does Self Psychology Differ in Practice?” IJP 66 (1985): 391–404, argues, from the perspective of a sharp critic of self psychology, that it and classical analysis do not differ as much in practice as was often claimed and that classical analysts all along had engaged in many of the maneuvers they saw as beyond the bounds of orthodox craft. 49. “Ideologies”: Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 74. “Immediate gratification”: Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978 [1976]), 81, “one thing” at 78, “economic system” at 37. “Economy”: Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011 [1960]), 169, “first few minutes” at 171. 50. “Spoiled brats”: James L. Titchener, “The Day of a Psychoanalyst at Woodstock,” Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 5, ed. Werner Muensterberger and Aaron H. Esman (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), 153. “Needs”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 162–163, “optimal frustration” at 171. Lasch’s tendentiousness can be glimpsed in his confident assertion that love of the child “came to be regarded not as a danger but as a positive duty” (162). On optimal frustration, see Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 2001 [1971]), 64. 51. “Picked-up generation”: William Braden, The Age of Aquarius: Technology and the Cultural Revolution (Chicago: Quandrangle Books, 1970), 22. “Unite one”: Jules Henry, Culture against Man (New York: Vintage, 1965), 84. “Seeking transcendence”: Nathan Adler, The Underground Stream: New Life Styles and the Antinomian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 118 and 90; “The devouring of sensation is a characteristic hippie motivation,”

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writes Adler, at 118. “Family-like enclaves”: James V. Hamilton, “Some Cultural Determinants of Intrapsychic Structure and Psychopathology,” Psychoanalytic Review 58 (1971): 279–294, at 289. Braden, Age of Aquarius, at 243, writes that “the hippies are clearly a contact species,” huddling together “like walruses.” See also Henry Lowenfeld and Yela Lowenfeld, “Our Permissive Society and the Superego: Some Current Thoughts about Freud’s Cultural Concepts,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 39 (1970): 590–608. 52. “Most hippies”: Henry Malcolm, Generation of Narcissus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 201. Robert D. Gillman, “Genetic, Dynamic and Adaptive Aspects of Dissent,” JAPA 19 (1971): 122–130, esp. 128, reporting analysts’ comments at a panel discussion on the topic. “Big house”: Hamilton, “Cultural Determinants,” 282, citing a radio program aired in 1966. 53. Among the constitutive elements of “the analytic ideal,” according to Reuben Fine, were that “the pursuit of pleasure is a positive good” and that “sexual gratification should be encouraged”; Fine argued that “the great majority of psychotherapists” privately encouraged “the desirability of sexual intercourse in adolescence”: “The Age of Awareness,” Psychoanalytic Review 59 (1972): 55–71, at 58–60. Fine’s was an idiosyncratic interpretation, cited only once (by himself) in the literature, and reads as a caricature of the analytic perspective. “Apocalyptic fantasies”: Martin Wangh, “Some Unconscious Factors in the Psychogenesis of Recent Student Uprisings,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 41 (1972): 207–223, at 217. “Rehearsals for apocalypse”: Adler, Underground Stream, 69; Adler, caustic—if insightful—on almost every aspect of youth culture, is unreservedly sympathetic to the young on the issue of growing up with the Bomb. Wangh, “Unconscious Factors,” 213, discusses parents’ inability to offer their children reassurance. “More demanding”: Bettelheim in Braden, Age of Aquarius, 74, “brightest kid” at 75. “Deferred infanticide”: Arnaldo Rascovsky in Alexander Mitscherlich and John J. Francis, “Panel on ‘Protest and Revolution,’ ” IJP 51 (1970): 211–218, at 216. Mitscherlich, “Introduction to Panel on Protest and Revolution,” IJP 50 (1969): 103–108, and various speakers in Mitscherlich and Francis, “Panel on Protest,” discussing parental hypocrisy. Aaron Stern, ME: The Narcissistic American (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 65, and Malcolm, Generation of Narcissus, 199, discuss parental abuse of alcohol and drugs. 54. Herbert S. Strean, “Social Change and the Proliferation of Regressive Therapies,” Psychoanalytic Review 58 (1971–72): 581–594. 55. “Price of entry”: Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1959]), 372. “Non-satisfaction”: Freud,

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Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition 21:98. “Institutional support”: Fabian X. Schupper and Roy C. Calogeras, “Psycho-Cultural Shifts in Ego Defenses,” American Imago 28 (1971): 53–70, at 55, “self-discovery” at 60, “ ‘happiness’ ” at 67 (scare quotes in original). 56. “Establish the supremacy”: Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), 310, “source of gratification” at 396, “plucked of my feathers” at 431, “but it is sad” at 411 (emphasis in original). “A good friend”: Wilhelm Stekel, “On the History of the Analytical Movement,” Psychoanalysis and History 7 (2005): 99–130, at 104. 57. “Faithful to my habit”: Schur, Freud, 62, “relieve tension” at 412. “Slight narcosis”: Stekel, “History,” 103. “Single great habit”: Gay, Freud, 170. “Continuous sublimation”: Schur, Freud, 412. “Raucous conversation”: Stekel, “History of the Analytical Movement,” 104. “Logic of demand creation”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 74.

8. Inaccessibility 1. “Quite specific”: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 32, “tensions and anxieties” at 50. 2. “Anomic personalities”: David Riesman, Reuel Denny, and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 90. “So-called character neuroses”: Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 167. “Underlying structure”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 50. 3. “Aloof and supercilious”: Leo Stone, “The Widening Scope of Psychoanalysis,” JAPA 2 (1954): 567–594, at 584–585. “Love hungry”: Jan Frank in Leo Rangell, “Panel Report—the Borderline Case,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 3 (1955): 285–298, at 291. “Narcissistic supplies”: Ralph R. Greenson, “On Screen Defenses, Screen Hunger and Screen Identity,” JAPA 6 (1958): 242–262, at 255. “More sophisticated”: Barbara Easser Ruth and Stanley R. Lesser, “Hysterical Personality: A Re-evaluation,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 34 (1965): 390–405, at 390. “This type”: Peter Giovacchini, Psychoanalysis of Character Disorders (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1975), cited in Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 42. 4. “Not indifferent”: Freud, “Some Character Types Met with in PsychoAnalytic Work” (1916), Standard Edition 14:315. “Our analytic art”: Freud to Eduardo Weiss, 22 May 1922, in Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, “A Discussion of

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the Paper by Anton O. Kris ‘On Wanting Too Much: The “Exceptions” Revisited,’ ” IJP 57 (1976): 97–99, at 99. On this patient as typical, consider Kris, “On Wanting Too Much: The ‘Exceptions’ Revisited,” IJP 57 (1976): 85–95, at 85: “Today the ‘exceptions’ are very nearly the rule”; and Leupold-Löwenthal, “Discussion,” 99, on Weiss’s patient, “who would be a relatively common occurrence in an analyst’s practice today.” 5. Karl Abraham, “A Particular Form of Neurotic Resistance against the Psycho-Analytic Method” (1919), in Abraham, Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: Marsfield Library, 1988 [1927]), 303–311; in this short paper, Abraham mentions these patients’ narcissism more than a dozen times. “Good tolerance”: Henry M. Bachrach and Louis A. Leaff, “ ‘Analyzability’: A Systematic Review of the Clinical and Quantitative Literature,” JAPA 26 (1978): 881–920, at 886. 6. Although some credit Kohut and some Kernberg with having coined the concept of the “narcissistic personality disorder,” in fact priority belongs to neither. Maxwell Gitelson delineated the concept in 1958 (or earlier), but his name is almost never associated with it. See Edward Glover, “Ego-Distortion,” IJP 39 (1958): 260–264, at 261, among other papers and panel reports; “Book Notices,” JAPA 22 (1974): 697–706, at 701, notes the lack of proper attribution. Throughout, I have stressed Kernberg’s role in formulating the narcissistic personality more than Kohut’s; his portrait of the narcissist is, to my mind, much more compelling and innovative than Kohut’s, in part because, coming from the object relations tradition, he homes right in on the contradictions between external functioning (which may be quite good) and the pathologies in internal object relating that make the condition so confusing, paradoxical, and hard to pin down—if familiar. Stanley A. Leavy, “Against ‘Narcissism,’ ” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19 (1996): 403–424, writes, at 411, crediting Kernberg with delineating the term, that it “has the advantage of being as good a label as any for a recognizable syndrome.” On Kernberg, see esp. his “Contrasting Viewpoints Regarding the Nature and Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities: A Preliminary Communication,” JAPA 22 (1974): 255–267. “Improve dramatically”: Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1985 [1975]), 243. “Pathological self-structure”: Kernberg, “Contrasting Viewpoints,” 258. On Kernberg and Kohut, consider Irwin Hirsch, “Toward a More Subjective View of Analyzability,” JAPA 44 (1984): 169–182, at 180: “The analytic community in the United States responded [to the work of Kernberg and Kohut] as if restraints were lifted.” On Kohut, see Kris, “Freud’s Treatment of a Narcissistic

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Patient,” IJP 75 (1994): 649–664, at 661, asking why “Freud’s attitude of support” toward narcissistic patients “required rediscovery” by Kohut; and Charles K. Hofling and Robert W. Meyers, “Recent Discoveries in Psychoanalysis,” Archives of General Psychiatry 26 (1972): 518–523. Among surveys that registered the predominance of narcissism and the character disorders are Norman D. Lazar, “Nature and Significance of Changes in Patients in a Psychoanalytic Clinic,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 42 (1973): 579–600; and Daniel S. Jaffee and Sydney E. Pulver, “Survey of Psychoanalytic Practice 1976: Some Trends and Implications,” JAPA 26 (1978): 615–631. “Like Aaron Green”: Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (New York: Knopf, 1981), 110 and 117. On the Kohutian analytic setting, consider what Kohut said in a seminar, circa 1974 (Seminars, 59), of his stance toward “people with acute disturbances” in body-temperature regulation, among them schizoid and narcissistic patients: “Sometimes a very simple remedy is to offer them a hot drink. I do not serve meals in sessions with my patients, but I have had some very ill people to whom I have said, ‘You’re feeling terrible today. Let us go down and have a cup of coffee.’ ” 7. “Biography of Jones”: Vincent Brome, Ernest Jones: Freud’s Alter Ego (New York: Norton, 1983), esp. chap. 12. On Riviere as patient, see also Kris, “Freud’s Treatment”; Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrrester, Freud’s Women (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 365; and Mary Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 2. Riviere’s classic paper: Riviere, “A Contribution to the Analysis of the Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” IJP 17 (1936): 304–320. “Taking Freud to task”: Kris, “Freud’s Treatment,” 660. 8. Riviere, “Review of David Forsythe, The Technique of Psycho-Analysis” (1921–22), in Riviere, The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers: 1920–1958, ed. Athol Hughes (London: Karnac Books, 1991), 69. 9. “That proud woman”: Freud to Abraham, 30 March 1922. “Long tragedy”: Riviere to Jones, 25 October 1918, Joan Riviere collection, Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, P04-C-E-06 (all letters cited below from Riviere to Jones are in the Riviere Collection, with the same reference number). “Worst failure”: Jones to Freud, 22 January 1922. “Not yet worked out”: Freud to Abraham, 30 March 1922. 10. “Narcissism and selfishness”: Riviere to Jones, 28 December 1918. “Egocentric, asocial”: Riviere, “Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” 318. 11. “Underestimated”: Jones to Freud, 22 January 1922. “Intimate attitude”: Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis”

