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 1

I. Narcissism in the Me Decade 9

1. The Culture of Narcissism 11
2. Heinz Kohut’s American Freud 37
3. Otto Kernberg’s Narcissistic Dystopia 59

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 252

Abbreviations 273
Notes 276
Acknowledgments 352
Index 355
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
INTRODUCTION

It is a commonplace of social criticism that Amer-

ica has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcis-
sists. Greedy, selfish, and self-absorbed, we narcissists are thriving,
the critics tell us, in the culture of abundance that is modern, late-
capitalist 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. Reck-
less 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 regu-
larly invoked gallery of narcissists in our midst—spanning the spec-
trum 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 loos-
ening 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 “plen-
titude of option.” Narcissism has figured importantly in psychoana-
lytic thinking from the appearance of Freud’s landmark essay, “On
Narcissism: An Introduction,” in 1914, but it did not enter the pop-
ular lexicon until the 1970s. Then, as a shorthand for Me Decade
2 Introduction

excess, it was quickly grafted onto a narrative of decline that saw

Americans as a people shifting from sturdy production to meaning-
less consumption, from small-town gemeinschaft to anonymous ge-
sellschaft, from David Riesman’s introspective bourgeois to his su-
perficial 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 Ameri-
can 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 nar-
cissist, whose impoverished moral sensibility serves to vividly illus-
trate 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, cul-
minating in the publication of his wildly popular 1978 jeremiad, The
Culture of Narcissism. In the hands of Lasch and other critics, nar-
cissism 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-
 Introduction 3

tion, and claims for gay liberation—to collectively warn of the un-
raveling of Western society and the undermining of its most cher-
ished 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 por-
trait 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 bra-
vado, depended for its vitality on the ever-expanding consumer de-
mand 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 dis-
ordered 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. Cel-
ebrating what others condemned, Kohut boldly reframed narcissism
as a desirable, even healthy, dimension of mature selfhood. He con-
sistently underscored narcissism’s positive aspects, arguing that it
fueled individuals’ ambitions, creativity, and fellow-feeling. He re-
jected 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 differ-
ent. 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
4 Introduction

devalue and discard. The most creative and intelligent of them en-
joyed 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 mo-
ment 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 sus-
tain life) and pathological (a state of self-love to be overcome in the
course of development). In the half-century-long unfolding of narcis-
sism’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 to-
gether broadened narcissism’s remit—in their wake it could refer to
both destructiveness and self-preservation, and could be seen as ex-
pressive 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 in-
stantly recognizable. This move marked narcissism’s psychoanalytic
coming of age and, beyond the discipline, endowed it with a concrete-
ness and specificity appealing to critics. The narcissist was now an
identifiable character open to attack.
 Introduction 5

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: gran-
diose, entitled, ruthless, filled with rage and lacking in empathy, be-
neath the seductive surface these narcissists were satisfyingly miser-
able. At the same time, Kohut’s healthy narcissism almost entirely
escaped the critics’ notice. Kohut spoke to strivings for self-
realization, legitimized worldly ambition, and supported the pursuit
of values, goals, and ideals expressive of the highest in human na-
ture. The commitments of the critics were, in contrast, to asceticism
and scarcity, and they disdained the language of possibility and self-
discovery. 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 narcis-
sism 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 con-
versation 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: self-
esteem, 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 at-
tention, offered solutions to a range of issues with which their ana-
lytic 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
6 Introduction

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 nar-
cissism, whether it is their contributions to the literature or the dif-
ferent perspectives and even animosities that divided them: the ca-
nonical 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 in-
tense 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 organiz-
ing 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 con-
troversies 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 as-
siduous boundary policing. From the beginning, analysts used nar-
cissism to account for the best and worst in us, to explain our ca-
pacities 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 theo-
rize 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 understand-
ing our experiences of ourselves and of all the others in our lives,
 Introduction 7

and it has offered a way to bring needs and wants not rooted in bi-
ology 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 pathologi-
cal 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 vari-
ous 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 phenome-
non 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 grandios-
ity 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 self-
contented, psychologically inaccessible female narcissist, enigmatic in
her self-sufficiency; what was at issue in clinical construals of narcis-
sism 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 differ-
ent cultural indictment of an unseemly material plentitude.
12 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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, narcis-
sism 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 civi-
lization 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 ana-
lytic debate. The critics, meanwhile, eagerly incorporated the term
into their already refined critiques of American affluence and abun-
dance. And a public, possessed of what one British critic noted was a
puzzling “appetite for self-excoriating self-examination,” made best-
sellers 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
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 13

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 selec-
tions on “the problems of affluence” drawn from Alexis de Toc-
queville’s Democracy in America, first published in 1835, to Lasch’s
just published jeremiad—took to the airwaves lamenting that the wor-
ship 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. Iden-
tity, 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 de-
bate. 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 observ-
ing, studying, and doting on it.” Wolfe sent up the incessant “dwell-
ing 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
14 Narcissism in the Me Decade

the solipsistic retreat into the self promoted by a new breed of pop-
ular 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 por-
tending the rise of a “new narcissism.”2
Others joined Wolfe and Marin. Articles in Time magazine chroni-
cled 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 in-
vitations to self-absorption springing up all over, in courses such
as “Understanding the Struggle to be ‘ME,’ ” in workshops on achiev-
ing 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 Narcis-
sus, 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 nar-
cissism 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 scat-
tered references to narcissism as signaling an indulgent, sensuous,
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 15