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(1912), Standard Edition 12:18, “emotional coldness” at 115. “Nowhere to go”: Jones to Freud, 22 January 1922. 12. “Fiendish sadist”: Jones to Freud, 22 January 1922. “Wounded professional pride”: Riviere to Jones, n.d. [likely December 1917]; “too incompatible”: n.d. [likely 11 February 1918]. On the eroticized transference, see the comments of Hanna Segal: “I couldn’t believe it because she was such a contained figure of authority. . . . I just couldn’t put together in my mind, this woman of such austere bearing carrying on in this hysterical eroticized transference”: Joseph Aguayo, “An Interview with Dr. Hanna Segal,” fort da 5, no. 1 (Spring 1999). 13. “So many virtues”; Riviere to Jones, n.d. [likely 11 February 1918]; “please remember”: n.d. [likely December 1917] (emphasis in original); “have to kill myself”: n.d. [likely 11 February 1918]. 14. “So often thought”: Riviere to Jones, 26 September 1918; “too extravagant”: 25 October 1918. “Agitation about analysis”: Riviere, 21 December 1918, Diary of Joan Riviere, Riviere collection, Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, P02-C-03. “Sense of external reality”: Riviere, “Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” 308. “I am always”: Riviere to Jones, 25 October 1918. 15. Riviere to Jones, 25 October 1918 (emphasis in original). 16. “Oust the analyst”: Riviere, “Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” 306. “Understanding everything”: Riviere to Jones, 4 November 1918 (emphasis in original); “long refused”: 31 October 1918. 17. “Woman in me”: Riviere to Jones, 20 December 1918 (emphasis in original). “Not the type”: Jones to Freud, 1 April 1922. “Masculinity complex”: Riviere, “The Private Character of Queen Elizabeth,” IJP 3 (1922): 256–259, at 259, writes of the queen’s “astonishing intellectual development” as part evidence of her masculinity complex. “What a pity”: Riviere to Jones, 20 December 1918. 18. “Far reaching insight”: Jones to Freud, 22 January 1922; “bought for Freud”: 17 March 1919. 19. “Bodily pain”: Freud to Jones, 18 April 1919. ”Early attachment”: Jones to Freud, 28 June 1910; the tale appeared (disguised) in Jones, “Freud’s Theory of Dreams,” American Journal of Psychology 21 (1919b) and in the 1912 revision of Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors (1901), Standard Edition 6:196–197. 20. “Reached an impasse”: Kris, “Freud’s Treatment,” 651; Riviere also used the term impasse to describe her analytic plight in correspondence with

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Jones: 10 September 1917. “Most colossal”: Jones to Freud, 22 January 1922. “Negotiating preliminaries”: Riviere to Freud, 1 December 1921, in Athol Hughes, “Letters from Sigmund Freud to Joan Riviere (1921–1939),” IJP 19 (1992): 265–284. “Strongly positive”: Jones to Freud, 22 January 1922. “Scientific inquiry”: Riviere, “Review of Forsyth,” 64–70. 21. “As an instrument”: Riviere, “An Intimate Impression,” Lancet, 20 September 1939, quoted in Jones, Freud 2:451. “Same difficulty”: Jones to Freud, 22 May 1922, also cited by Kris, “Freud’s Treatment,” 654. “Problems with the translations”: Aguayo, “Interview with Hanna Segal.” “Frustrated and deprived”: Nina Bakman, “Thirty Years On: K. R. Eissler’s Interview with Joan Riviere (1953),” Psychoanalysis and History 15 (2013): 91–104, at 100. 22. “Shewing”: Jones to Freud, 1 April 1922. “Pure myth”: Jones to Freud, 22 May 1922 “Mrs. R.”: Freud to Jones, 4 June 1922. “Intellectual judgment”: Jones to Freud, 10 June 1922. “Secondary analysis”: Freud to Jones, 25 June 1922. 23. On women as objects of exchange between men, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), esp. 38–43. “Uncommon combination”: Freud to Jones, 4 June 1922. “Absurd”: Jones to Freud, 10 June 1922. “Classic situation”: Jones, “Jealousy,” in Papers on Psycho-Analysis 5th ed. (London: Maresfield Reprints, 1967 [1948]), esp. 327–330. “Chided Jones”: Freud to Jones, 25 June 1922. See also Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud’s Women, 356. 24. “Spare no concessions”: Freud to Jones, 16 April 1922; “not to scratch too deeply”: 2 March 1922; “diplomacy”: 16 April 1922. “Substitute friendliness”: Riviere, “Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” 306. “Deliberately provoke”: Bakman, “Eissler’s Interview with Joan Riviere,” 101–102. Riviere told Eissler that this was a “mistake that Freud himself later admitted.” Bakman paraphrases: “Freud had expected her to be furious, but succeeded only in hurting her.” “Brilliant success”: Riviere, “Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” 319. “Real power”: Freud to Jones, 16 March 1922. 25. Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), Standard Edition 19:50n.1. Kris, “Freud’s Narcissistic Patient,” 58, writes “it is hard to imagine that Riviere was far from” Freud’s thoughts in writing the note; Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud’s Women, 358, see Riviere as “a prime model” in conceptualizing relations among the ego, id, and superego. 26. “Hatred, vindictiveness”: Riviere, “Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” 318, “real capacity” at 314. “Endure any praise”: Freud, Ego and Id, 49 (also quoted by Riviere, 304. “Narcissistic problem”: Freud to Jones, 4 June 1922.

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“Pangs of conscience”: Freud, Ego and Id, 45, “abandoned love-relation” at 50n.1. 27. “Punishment”: Riviere to Jones, 28 December 1918 (emphasis in original). “Very keenly”: Kris, “Freud’s Treatment,” 654. On coproduction between analyst and analysand, see Bennett Simon’s subtle and suggestive paper, “The Imaginary Twins: The Case of Beckett and Bion,” International Review of PsychoAnalysis 15 (1988): 331–352. 28. “Sometimes quite naïve”: Riviere, “A Character Trait of Freud’s,” in Inner World, 352–353. “ ‘Agonistic’ disposition”: Freud to Riviere, in Hughes, “Letters from Freud to Riviere,” 13 March 1923; “suits you well”: 8 May 1923; “weakness”: 9 October 1927. “Falseness and deceit”: Riviere, “Negative Therapeutic Reaction,” 320. 29. Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925), Standard Edition 19:254. 30. “Happy band”: Jones, Freud 2:185. “Absurd jealous egotism”: Jones to Freud, 18 December 1909; “personal complex”: 8 February 1911. “Impulses of jealousy”: Ferenczi to Freud, 5 October 1909. “Don’t be jealous”: Freud to Ferenczi, 19 December 1910. “Childish ideas”: Ferenczi to Freud, 17 April 1910. 31. Riviere, “Jealousy as a Mechanism of Defense,” IJP 13 (1929): 414–424 (emphasis in original). 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. “Ordinary men and women”: Riviere, “Hate, Greed and Aggression,” in Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere, Love, Hate and Reparation (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1937), 3, “capacity for initiative” at 31. On envy and the narcissistic incapacity for object relating, see Otto Kernberg, “Barriers to Falling and Remaining in Love,” JAPA 22 (1974): 486–511. 35. Kris, “Freud’s Treatment,” 661–663. “Depart from ordinary technique”: Kurt Eissler in Leonard Shengold and James T. McLaughlin, “Plenary Session on ‘Changes in Psychoanalytic Practice and Experience: Theoretical, Technical and Social Implications,’ ” IJP 57 (1976): 261–274, at 272. “Analytic atmosphere”: Kohut, “Remarks on the Panel on ‘The Bipolar Self’ ” (1979), in Search 4:479.

9. Identity 1. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 2013 [1953]), 68. See Philip Gleason, “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,” Journal of

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American History 69 (1983): 910–931, for a masterful survey of identity’s debut and subsequent fate beyond psychoanalysis. 2. “Inward life”: William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950 [1890]), 299, cited in Ian Miller, “William James and the Psychology of Consciousness: Beginnings of the American School,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 23 (1981): 299–313, at 308–309. “Sociological orientation”: Edith Jacobson, The Self and the Object World (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), 25. 3. “Household word”: Robert A. Nisbet, “A Sense of Personal Sameness,” New York Times, 31 March 1968. “Cliché”: Robert Coles in Gleason, “Identifying Identity,” 913. “Rallying cry”: Robert S. Wallerstein, “Erikson’s Concept of Ego Identity Reconsidered,” JAPA 46 (1998): 229–247, at 230. “Moral terms”: Kenneth Kenniston in Gleason, 913. “Identity crisis”: Dorothy Barclay, “After the First Year of College,” New York Times, 28 May 1961. “Growing pains”: June Bingham, “The Intelligent Square’s Guide to Hippieland,” New York Times, 24 September 1967. “Bellyachers”: Crane Brinton in Alden Whitman, “Identity a Puzzle to Intellectuals,” New York Times, 1 April 1968. See Orrin E. Klapp, Collective Search for Identity (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1969), for a report from the front lines of the identity revolution. 4. On social factors, see, for example, Norman Tabachnick, “Three PsychoAnalytic Views of Identity,” IJP 46 (1965): 467–473, at 471. “True clinician”: Daniel Yankelovich and William Barrett, Ego and Instinct: The Psychoanalytic View of Human Nature—Revised (New York: Random House, 1970), 143 (reporting a conversation with Paul Myerson), “lived experience” at 152–154. 5. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1978 [1950]), 279. 6. “Introspective honesty”: ibid., 282. “Life itself ”: D. W. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience” (1967), in Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1989 [1971]), 98 (emphasis in original). “Differ from Freud”: Winnicott in Harry Guntrip, “My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 2 (1975): 145–156, at 153. For an instance of the subtlety of Erikson’s use of Freud to authorize his own “anti-Freudian” position, see his “Ego Development and Historical Change— Clinical Notes,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2 (1946): 359–396, where, at 380, he argues that “psychoanalysis came to emphasize the individual and regressive rather than the collective-supportive aspects” of Freud’s statements on self-esteem in “On Narcissism.” Absolving Freud, he lays blame instead on Freud’s followers, who were “concerned with only half the story,” going on to spell out a compelling argument for the potential of the environment to sustain

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infantile narcissism and self-esteem. See Ellen R. Peyser, “Classics Revisited: Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society,” JAPA 46 (1998): 249–255, suggesting at 253 that “Erikson was more anti-Freudian than has been acknowledged” and that his “ideas were mutative without our noticing.” Peyser, and Wallerstein, “Erikson’s Concept of Ego Identity,” 245,n.5, both refer to Arnold Cooper’s notion of Erikson’s “quiet revolution.” I am indebted in this chapter to Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999). 7. References to the self’s loss appear in many sources from the 1940s and 1950s; see, for example, Edwin E. Aubrey, Man’s Search for Himself (Nashville: Cokesbury Press, 1940). “Discovery”: T. F. James, “What It Means to Find Your Self,” Cosmopolitan, January, 1959. As one authority insisted in 1954 with respect to the search, man “must do so in order that he may be healthy and adjusted”: Vincent V. Herr, “Integration and the Self-Ideal,” in The Human Person: An Approach to an Integral Theory of Personality, ed. Magda B. Arnold and John A Gasson (New York, 1954), 285. 8. “Malaise of our times”: Allen Wheelis, The Quest for Identity (New York: Norton, 1958), 9, “weary and skeptical” at 88, “hard inner core” at 18. 9. “Sense of personal sameness”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), 16–17. “Intelligent college students”: Lawrence E. Davies, “LSD Conference Opens on Coast,” New York Times, 14 June 1966. “Unionized social workers”: Martin Tolchin, “Psyches Conflict in Strike Parley,” New York Times, 9 March 1964. “Intellectuals without a cause”: Brinton in Whitman, “Identity a Puzzle.” 10. “Psychoanalytic limbo”: Wallerstein, “Erikson’s Concept of Ego Identity,” 230. “More than one sense”: Heinz Hartmann, Essays on Ego Psychology: Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), 287. For additional critiques, see Charles N. Sarlin, “Feminine Identity,” JAPA 11 (1963), 790–816, at 790; and Jacobson, Self and the Object World, 27. J. Laplance and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac, 1988 [1973]), s.v. “ego,” argue that the terminological confusion—the ego psychologists’ charge—is intrinsic to the concept: “The interplay between these two meanings”—“the ego as the person and the ego as a psychical agency”—“is the core of the problematic of the ego” and is as such unresolvable. “Eissler”: Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 422. 11. “Freedom and enjoyment”: Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment (New York: Norton, 1975), 39, “where they were going” at 44.

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12. “Conceptual necessity”: Ibid., 18. See Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 29–36, for the complexities of Erikson’s parentage. “Strangely adolescent”: Erikson, Life History, 44. 13. Erikson, Life History, 44. 14. “Heard talk”: Erikson, “Childhood and Tradition in Two Indian Tribes—a Comparative Abstract, with Conclusions,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1 (1945): 319–350, at 348. “Mechanical apparatus”: Erikson, “Ego Development and Historical Change,” 390, “unqualified” at 392, “egoinflating” at 393. “What is popularly called”: Erikson, “Childhood and Tradtion,” 348,n.7. “Fashionable and vain”: Erikson, Childhood and Society, 294. “Reshape itself”: Peyser, “Classics Revisited,” 253. 15. “Unfathomable”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 9. “Faddish equation”: Erikson, “Identity, Psychosocial,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan Company and the Free Press, 1968), 62. “Deliberately confused”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 19. On distinctions among dimensions of identity, see Heinz Lichtenstein, “Identity and Sexuality: A Study of Their Interrelationship in Man,” JAPA 9 (1961): 179–260; and Lichtenstein, “The Dilemma of Human Identity: Notes on Self-Transformation, Self-Objectivation, and Metamorphosis,” JAPA, 11 (1963): 173–223. On another of the “the indispensable dun-gray words that pass without notice because they are too important,” see Donald Fleming, “Attitude: The History of a Concept,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1967): 287–365; attitude, like identity, has a technical as well as a popular history—Fleming, at 290, notes that it “made itself intuitively understood.” The opening sentence of David J. DeLevita, The Concept of Identity, trans. Ian Finley (Paris: Mouton, 1965), 1, registers the novelty of identity: “The term ‘identity’ that we meet so frequently in publications relating to the study of human behavior has had such a lightening career that it must be regarded as being a member of the ‘noveau riche.’ ” 16. “Almost without reference”: Louise E. Hoffman, “From Instinct to Identity: Implications of Changing Psychoanalytic Concepts from Freud to Erikson,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18 (1982): 130–146, at 139. “Essential nucleus”: Erich H. Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York, 1994 [1941]), 276. 17. “Conceptual ancestors”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 19. “Obscure emotional forces”: Freud, “Address to the Society of the B’Nai B’Rith” (1926), Standard Edition 20:274. “Ethnic”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 21. “Timeless elite”: Erikson, Childhood and Society, 280. “Contemporary crises”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 23–24.

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18. “Actual identity”: Freud, “ ‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to  the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions” (1919), Standard Edition 17:185. “Original”: Freud, “Dreams and Telepathy” (1922), Standard Edition 18:214.“Do not know”: Erikson, “Ego Development and Historical Change,” 386–387. 19. “Most deeply”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 19 (emphasis in original). James’s letter is in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 199; the editor dates it to roughly the end of 1878. James associated the sense with a feeling of “deep enthusiastic bliss”(200). “Personal identity”: James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 330. DeLevita, in The Concept of Identity, at 31, took note of James’s “good-natured carelessness, which sometimes drove the German lady who translated his works to despair,” in mixing together spiritualistic, associationalistic, and transcendental theories of the soul in his writings. “Exuberant awareness”: Erikson, “Identity, Psychosocial,” 61. 20. M. N. Banerjee, “Indian Psycho-Analytical Society,” Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association 12 (1931): 387–392, at 388, reporting that Bhattacharya’s lecture to the society in 1920 “approached the problem from many different standpoints and shewed the insufficiency of some of the existing theories on the subject. He also discussed the findings of psycho-analysts relevant to the problem.” “Another Indian analyst”: G. Bose, “The Duration of Coitus,” IJP 18 (1937): 235–255, at 244. “Ego feeling”: Federn, “Some Variations in Ego-Feeling,” IJP 7 (1926): 434–444; and “Ego Feeling in Dreams,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1 (1932): 511–542, at 511–513. 21. “Joyful and exhilarating”: Robert E. Nixon, “How to Begin the Treasure Hunt for Your Real Self,” Seventeen, October 1966. “Real self”: Helen Merrell Lynd, “Who Are You?” Mademoiselle, August 1960. “True self”: Melvin Tumin, “There Is No Real You,” Mademoiselle, February 1971 (emphasis in original). Nixon was the staff psychiatrist at Vassar; Lynd and Tumin were both distinguished sociologists. “Found himself”: Bingham, “Hippieland.” “This or that”: Harold F. Searles, “Roles and Paradigms in Psychotherapy. Marie Coleman Nelson (Ed.), Benjamin Nelson, Murray H. Sherman, and Herbert S. Strean,” Psychoanalytic Review 55 (1968–1969): 597–700, at 699. 22. “Finding the Real Self: A Letter—with a Forward by Karen Horney,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (1949): 3–7. The letter was written by a “Mrs. B.,” following thirty-eight hours of psychoanalytic treatment, to a sanatorium psychiatrist who had “helped her through the acute stages of her anguish.”

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23. “Long journey”: Ibid. “Constituted out of”: Leston Havens, “A Theoretical Basis for the Concepts of Self and Authentic Self,” JAPA 34 (1986): 363– 378, at 370. “Collect together”: Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Karnac, 1990 [1965]), 148. “Feeling real”: Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 117. 24. “Valid indications”: Ralph H. Turner, “The Real Self: From Institution to Impulse,” American Journal of Sociology 81 (1976): 989–1016, at 997. 25. “Love-ins”: Ibid., 993. “Mastery of reality”: James F. Masterson, The Search for the Real Self: Unmasking the Personality Disorders of Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1988), 23. On Winnicott’s “true self,” see Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 127–137. 26. “When a philosopher”: Moore in Clifford Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 84. “Talk a good game”: Riesman, Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), 700–705, “talk of autonomy” at 680. 27. Riesman, Faces in the Crowd, 679–680. 28. Jersild, In Search of Self: An Exploration of the Role of the School in Promoting Self-Understanding (New York: Bureau of Publication, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1952), 22–36, appendix B. 29. “Psychologizing”: ibid., 30. 30. Ralph H. Turner, “Is There a Quest for Identity?” Sociological Quarterly 16 (1975): 148–161. “No Freud please”: John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 252. On the view from Britain, consider the acid comment of Charles Rycroft, “On Shame and the Search for Identity,” IJP 41 (1960): 85– 86: “Of the use or misuse that American society may make of psycho-analytical concepts in its search for a philosophy of life, the present reviewer can have nothing to say.” “Anguished, frustrated”: Charles J. Rolo, “Are Americans Well Adjusted?” Atlantic Monthly, 1961, a review of Geral Gurin, Joseph Veroff, and Sheila Field, Americans View Their Mental Health: A Nationwide Interview Survey (New York, 1960). 31. “Judicial department”: Wheelis, Quest for Identity, 98. “Parents’ strictness”: Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), Standard Edition 22:62. 32. “Unquestioning acceptance:” Wheelis, Quest for Identity, 102. Writing from Britain, Charles Rycroft, “The Quest for Identity,” IJP 41 (1960): 86–87,

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dissented from the notion that father deprivation was at the root of identity problems, noting that Winnicott’s work was demonstrating that the relationship with the preoedipal mother was of more significance. 33. “Flock of sheep”: Jung to Freud, 8 November 1909. “Father ideal”: Freud (12 October 1910), Minutes 3:14. “Mother-complex”: Jung to Freud, 8 November 1909. “Petticoat government”: Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), Standard Edition 21:49. On Freud’s distaste for the United States, see Patrick J. Mahony, “Freud Overwhelmed,” Psychoanalysis and History 1 (1999): 56–68. 34. “Mothers were dominant”: Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York: Norton, 1953), esp. 119–125. “Men waited on their wives”: Freida Fromm-Reichmann, “Notes on the Mother Rôle in the Family Group,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 4 (1940): 132–148, at 133–134; she adds that such a mother was “more disastrous” for the child than the authoritarian father. 35. “Revengeful triumph”: Erikson, Childhood and Society, 289, “overwhelmingly bigger” at 313–314. 36. “Reasonably good terms”: ibid., 312. “Rigidly vindictive”: Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity,” JAPA 4 (1956): 56–121, at 103, “triumph of depreciation” at 84. “Tastes and standards”: Freud (“An Outline of Psycho-Analysis,” IJP 21 [1940], 82) in Erikson, “Childhood and Tradition,” 346. “Man’s enslavement”: “Ego Development and Historical Change,” 395, “particular life style” at 360. See Bingham, “Hippieland,” for an instance of the sort of parental leniency that caught Erikson’s attention: “A clear difference between the parents of today and their parents is the reluctance to smite the young down.” The refugee analyst Christine Olden, in “Notes on Child Rearing in America,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 7 (1952): 387–392, attempting, at 389, to understand why “the permissive aspects” of psychoanalysis “overshadowed all other aspects” in the United States, noted that in the 1870s a visiting Scotsman, observing how independent the American young were, wrote that “ ‘Parent, obey your children in all things,’ is the new commandment.” 37. Tibor Agoston, “Some Psychological Aspects of Prostitution: The Pseudo-Personality,” IJP 26 (1945): 62–67. “Emergence”: Lichtenstein, “Identity and Sexuality,” 216, “consummated body” at 225, “feminine surrender” at 228. 38. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 64–65. 39. “Well liked”: Ibid., 64. “Master occupational change”: C. Wright Mills, “The Competitive Personality,” Partisan Review 13 (1946): 433–447, at 437.

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40. Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 126. 41. “So-called genital trauma”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 275– 279. “Cannot be”: Erikson, “Identity, Psychosocial,” 64. “Have an identity”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 283, “somatic tasks” at 289, “singular loveliness” at 283, “engineering” at 291. Feminists vehemently criticized Erikson’s notions of the gendered nature of “inner” and “outer” space (in Childhood and Society, 97–108); he argued, based on observations of children’s play, that boys built phallic objects and girls enclosures, and answered his critics in “Once More the Inner Space” (1963), in his Life History, 225–247. 42. “Many good things”: Kohut, Seminars, 222–225. “Structure that dips”: Kohut, Search 2:837. “Self ‘emerges’ ”: Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 2001 [1971]), xiv–xv. “Blame psychoanalysis”: Kohut, Search 2:579 (emphasis in original). “Gossipy letter”: Kohut to Tilmann Moser, 11 April 1969, in Kohut, Curve, 328–239. Contra Kohut, “identity” was the guest whom everyone implored to stay; see, from within the ego-psychological tradition, Heinz Lichtenstein, The Dilemma of Human Identity (New York: Jason Aronson, 1977). 43. “Simply tried”: Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 422. “Establish”: Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach (New York: Norton, 1985), 217, “sense of continuity” at 237. “Mere fact”: Erikson, “Ego Development,” 363. “Group self”: Kohut, Search 2:837. “Group identity”: Erikson, “Ego Development and Historical Change,” 361. “Zest and joy”: Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure?, ed. Arnold Goldberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 85. “Vital condition”: Erikson, “The Galilean Sayings and the Sense of ‘I’,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19 (1996): 291– 337, at 294. “No feeling of being alive”: Erikson, “Ego Development,” 367. 44. “Normal Intergenerational”: Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi-Circle of Mental Health,” IJP 63 (1982): 395–407, at 405. “Intergenerational themes”: Erikson, “On the Generational Cycle: An Address,” IJP 61 (1980): 213–223, at 217–218. “Inflated patriarchal claims”: Erikson, Childhood and Society, 314. “Rejection and expulsion”: Erikson, “Generational Cycle,” 218. 45. Erikson, “Ego Development and Historical Change,” 380–382. “Aiminhibited self-esteem”: Kohut, “Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 27 (1972): 360–400, at 388. 46. “Adequate sense of identity”: Otto Fenichel, “The Means of Education,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 1 (1945): 281–292, at 284. “Hidden behind

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narcissism”: Joseph D. Lichtenberg, “The Dilemma of Human Identity,” in “Book Notices,” JAPA 28 (1980): 703–732, at 706. Roy Schafer, “Concepts of Self and Identity and the Experience of Separation-Individuation in Adolescence,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 42 (1973): 42–59, discusses, at 55–56ff, the “ambiguity” of the terms self and identity, seeing both as responses to analysts’ dissatisfaction with ego psychology’s “remoteness, impersonality, and austerity,” and arguing that the discipline could only benefit from the shift underway to concern “with specifically human phenomenology and concepts.” “Obliterating”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 86, “mass culture” at 91. “Problems of identity”: Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1959]), 13.

Conclusion: Narcissism Today 1. “Ego-addled”: Raina Kelley, “Generation Me,” Newsweek, 27 April 2009. “Best selling books”: Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Free Press, 2009); Drew Pinsky, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). “Articles”: Laura Bennett, “Generation Whine,” The New Republic, 5 October 2012; Ross Douthat, “The Online Looking Glass,” New York Times, 12 June 2011. “Grandiosity is out of style”: David Brooks, “Temerity at the Top,” New York Times, 21 September 2012. 2. “Attract us”: Jan Hoffman, “Here’s Looking at Me, Kid,” New York Times, 20 July 2008. “Subtitle”: Scott Barry Kaufman, “How to Spot a Narcissist: Welcome to the Contradictory Universe of Narcissism,” Psychology Today, 27 June 2011. “Do we really find”: Chris Yayomali, “Do We Really Find Selfish, Narcissistic Jerks More Attractive?” The Week 29 November 2102. “Narcissists as more likeable”: Daisy Grewal, “Psychology Uncovers Sex Appeal of Dark Personalities,” Scientific American, 27 November 2012. “Extroverted, confident”: Elizabeth Bernstein, “Why Divas Need Make No Apology,” Wall Street Journal, 8 April 2013. “Hard to resist”: Grewal, “Sex Appeal.” 3. “Help you succeed”: Yolanda Reid Chassiakos, “Healthy Narcissism Can Help You Succeed,” Huffington Post, 20 May 2010. “Healthy part of narcissism”: Prudence Gourguechon in Jan Hoffman, “Everyone’s a Narcissist, It Seems,” New York Times, 20 July 2008. “Fuels drive”: Emily Yoffe, “But Enough about You . . . What Is Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Why Does Everyone Seem to Have It?” slate.com, 18 March 2009. “Documented benefits”: Scott Barry Kaufman, “Why Is Narcissism Adaptive in Youth?” psychologytoday.com,

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13 August 2011. “Makes you attractive”: Tracy Quan, “In Defence of Narcissism,” guardian.co.uk, 4 August 2008. “Inflated sense of self”: Kaufmann, “Adaptive in youth.” “Life has meaning”: Yoffe, “Enough about You.” “Forms of public life”: Quan, “Defence of Narcissism.” 4. “Kohutian”: Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, “Narcissism and Leadership: An Object Relations Perspective,” Human Relations 38 (1985): 583–601, at 587. “Overcome”: Michael Maccoby, “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, The Inevitable Cons”; the article was originally published in Harvard Business Review, vol. 78, no. 1 (January 2000): 68–77, and is widely available on the Internet (www.maccoby.com/Articles/NarLeaders.shtml: accessed 22 June 2013). See also Maccoby, The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Peril of Visionary Leadership (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). 5. Maccoby, “Corporate Character Types: The Gamesman vs. Narcissus,” Psychology Today, October 1978. 6. Ernest Jones, “The God Complex: The Belief That One Is God, and the Resulting Character Traits” (1913), in Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1951), 244–265 (emphasis in original). “Difference”: Maccoby, “Narcissistic Leaders,” 94; the quip is all over the Internet, and provides the title for Mike Wilson, The Difference between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). 7. “These are the doers”: Maccoby, “Gamesman vs. Narcissus,” 61. “People belonging”: Freud, “Libidinal Types” (1931), Standard Edition 21:218 (cited by Maccoby, “Narcissistic Leaders,” 93). “Absolutely narcissistic”: Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Standard Edition 18:123–124. 8. “Security and protection”: Christine Olden, “About the Fascinating Effect of the Narcissistic Personality,” American Imago 2 (1941): 347–355, at 353–354. “Extreme submissiveness”: Annie Reich, “A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Extreme Submissiveness in Women,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 9 (1940): 470–480. 9. Otto Fenichel, “Psychoanalytic Remarks on Fromm’s Book ‘Escape from Freedom,’ ” Psychoanalytic Review 31 (1944): 133–152, reviews the literature on the longing to belong; see also his “Trophy and Triumph: A Clinical Study” (1939), Collected Papers, 2nd series (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 141– 162. “Limitless narcissism”: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition 21:72. “Another person’s narcissism”: Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Standard Edition 14:89.

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10. “Personal Magnetism,” London Spectator, 34, no. 3, March 1903. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1947). On Weber, see Robert C. Tucker, “The Theory of Charismatic Leadership,” Daedalus 97 (1968): 731–756. “Attributions of specialness”: Charles Camic, “Charisma: Its Varieties, Preconditions, and Consequences,” Sociological Inquiry 50 (1980): 5–23, at 7. 11. “Into popular discourse”: Bell in Richard R. Lingeman, “The Greeks Had a Word for It—But What Does It Mean?” New York Times Magazine, 4 August 1968. Malcolm X: Albert B. Southwick, “Malcolm X: Charismatic Demagogue,” Christian Century 80 (1963): 740–741. Wilson: “Britain: The Charisma Sweepstakes,” Newsweek, 15 June 1970. Scoop Jackson: “Nation: A Moment of Charisma,” Time, 15 March 1976. Connolly: “Mr. Charisma,” The Nation, 10 February 1979. Jackson: Nathaniel Sheppard, “Jesse Jackson: The Last Charismatic Leader?” Black Enterprise, March 1981. “Mysterious air”: Fredelle Maynard, “Charisma: Who Has It?” Seventeen, October 1968. Francine du Plessix Gray, “Charisma: What It Is and How to Get It,” Mademoiselle, December 1981; Doe Lang, “Charisma: Who Has It? How They Got It! And How You Can Get It Too!” Good Housekeeping, February 1982. 12. “Key trait”: Seth A. Rosenthal and Todd L. Pittinsky, “Narcissistic Leadership,” Leadership Quarterly 17 (2006): 617–633, at 628. “Model of leadership”: Maccoby, Productive Narcissist, 11. “Bland, opaque”: Abraham Zaleznik, “Charismatic and Consensus Leaders: A Psychological Comparison,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 38 (1974): 222–238, at 233. Zaleznik was a psychoanalyst and professor of management at the Harvard Business School. For a popular notice of his work, see “The Ugly Side of Charisma,” Science Digest 80 (October 1976): 8–9. 13. “Awe, devotion”: Jerome A. Winer, Thomas Jobe, and Carlton Ferrono, “Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of the Charismatic Relationship,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 12 (1984): 155–175, at 163–165; here I am indebted to Camic, “Charisma.” “Uncanny ability”: Kohut in Daniel Sankowsky, “The Charismatic Leader as Narcissist: Understanding the Abuse of Power,” Organizational Dynamics 23, no. 4 (1995): 57–71, at 65. 14. “Seemingly unlimited”: Roderick M. Kramer, “The Harder They Fall,” Harvard Business Review 81, no. 10 (October 2003): 58–66, at 58. “Risky decision making”: Amy B. Brunell et al., “Leader Emergence: The Case of the Narcissistic Leader,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1663–1676,

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at 1674. “Crash and burn”: Kramer, “Harder they Fall,” 58–59. “Resource and hazard”: Zaleznik, “Management of Disappointment,” Harvard Business Review 45, no. 6 (November–December 1967): 59–70, at 65–66. 15. “Distributing authority”: Zaleznik, “Power and Politics in Organizational Life,” Harvard Business Review 48, no. 3 (May–June 1970): 47–60, at 48. 16. Maccoby, “The Narcissist-Visionary: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Your Difficult Boss,” Forbes, 3 March 2003, www.maccoby.com /Articles/onmymind.shtml (accessed 23 September 2010). 17. For the numbers, widely quoted, see Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement (New York: Free Press, 2009), 2; for example, “is not good”: Holly Brubach, “But Enough about You,” New York Times T Magazine, 19 February 2009; Raina Kelley, “Generation Me,” Newsweek, 27 April 2009; and Madeline Bunting, “The Narcissism of Consumer Society Has Left Women Unhappier than Ever,” Guardian, 26 July 2009. On prevalence, see Leonard C. Groopman and Arnold Cooper, “Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” at www.health.am/psy/narcissistic -personality-disorder/ (accessed 28 June 2013), reporting lifetime prevalence of 1 percent in the general population, 2–16 percent in clinical populations, with 50–75 percent male; and F. S. Stinson et al., “Prevalence, Correlates, Disability, and Comorbidity of DSM IV Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Results from the Wave 2 National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 69 (2008): 1033–1045, reporting lifetime prevalence at 6.2 percent, in a sample of 34,653 adults: 7.7 percent for men, 4.8 percent for women. 18. The Narcissistic Personality Inventory can be found on the Internet at http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm and in Pinsky Mirror Effect, 261–267. Scores of 21 or higher are indicative of narcissism; according to Twenge and Campbell, Narcissism Epidemic, at 31, average scores have gone from c. 15.5 in 1980–1984 to c. 17.5 in 2005–2006. There is a substantial literature and a good deal of controversy about what the test measures. Among critics’ articles are Seth A. Rosenthal and Jill M. Hooley, “Narcissism Assessment in Social-Personality Research: Does the Association between Narcissism and Psychological Health Result from a Confound with Self-Esteem?” Journal of Research in Personality 44 (2010): 453–465; Rosenthal et al., “Further Evidence of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory’s Validity Problems: A Meta-Analytic Investigation—Response to Miller, Maples, and Campbell,” Journal of Research in Personality 45 (2100): 408–416; and Kali H. Trzesniewski et al., “Do Today’s

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Young People Really Think They Are So Extraordinary?” Psychological Science 19 (2008): 181–188. 19. For a persuasive analysis of what the questions in fact measure, see Rosenthal and Hooley, “Narcissism Assessment,” 456. “An important person”: Twenge and Campbell, Narcissism Epidemic, 34. “Very, very important”: Twenge in Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Generation Me vs. You Revisited,” New York Times, 17 January 2008. 20. W. Keith Campbell, “Is Narcissism Really So Bad?” Psychological Inquiry 12 (2001): 214–216. 21. “Eighty percent”: Mark Leary in Carl Vogel, “A Field Guide to Narcissism,” Psychology Today, January-February 2006. “Confidence in success”: Freud, “A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit” (1917), Standard Edition 17:156. “Always confident”: Jake Halpern, “The New Me Generation,” Boston Globe, 30 September 2007. “Not an increase”: Rosenthal and Hooley, “Narcissism Assessment,” 462. Elizabeth Gudrais, “Self-Esteem, Real and Phony,” Harvard Magazine, September/October 2005, quotes Seth Rosenthal saying that “narcissism is not a kind of self-esteem. . . . Equating confident people with narcissistic people is like equating happy with manic and then saying, ‘Well, maybe happiness isn’t such a good thing after all.’ ” 22. “Every generation”: David Elkind in Susan Krauss Whitbourne, “Fulfillment at Any Age,” Psychology Today, 13 September 2011. The phrase also appears in Brent W. Roberts, Grant Edmonds, and Emily Grijalva, “It is Developmental Me, Not Generation Me: Developmental Changes are More Important than Generational Changes in Narcissism—Commentary on Trzesniewski and Donnellan,” Perspectives in Psychological Science 5 (2010): 97–102. “Uniquely miserable”: Spencer Brown, “We Can’t Appease the Younger Generation,” New York Times, 27 November 1966. “Fatuous self-absorption”: Frank A. Johnson, “The Existential Psychotherapy of Alienated Persons,” in The Narcissistic Condition: A Fact of Our Lives and Times, ed. Marie Coleman Nelson (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1977), 128. “Absolutely hilarious”: Comment to “Students Not So Self-Obsessed, After All, Study Finds,” Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, 17 January 2008. Pearsall Smith quoted in Brown, “Can’t Appease.” For assessments, see, for example, Christine Rosen, “The Overpraised American,” Policy Review 133 (October/November, 2005); and Lori Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” Atlantic, July/August 2011. “So selfish”: Joel Stein, “The New Greatest Generation: Why Millennials Will Save Us All,” Time, 20 May 2013.

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23. “New study”: Eric Hoover, “New Study Finds ‘Most Narcissistic Generation’ on Campuses, Watching You Tube,” Chronicle of Higher Education 28 February 2007. “Students Not So Self-Obsessed.” “Dire warnings”: Douglas Quenqua, “Seeing Narcissists Everywhere,” New York Times, 5 August 1913. Books: Linda Martinez-Lewis, Freeing Yourself from the Narcissist in Your Life (New York: Penguin, 2008); Cynthia Zayn and M.S. Kevin Dribble, Narcissistic Lovers: How to Cope, Recover and Move On (Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press, 2007); Nina W. Brown, Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up’s Guide to Getting over Narcissistic Parents (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Press, 2008). “Infuriating”: Nina W. Brown, Coping with Infuriating, Mean, Critical People: The Destructive Narcissistic Pattern (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006). Cynthia Lechan Goodman and Barbara Leff, The Everything Guide to Narcissistic Personality Disorder (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2012). 24. Rosenthal and Hooley, “Narcissism Assessment,” 461, discussing the psychologist’s take on healthy narcissism. I refer to research psychologists here to distinguish them from clinical psychologists. 25. For condemnation of advertiser’s exploitation of women, see Susan J. Douglas, Where The Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), chap. 11 (a critique of the notion of “Narcissism as Liberation”). “Inflated sense”: Lucy Taylor, “The Ego Epidemic: How More and More of Us Women Have an Inflated Sense of Our Own Fabulousness,” Mail Online,14 September 2009. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994), writes, at 23, that “feelings of dismay about the whole of fashion have been expressed since its very beginning” and is especially pointed on the dour moralism of the antifashion position. 26. “Jealousy, petty triumph”: Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 114, “women dress,” at 214. “Highly ambivalent”: Adrienne Harris in Irene Cairo-Chiarandini, “To Have and Have Not: Clinical Uses of Envy,” JAPA 49 (2001): 1391–1404, at 1399. “Way of displaying”: Arlene Kramer Richards, “Ladies of Fashion: Pleasure, Perversion or Paraphilia,” IJP 77 (1996): 337–351, at 337. 27. “Generation Me’s lifetime”: Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Free Press, 2006), 17, “free to be” at 24–25, “satisfy their personal wants” at 221. “Fads” and “bodies” are items on the NPI, in Pinsky and Young, Mirror Effect, 264. “Vain and self-centered”: Twenge and Campbell, Narcissism Epidemic, 39. Stanley A. Leavy, “Against Narcissism,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19 (1996): 403–424, notes,

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at 406, that “narcissism as the erotic pleasure of gazing at the reflection of one’s own body” plays little role in analytic thinking and practice (though, as noted in the text, it figures importantly in the NPI). 28. Louis W. Flaccus, “Remarks on the Psychology of Clothes,” Pedagogical Seminary 13–14 (1906–1907): 61–83, esp. 70–75. 29. “Psychic distress”: Colin Campbell, “Shopaholics, Spendaholics, and the Question of Gender,” in I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self, ed. April Lane Benson (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2000), 58, “extended clothes-shopping” at 69. “Escape from psychic pain”: Ann-Marie N. Paley, “Growing Up in Chaos: The Dissociative Response,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 48 (1988): 72–83, at 75. “Flight from feminine identification”: Diana Diamond, “Gender-Specific Transference Reactions of Male and Female Patients to the Therapist’s Pregnancy,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 9 (1992): 319–345, at 331. “Form of self-harm”: Lynda Chassler, “Traumatic Attachments and Self-Harm Behaviors,” Psychoanalytic Social Work 15 (2008): 69–74, at 70. “Deferred reaction”: Lauren Lawrence, “The Psychodynamics of the Compulsive Female Shopper,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1990): 67–70, at 70. “Cast shopping”: Campbell, “Shopaholics.” 30. “Ungraceful descent”: Michelle Cottle, “How Men’s Magazines Are Making Guys as Neurotic, Insecure and Obsessive about Their Appearance as Women,” Washington Monthly, May 1998. “Tight, low-rise jeans”: Mark Lotto, “We’re Nude York, Nude York,” New York Observer, 26 June 2005. 31. “Shalt nots”: Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 14–18. Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011 [1960]), 85. 32. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 17.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the contributions of the many friends, colleagues, and family members that enabled me to write this book. I wish to thank Tony Broh, David Casey, Debbie Cooper, Lorraine Daston, Carolyn Dean, Stephanie Engel, Jennifer Hochschild, Dan Sternberg, and Hedy Weinberg for their generous and unwavering support of me and for their inexhaustible interest in narcissism. I am deeply grateful to Jean-Christophe Agnew, David Alworth, Sarah Igo, and Barbara Taylor for their engagement with this project and for offering me informed and astute comments on various portions of it. A good deal of what I learned in conversations spanning many years with John Carson, John Forrester, Volney Gay, Peter Mandler, Andreas Mayer, and Louis Sass has made its way into this book in one form or another. Michael Bess, Jim Epstein, Leah Marcus, Mike Schoenfeld, Valerie Smith, and Frank Wcislo started as colleagues and became valued friends. With Angela Creager, Lorraine Daston, Susan Marchand, Londa Schiebinger, and Norton Wise I have edited collections of essays, and have benefited from collaborating with them all. Former students Tammy Brown, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Rachel Goldstein, Chin Jou, and Laura Stark were always ready to talk about narcissism, and have sent a steady stream of articles on the topic my way. Joyce Seltzer has been an ideal editor, supportive of my ambitions for the book; Donika Ross stepped in at the last minute to help with manuscript preparation. I have long enjoyed the friendship of Emily Martin, fellow traveler in the realm of all things “psy”; her sustaining presence

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has been critical through the years this book has been in the making. Michael Bernstein has given generously of his self and keen intelligence, for which I am exceedingly grateful. And, over the last several decades, Allan Brandt has proven the most steadfast of friends, a font of warmth and deeply appreciated wisdom on just about everything. I wish to acknowledge the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts— friends and colleagues—who have contributed in important ways to this book. Bennett Simon, friend and intellectual collaborator, has served as an invaluable sounding board on matters both personal and professional; I benefitted enormously from his generous reading of the entire manuscript. In conversation with Humphrey Morris I have deepened my understanding of narcissism, of psychoanalysis, and of much else besides. In Boston, Steven Ablon, Nancy Chodorow, Lois Choi-Kain, Shelly Greenfield, and Anton Kris have been especially welcoming and supportive of my interests in the borderlands between the academy and psychoanalysis. I am also grateful to the many practitioners to whom I have presented my work for the informed and challenging feedback they have given me. In particular, I thank Stanley Coen, Lawrence Friedman, George Makari, and Kerry Sulkowicz in New York and James Anderson in Chicago. Portions of chapter 4 originally appeared in “The Narcissistic Homosexual: Genealogy of a Myth,” History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past, ed. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. The full published version of this publication is available from: http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc /doifinder/10.1057/9781137092427.0004. Brief portions of the Introduction and Chapter 1 originally appeared in “Narcissism: Social Critique in Me-Decade America,” Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880-1980, ed. Kerstin Brückweh, Dirk Schumann, Richard F. Wetzell, and Benjamin Zieman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. The full published version of this publication is available from: http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057 /9781137284501.

354

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank John Burnham for providing a platform to explore the ideas discussed here in chapter 2, in After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America, ed. Burnham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). At an earlier stage in my research, I examined some of the issues in the same chapter in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and am grateful for the feedback I received. I would also like to thank Joanne Halford, Honorary Archivist of the British Psychoanalytical Society, London, and Casey Gibbs, Librarian of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, for permission to publish material from, respectively, the Joan Riviere Papers and the Heinz Kohut Papers. My greatest debts are to my family. The support of my parents has been unwavering, and so too has been the companionship of my sisters and brothers. Linda Gerstle and Isaac Franco were always ready to offer me a refuge from narcissism. My sons reached adulthood listening to me talk of finishing this project. Dan has proven an invaluable interlocutor to the end, and his readings of the book improved it immeasurably. Sam has been endlessly and satisfyingly curious and, like his brother, always open to talking with me about it. Finally, I thank my husband Gary Gerstle for giving me sustained encouragement, support, and love—the “narcissistic supplies” that have made it all possible.

INDEX

Abraham, Karl, 204, 207, 283n28, 314n7, 333n5 Abstinence, 174–176, 182–186, 326n29 Adler, Alfred, 50, 184 Advertising: and affluent society, 21–22; and culture of narcissism, 15; and needs vs. wants, 25; sexualized, 22, 280n17; and vanity, 163–164 Affluence, 18–23 The Affluent Society (Galbraith), 18–19 Aggression: and developmental stages, 27; and love, 73, 78; and malignant narcissism, 60, 61, 63, 65, 80; and materialism, 160 Aichorn, August, 42 Albieri, Donna, 87, 88 Alexander, Franz, 191 Altruism, 4, 39, 107 Americanized Freud, 37–58; and classical psychoanalysis, 49–58; narcissism in, 38–49 American Psychoanalytic Association, 40

American superego, 241–244 Anal stage, 27 The Analysis of the Self (Kohut), 40, 54 “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (Freud), 178 Analytic censorship, 177–182 Apocalyptic fantasies, 198 Asceticism: and affluent society, 23; and gratification, 166, 176, 323n18; and independence, 136; Rieff on, 34; and vanity, 160 Austen Riggs Center, 231 Austerity, 166 Autoeroticism, 83, 85, 98–99 Automobiles, symbolism of, 149–150 Avarice, 27, 30–33 Bacon, Francis, 83, 200 Balint, Alice, 116–117 Balint, Michael, 118, 119, 192, 306n6 Basch, Michael, 330n48 Behling, Katya, 120, 121

356

Index

Bell, Daniel: on affluence, 18, 20, 22–23; on charisma, 258; on gratification, 167, 194, 195; on modernity, 35, 46–47; on needs vs. wants, 25; social criticism by, 2, 57 Benjamin, Jessica, 323n15 Bernays, Minna, 119–120, 121–122 Bettelheim, Bruno, 198 Bhattacharya, Haridas, 235 Birth control, 128 Blanton, Smiley, 29, 178, 321n8 Bliss, Sylvia, 145, 147, 149 Bonaparte, Marie, 95 Boredom, 38 Bose, G., 235 Boston Globe on self-esteem, 263 Boundary violations, 183 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 2 Branden, Nathaniel, 109 Breger, Louis, 94 Breuer, Josef, 168, 323n15 Brierley, Marjorie, 322n12 Brill, Abraham, 99, 220 British Psycho-Analytical Society, 98, 151, 154 Brooks, David, 253, 254 Butler, Judith, 152 California “Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem,” 110 Campbell, Keith, 261, 262, 348n18 Capitalism: and affluent society, 22, 23; and dependency, 127; and gratification, 195; and greed, 3, 30 Cars, symbolism of, 149–150 Carter, Jimmy, 13

Character Analysis (Reich), 233 Character neuroses, 203 Charisma, 258–259 Child grandiosity, 44–45 “A Child Is Being Beaten” (Freud), 234 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 48, 63, 116, 257 Clark University, 91, 147 Classical psychoanalysis: and Americanized Freud, 49–58; and asceticism, 166; and gratification, 320n2; on independence, 132–135, 136; Kohut’s revolution against, 49–58; on object-love, 84–85. See also Psychoanalysis Clinical Diary (Ferenczi), 168–169, 177 Clothes fetishism, 141, 313n6. See also Fashion and vanity Collins, Jim, 259 Colossal narcissism, 213–219, 256 Comfort, Alex, 76 Competitiveness: and affluence, 19; and malignant narcissism, 63; and vanity, 150 “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child” (Ferenczi), 179–180, 181, 325n226 Conspicuous consumption, 130 Consumerism: and affluent society, 22, 284n35; and culture of narcissism, 15, 70; and dependency, 127; and narcissism, 261; and needs vs. wants, 26 Consumption: and culture of narcissism, 29, 32–33, 202; and

Index dependency, 127, 129–130; and independence, 113; and vanity, 268 “A Contribution to the Analysis of the Negative Therapeutic Reaction” (Riviere), 205–206 Cosmopolitan on identity, 228 Counterculture, 3, 19–20, 39, 78, 165, 195 Countertransference, 66 Covey, Stephen, 259 Creativity: of fashion, 148; and independence, 133; and malignant narcissism, 71, 80 The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Bell), 2, 18 Cultural personality, 226 Culture against Man (Henry), 21 Culture of narcissism, 13–18 The Culture of Narcissism (Lasch), 2, 12, 13, 16, 17, 68, 110, 132, 255 Cushman, Philip, 284n35 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 13 Dependence: as feminine trait, 86, 119–126; and homosexuality, 86, 96; and jealousy, 220; and Oedipus complex, 308n17; as pathological problem, 136–137; and subordination, 113; and vanity, 160. See also Independence Developmental stages, 27–28 Dichter, Ernest, 21, 22, 32, 195, 270, 281n19 “Dreams and Telepathy” (Freud), 234 Drive theory, 59, 65

357

Ego: and culture of narcissism, 16; and healthy narcissism, 104; and identity, 229–230; possessions as portion of, 30 The Ego and the Id (Freud), 216 “Ego Development and Historical Change” (Erikson), 338n6 Einfühlung, 171–172 Eissler, Kurt, 52, 230, 290n25, 327n32, 336n24 Eissler, Ruth, 40, 52 Elegance, 25 Ellis, Havelock, 83, 300n26 Ellison, Larry, 256 Emotional Intelligence (Goleman), 259 “The Emotional Life of Civilized Men and Women” (Riviere), 157 Empathy: and gratification, 166, 170, 186–194; Kohut on, 56; and leadership, 259–260 Envy, 145, 151, 160, 163, 222, 266 Erhard, Werner, 14 Erikson, Erik: framing of narcissism by, 6–7; on Freud’s abstinence from smoking, 176; on identity, 56, 225–237, 243, 247, 248–251, 338n6; on self-esteem, 105 Escape from Freedom (Fromm), 233 Essence magazine on self-love, 109 The Everything Guide to Narcissistic Personality Disorder (Goodman & Leff), 265 Exhibitionism, 141, 142, 144–145, 149–150, 163, 266 Extreme dependency, 126

358

Index

Fairbairn, W. R. D., 126 The Fall of Public Man (Sennett), 18 Farnham, Marynia F., 131 Fashion and vanity, 140–150, 158, 162, 266–269, 316n19 Federn, Paul, 104, 105, 235–236, 252, 301n34 Female narcissism, 138, 266. See also Vanity “Female Sexuality” (Freud), 116 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 224, 246 Femininity: and culture of narcissism, 15; of dependence, 86, 119–126; and identity, 246–247; of jealousy, 219; and vanity, 156–157; of vanity, 163; of wants, 25–26 Feminism, 76, 78, 129, 224, 225 Fenichel, Otto, 28–30, 102, 105–106, 185, 250, 283n30 Ferenczi, Sándor: analytic boundary violations by, 183; on empathy, 56, 186–187, 188, 291n27, 321n8; framing of narcissism by, 6–7; on Freud’s break with Jung, 124; on Freud’s Leonardo, 86; Freud’s relationship with, 90–97, 119, 167–176; on gratification, 166, 167–176, 320n2; on homosexuality, 100, 101; on independence, 116, 119; on infantile grandiosity, 44; jealousy of Jung, 220; on Jones, 325n226; marginalization of, 50, 54–55, 166, 177–182; on self-love and object-love, 103–104 Fetishism, 141, 313n6 Fine, Reuben, 331n53 Flaccus, Louis W., 147, 157, 267–268

Fliess, Ida, 93–97 Fliess, Wilhelm: on abstinence, 174–175, 176; Freud’s relationship with, 87, 93–96, 122, 168 Flügel, J. C., 101, 143–146, 148–149, 266–267, 270, 316n19 “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism” (Kohut), 107 Fortune on charisma, 258 Fraser, Nancy, 124 Free association, 189 Free love, 76. See also Sexual permissiveness Freud, Anna, 40, 119, 184, 219, 231 Freud, Martha, 95, 120, 121 Freud, Martin, 307n10 Freud, Oliver, 121 Freud, Sigmund: on aggression in relationships, 63; analytic boundary violations by, 184; and censorship of Ferenczi, 179–182; on clothes fetishism, 313n6; on empathy, 171–172, 188; on female narcissism, 11, 138; Ferenczi’s relationship with, 90–97, 119, 167–176; Fliess’s relationship with, 87, 93–96, 122, 168; framing of narcissism by, 6–7; on gratification, 48, 165–166, 168–176; on heroic dependencies, 119–126; on homo natura, 49; and homosexuality, 90–103; on identity, 230, 233, 234; on independence, 114, 119, 132–133, 136; on infant narcissism, 43–44; Jones’s relationship with, 213–222; Jung’s relationship with, 122–124, 297n5; Kohut influenced

Index by, 42–43; on leadership qualities of narcissists, 256–257; on Leonardo da Vinci, 85–90; on narcissism as normal and pathological, 4, 33–34, 83–84; on needs and wants, 23; on primary narcissism, 114, 115–119; Riviere as analysis subject of, 213–219, 336n24; on self-esteem, 105, 302n36; on treatment of narcissism, 203–204. See also specific books and papers Freud, Sophie, 121 Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Rieff), 24 Friedan, Betty, 224, 246, 247 Fromm, Erich, 136, 233, 313n5 Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, 242, 243 Galatzer-Levy, Robert M., 329n48 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 18–19, 24, 25, 26 Gallantry, 75 Gates, Bill, 261 Gay, Peter, 87, 95, 184, 323n18 Gellner, Ernest, 62–63 Gender: and jealousy, 219–220, 221; and vanity, 266–271. See also Femininity; Feminism; Women Gender Trouble (Butler), 152 Generation Me, 261, 264, 267 Generation Me (Twenge), 267 Generation of Narcissus (Malcolm), 197 God-complex, 154, 256 Goleman, Daniel, 259 Good Housekeeping: on charisma, 259; on self-love, 110

359

Good to Great (Collins), 259 Gordon, Linda, 124 Grandiose self, 45, 72, 163 Grandiosity: child, 44–45, 46; and culture of narcissism, 11, 18, 33; and independence, 133; infant, 44; in Kernberg’s narcissists, 4–5; and leadership, 260; and malignant narcissism, 61; and vanity, 161 Gratification, 165–201; and affluence, 20; and affluent society, 22; and analytic censorship, 37, 177–182; and culture of narcissism, 12, 15; and empathy, 186–194; instant and immediate, 194–200; in Kohut’s framing of narcissism, 37, 40; and love, 167–176; as pathological problem, 136–137; and privation in analytic setting, 182–186; society as antagonistic to, 48; as target of Me Decade critics, 5 Greed, 27, 30–33, 194 Green, Aaron, 191, 192, 193, 194, 205 Groddeck, Georg, 92 Hallucinatory independence, 115–119 Hartmann, Heinz, 52, 55, 230 Haven in a Heartless World (Lasch), 132 Healthy narcissism, 4, 85, 103–109, 254, 262–263 Hedonism, 20, 21, 79, 280n16, 281n19 Henry, Jules, 21, 22, 280n17 Heterosexuality: as narcissistic, 103; and self-love, 84, 100, 102, 108

360

Index

Hofstadter, Richard, 17 Hollander, Anne, 316n19 Home economics, 131 Homosexuality: and dependence, 86, 96; Freud’s work on, 85–90; and identity, 225; of Leonardo da Vinci, 87–88; narcissism connected to, 84, 107; and object love, 98; and paranoia, 91–92; and psychoanalysis, 98; and self-love, 84, 97–103; and vanity, 139, 142 Horney, Karen, 184, 236, 237, 238 Household labor, 131 Hubbard, L. Ron, 14 Id, 16 Idealism, 197, 209 Identity, 224–251; and American superego, 241–244; and culture of narcissism, 13; and healthy narcissism, 56; and minor differences, 248–251; pseudopersonalities, 245; and realness, 237–241; searching for, 228–237; women’s, 244–247 Identity crisis, 229 Imperial self, 47 Impulse gratification, 15, 66 Independence, 113–136; and affluence, 19; and Freud’s heroic dependencies, 119–126; hallucinatory, 115–119; and leadership, 260; and malignant narcissism, 62; phony, 132–135; and selfesteem, 106; and self-sufficiency, 126–132; and vanity, 143, 153, 160. See also Dependence Individualism: and affluence, 20, 22

Indulgence, 166 Infancy: dependence in, 133; grandiosity in, 44; independence in, 114, 115–119; narcissism in, 43–44, 70, 249 Infantile sexuality, 86 Instant gratification, 194–200 Interdependence, 20, 117, 119 Internalized object relations, 61, 160 International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 126, 181, 215 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 95 Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis (Freud), 212 “Introjection and Transference” (Ferenczi), 104 “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis” (Kohut), 186 Jackson, Jesse, 258 Jackson, Scoop, 258 Jacobson, Edith, 52 Jacoby, Russell, 281n19 James, William, 30, 225, 233–235, 302n36, 341n19 Jealousy, 219–222. See also Envy Jersild, Arthur T., 240 Jobs, Steve, 255, 261 Johns Hopkins University, 64 Johnson, Virginia E., 74 Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious (Freud), 171 Jones, Ernest: analytic boundary violations by, 183; Ferenczi’s work censored and suppressed by, 54–55, 181; framing of narcissism by, 6–7; and Freud’s departure from

Index

361

Germany, 42; on Freud’s disdain for dependence, 119, 122, 135; on Freud’s family life, 119–120; on Freud’s obsession with Leonardo da Vinci, 85–86; Freud’s relationship with, 213–222; on Freud’s relationship with Fliess, 94–95, 96; on Freud’s relationship with Jung, 123; on “God complex,” 154, 256; Riviere as analysis subject of, 205–206, 207–212; on women’s dependence on men, 125 Jung, Carl: analytic boundary violations by, 183; Freud’s relationship with, 122–124, 168, 297n5; on homosexuality, 100; marginalization of, 50; on women in U.S., 242

analysis, 5, 49–58, 84, 191; on empathy, 186–194, 291n27; framing of narcissism by, 3, 6–7; Freud’s influence on, 42–43; on gratification, 166, 167; and healthy narcissism, 5, 106–108; on healthy narcissism, 161, 162–163; on homosexuality and object-love, 99; on identity, 227, 248–251; on independence, 113–114, 132–135, 136; on narcissism, 38–49; on narcissistic personality disorder, 204–205; on treatment of narcissism, 72 Komik und Humor (Lipps), 171 Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 88, 141 Kris, Anton, 206, 217, 218, 222 Kuhn, Thomas, 53, 55

Kann, Loe, 183 Kardiner, Abram, 324n20 Kernberg, Otto: biographical background, 64–65; and classical psychoanalysis, 5; on dependency, 135; framing of narcissism by, 3, 6–7; on healthy narcissism, 108–109; on independence, 114; on malignant narcissism, 57, 160–161; on materialism, 160; narcissistic dystopia of, 59–80; on narcissistic personality disorder, 204–205; on self-esteem, 303n40; on treatment of narcissism, 72 Keynes, John Maynard, 26 Klein, Melanie, 64, 118, 219 Kohut, Heinz: Americanized Freud by, 37–58; analytic process of, 329n48; and classical psycho-

Lasch, Christopher: on character neuroses, 203; on consumption, 32–33, 113, 132, 202, 268; on culture of narcissism, 2, 12, 15, 16–17, 27, 36, 67, 263, 280n16, 282n26; on dependency, 126–128, 312n35; on gratification, 165, 195, 196; on identity, 245–246, 251; on independence, 115, 132–133; on individualism, 2–3; on Kernberg, 59; on malignant narcissism, 68–69; on needs vs. wants, 24, 25; on self-absorption, 47; on self-esteem promotion, 110, 330n50; on sexual antagonism, 76–77; social criticism by, 57; on trivialization of personal relations, 73; on vanity, 140, 313n5 Latour, Bruno, 32

362

Index

Leadership, 254–261 Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (Freud), 84, 85–90, 98 Libido: and culture of narcissism, 16; and healthy narcissism, 104; Kernberg on, 65 Life magazine on household consumption, 131 Lipps, Theodore, 171 Loneliness, 38 The Lonely Crowd (Riesman), 2, 16, 19 Love: and aggression, 73, 78; and gratification, 167–176; Kernberg’s theories on, 73–74; ritualization of, 74. See also Self-love Lundberg, Ferdinand, 131 Lynd, Helen Merrell, 236, 237 Maccoby, Michael, 255, 261 Mademoiselle: on charisma, 259; on identity, 236 The Making of a Counter Culture (Roszak), 19–20 Malcolm, Henry, 197 Malcolm, Janet, 190–191, 192 Malcolm X, 258 Malignant narcissism, 59–80; and façade of normality, 64–67; media focus on, 57, 252; normal narcissism vs., 67–71; and personal relationships, 60–64; and sex and violence, 71–79 Marcuse, Herbert, 48 Marin, Peter, 13–14 Marital fidelity, 77 Marriage, 74, 261

Marxism, 233 Masculine ascendancy, 75 Maslow, Abraham, 35 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 23 Masochism, 207 Masters, William H., 74 Materialism, 32–33, 127, 157–162, 270 Matriarchy, 242. See also Mother attachment May, Rollo, 242 Me Decade, 5, 11, 79, 194 Media coverage: on malignant narcissism, 57, 252, 264; narcissism equated with selfishness in, 50. See also specific publications Megalomania, 117, 207 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Schreber), 91 Menninger Foundation, 64 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 85 Miller, Perry, 34–35 Mills, C. Wright, 246 Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (Lundberg & Farnham), 131 Moon, Sun Myung, 14 Moore, G. E., 238–239 Morbid dependency, 126 Morrow, Lance, 79 Mother attachment: and homosexuality, 99; and identity, 242; and independence, 116, 119; and self-love, 89. See also Oedipus complex Narcissism: and affluent society, 18–23; Americanized, 38–49; colossal, 213–219, 256; culture of,

Index 13–18; elements of, 83–251; and gratification, 165–201; healthy, 85, 103–109; and identity, 224–251; and independence, 113–136; and jealousy, 219–222; and leadership, 254–261; and me and mine, 30–33; and needs and wants, 23–26; normalization of, 4; and objects and things, 27–30; and self-love, 83–112; treatment of, 202–223; and vanity, 138–164 The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (Twenge & Campbell), 261 Narcissistic dystopia, 59–80; and façade of normality, 64–67; normal vs. malignant narcissism, 67–71; and personal relationships, 60–64; and sex and violence, 71–79 Narcissistic personality disorder, 4, 204–205, 333n6 Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), 261–262, 348n18 Narcissistic supplies, 28 Needs: and affluence, 19; and narcissism, 23–26; as target of Me Decade critics, 5; and vanity, 153 New Introductory Essays (Freud), 151 Newsweek: on culture of narcissism, 12–13, 16–17; on dependence, 135; on self-love, 110, 111 New York Times: on affluent society, 21; on Age of Narcissism, 2; on culture of narcissism, 15; on grandiosity, 253; on identity, 225–226; Kohut’s obituary in, 43; on narcissism, 264, 276n2

363

Nightingale, Florence, 244 Normal narcissism, 71 NPI (Narcissistic Personality Inventory), 261–262, 348n18 Nunberg, Herman, 102 Object love: in developmental stages, 84–85; and healthy narcissism, 103–104; and homosexuality, 98, 102; internalized, 61; and malignant narcissism, 65; and self-love, 44, 107, 117; and vanity, 139, 153, 267 Objects and things: and narcissism, 27–30; and vanity, 157–162 “Observations on Transference-Love” (Freud), 173, 181 Oedipus complex, 16, 43, 59, 80, 89, 125, 308n17 Of Love and Lust (Reik), 162 Olden, Christine, 257 Omnipotence, 62, 116, 118, 160, 250, 256, 257 “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (Freud), 1, 11, 84, 102–103, 105, 114, 117, 138, 173, 258 Optimal frustration, 54, 196 Oral stage, 27, 28 The Organization Man (Whyte), 2, 19, 21 The Origins of Love and Hate (Suttie), 126 Pálos, Gizella, 183 Papers on Technique (Freud), 169, 172, 173, 189 Paranoia, 91–92 Parasitism, 129–130, 310nn25–26

364

Index

Parental introjects, 15 Parenting: and disorders of self, 45–46; permissive, 196. See also Mother attachment Patriarchy, 74–75, 242 Penis envy, 163, 222, 314n7 People: on Kohut, 39; on Lasch, 17, 165 People of Plenty (Potter), 18 Permissive parenting, 196 Phony independence, 132–135 Pinsky, Drew, 348n18 Plagiarism, 54, 290n26 Plentitude, 1, 62 Political power, 6, 197 Potter, David, 18, 310n26 Primary narcissism, 114, 115–119, 134–135, 305n6 The Principles of Psychology (James), 30, 235 Privation in analytic setting, 1, 174, 182–186 The Productive Narcissist (Maccoby), 255 “Propaganda of commodities,” 15 Prostitution, 245, 246 Pseudo-personalities, 245 Psychic equilibrium, 78 Psychoanalysis: boundary violations in, 183; economic hypothesis in, 23; and gratification, 320n2; and homosexuality, 98; on independence, 114; popularity of, 50; and primary narcissism, 117–118; privation in, 182–186; technique of, 169–171; treatment of narcissism with, 4–5, 72, 202–223. See also Classical psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (Malcolm), 190 The Psychoanalytic Movement (Gellner), 62 The Psychoanalytic Situation (Stone), 185 “The Psychological Basis of Personal Identity” (Bhattacharya), 235 The Psychology of Clothes (Flügel), 143 The Psychology of Self-Esteem (Branden), 109 Psychology Today on normalization of narcissism, 253 Psychopathia Sexualis (KrafftEbing), 88, 141 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud), 212 The Pursuit of Loneliness (Slater), 14 Putnam, Robert, 2 The Quest for Identity (Wheelis), 228 Rádo, Sándor, 106 Rage, 60 Rank, Otto, 138, 168 Realness, 237–241 Reich, Annie, 105, 106, 257 Reich, Wilhelm, 233 Reik, Theodor, 162 The Restoration of the Self (Kohut), 40, 57 Rieff, Philip: on gratification, 48, 167, 194, 199; on identity, 251; on needs vs. wants, 24, 34; social criticism by, 1, 57; on vanity, 270–271 Riesman, David: on capitalism, 22; on Freud’s view of the child, 134;

Index on gratification, 195–196; on identity, 228, 239; social criticism by, 2, 16, 35; on treatment of narcissism, 202; on work ethic, 19, 20 Riviere, Joan, 207–212; as analysis subject, 205–206, 207–219, 336n24; on female narcissism, 150–157; framing of narcissism by, 6–7; on jealousy, 220; on materialism, 158, 159; translation of Freud’s works by, 212 Rockefeller University, 64 Roszak, Theodore, 19–20 Rycroft, Charles, 342n32 Sadger, Isidor, 84, 111–112 Sadism, 207, 217 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 62 Scarcity of resources, 19, 23–24, 60 Schizophrenia, 16, 117 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 91, 92, 97 Schur, Max, 200 Scientific American on normalization of narcissism, 254 Scott, Joan, 156 Segal, Hanna, 335n12 Self-absorption, 47 Self-admiration, 142. See also Vanity Self-assurance, 104 Self-censorship, 177 Self-confidence, 62, 147 Self-control, 1, 22, 90–97, 200 Self-criticism, 217 Self-esteem: and child grandiosity, 46; and culture of narcissism, 11; defining, 302n36; and Generation Me, 261; and healthy narcissism,

365

105; and identity, 250; and independence, 106, 133; and malignant narcissism, 62, 67–68; narcissism as form of, 4; normal, 71; and object love, 28; promotion of, 109–111, 330n50; and self-love, 108–109; as target of Me Decade critics, 5; in today’s society, 263, 265; and vanity, 147, 159, 161, 162 Self-expression, 146, 148 Self-gratification, 201 Self-indulgence, 1 Self-inflation, 106 Selfishness: and culture of narcissism, 14; narcissism equated with, 50, 111 Self-love, 83–112; and healthy narcissism, 103–109; and homosexuality, 97–103, 117; and self-control, 90–97 Selfobjects, 134, 135, 161 Self-observation, 171 Self psychology, 50 Self-realization, 5, 14, 22, 34, 68, 165 Self-sovereignty, 90, 115, 270 Self-sufficiency, 114, 126–132. See also Independence Sennett, Richard, 18 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey), 259 Seventeen: on charisma, 258–259; on identity, 236 Sex and malignant narcissism, 71–79 Sexual abstinence, 175–176, 183, 326n29 Sexualized advertising, 22 Sexual liberation, 77, 128, 228

366

Index

Sexual permissiveness, 70, 76 Sigmund Freud’s Mission (Fromm), 136 Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling), 202–203 Slater, Philip, 14, 20, 48, 280n15 Smith, Adam, 129 Smith, Logan Pearsall, 264 Smoking, 176, 200–201 Social criticism, 57–58, 252 Social facts, 28 Social relations, 60–64 The Sociology of Religion (Weber), 176 Socrates, 107 Sovereignty, 114 Spielrein, Sabina, 142, 183 Stekel, Wilhelm, 142 Stoicism, 24, 30–31 Stone, Leo, 185–186, 192, 203 Strachey, Alix, 172 Strachey, James, 51, 172, 178, 322n15 The Strategy of Desire (Dichter), 21 Strean, Herbert, 198–199 Strozier, Charles, 287n9 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 53 Subordination: and dependence, 113; sexual, 75; and vanity, 151–152 Sumptuary laws, 25 Superego: American, 241–244; and malignant narcissism, 64 Sutherland, Isabelle, 239 Suttie, Ian, 26, 118, 126, 135–136

The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 18, 130 Therapeutic nihilism, 177 Thompson, Clara Mabel, 328n39 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud), 98 Time: on affluent society, 19; on culture of narcissism, 14; on Generation Me, 264; on Me Decade, 79; on narcissism, 276n2 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 13 Transference, 66, 173, 181–182, 189, 205, 208, 213, 335n12 Trilling, Lionel, 16, 202–203 The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Rieff), 24, 270 Turner, Ralph, 238, 240–241 Twenge, Jean M., 261, 262, 267, 268, 348n18 “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z” (Kohut), 193

“Task Force to Promote SelfEsteem” (California), 110

Waelder, Robert, 52 Wallerstein, Robert S., 289n21

Vanity, 138–164; and fashion, 140–150; gendered, 266–271; and Generation Me, 261; and material me, 157–162; as target of Me Decade critics, 5; and women, 150–157 Veblen, Thorstein, 18, 129–130, 195 Victorianism, 1 Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 142 Violence and malignant narcissism, 71–79 Vischer, Robert, 171

Index Wall Street Journal on normalization of narcissism, 254 Wants: and affluence, 19; and narcissism, 23–26 Watson, Amey E., 130–131 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 129 Weatherly, U. G., 130 Weber, Max, 176, 258, 323n18 Welch, Jack, 261 Wheelis, Allen, 228, 241–242 Whyte, William H., Jr., 2, 19–22, 195–196 Wilson, Harold, 258 Winnicott, D. W.: framing of narcissism by, 6–7; on identity, 225, 227, 237–238; on materialism, 31, 157, 158 Wittels, Fritz, 119

367

Wolfe, Tom, 13, 14, 79 “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (Riviere), 152, 155 Women: advertising to, 21; and affluent society, 21–22; and consumerism, 127–128; Freud on female narcissism, 11; and identity, 244–247; and independence, 119–126; parasitism by, 129–130, 310nn25–26; and sexual antagonism, 74–75, 77–78; subordination of, 75, 151–152; and vanity, 140–157. See also Femininity; Gender Work ethic, 19, 20, 79 Young, S. Mark, 348n18 Zaleznik, Abraham, 260