and feminized consumption. Thus, for example, in 1948 a New York

Times writer invoked narcissism to characterize the unseemly self-
regard 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” ad-
vertisers promoted, which he found expressive of an ever-increasing
“national narcissism.”4
Lasch wove together a critique of this sort of feminized, consum-
erist gratification and the idea of narcissism as selfishness. His exem-
plary 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 capital-
ism’s goods, they live restlessly in the thrall of pseudoneeds stimulated
by “the propaganda of commodities.” Their inner lives are impover-
ished 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 con-
vincing than those of Wolfe, Marin, and others. A layman, he none-
theless assumed the analyst’s mantle to sketch a clinical portrait of
the new narcissist, highlighting the mix of grandiosity, rage, vacillat-
ing self-esteem, devaluing of others, seductiveness, and manipula-
tiveness that analysts took note of, and asserted his own clinical
bona fides in footnotes referencing the latest analytic journal litera-
ture. Lasch reproved his fellow critics for deploying narcissism pre-
scriptively 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
16 Narcissism in the Me Decade

promiscuously from papers not only on narcissism but also on bor-

derline personality and schizophrenia in support of his cultural analy-
ses and that it glossed over important debates among the authorities
on whom he relied did nothing to diminish its rhetorical persuasive-
ness. To the contrary: he was giving his audience what it wanted.
Today, when psychoanalysis can be casually dismissed as an out-
dated 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 Oe-
dipus complex appeared regularly in magazine and newspaper discus-
sions 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.” Lio-
nel 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 pro-
found, 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
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 17

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. Psychoana-
lysts, 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 psy-
choanalytic perspective he so roundly condemned in the book as evi-
dence 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 permissive-
ness 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 well-
established 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 Ameri-
can history. His target was the exuberant self and his ideal was what
he called “the imperial self of yesteryear,” the autonomous, indepen-
dent Freudian self without needs. Lasch confidently linked the indi-
vidual and the social in his contention that each epoch’s signal
pathologies expressed “in exaggerated form its underlying character
18 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 “ap-
proval 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 consump-
tion at a particularly vexed point in the history of intellectuals’ en-
gagement 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 pub-
lished at a time when the proposition that abundance results in the
impoverishment of the self achieved near-axiomatic standing in popu-
lar commentary and professional social science. David Potter, in his
1954 People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Char-
acter, held that from the start America was uniquely endowed with
abundance. What it bequeathed to the world in its revolutionary mo-
ment was not democracy but the promise that man could “free him-
self 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-
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 19

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 criti-
cism 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. Scar-
city 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 abun-
dance, 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 delin-
eated “organization man” aspired to little more than a regular pro-
motion, 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 com-
mentators, sociologists, and journalists described a monumental con-
flict 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
20 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 en-
thusiastic embrace of hedonism and gratification was variously cast
in accounts of the new culture as an addictive force, an inherent hu-
man 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 fulfill-
ment. 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 imme-
diate gratification and an extended lament for lost virtues of self-
restraint. 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 hedo-
nism” 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 dis-
placement of repression by gratification. In 1960, Riesman was al-
ready seeing hedonism on the rise among precisely those who in an
earlier age, enacting the prudential asceticism of the Protestant ethic,
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 21

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 business-
man trading the bank account for the expense account that must be
regularly depleted—in lunches, golf, and conferences—as performa-
tive 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. Busi-
nessmen who might invoke Benjamin Franklin on thriftiness knew
they had to uncouple hedonism from the taint of immorality and re-
frame 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 li-
cense to engage in the “animalistic, undesirable, dirty emotional busi-
ness” 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 im-
pulse 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
22 Narcissism in the Me Decade

between the sexes. Surveying the erosion of renunciation as both cul-

tural ideal and practice, Henry, like Bell, lamented what Dichter pro-
moted, 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 ten-
sion 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 profit-
seeking 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 every-
where in the 1970s. He was as caustic as Lasch on the counterculture,
in his view an ephemeral if noisy movement that “produced little cul-
ture 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
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 23

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 acquisitive-
ness 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 phe-
nomenon 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 hypothe-
sis 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 individ-
uals 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 libera-
tionist 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
24 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 argu-
ment developing within American social criticism that focused pri-
marily 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 dis-
dained. In his 1959 Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and then in his
enormously influential 1966 polemic, TheTriumph of the Therapeu-
tic, 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 produc-
tion 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 dis-
tinguished 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
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 25

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 en-
tity 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 ac-
cordance with his needs.” Bourgeois society, by contrast, entertained
wants, which Bell explained, similarly to Galbraith, were psychologi-
cal, 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 com-
mercial 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 characteris-
tic 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 reeduca-
tion,” dating to the 1920s, that instilled in once-satisfied individuals a
taste for the frivolous. Both envisioned a subject unconflicted by un-
met 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 litera-
ture, aligned with elegance, eroticism, extravagance, and ostentatious
26 Narcissism in the Me Decade

aristocratic display against the sobriety of Galbraith’s “useful citi-

zen” 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 pre-
cisely that conventional economic wisdom, fixed as it was on pro-
duction 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 nec-
essary 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 insa-
tiable, 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, senso-
rial 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 scar-
cities of childhood and negotiated in the social competition of
adulthood.
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 27

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, psycho-
analysis was more focused on pathologies of restraint and renuncia-
tion 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 ana-
lyst’s stock in trade, and among the aims of psychoanalytic treat-
ment 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 disor-
dered 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 long-
ings, and anal characters could be miserly, parsimonious, and reten-
tive, 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
28 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 develop-
mental 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 infan-
tile omnipotence, seeing them engaged in a continuous, lifelong proj-
ect 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 bio-
logical 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 main-
tain 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 eat-
ing is a sly way of satisfying oral libido.” Psychoanalysts on the whole,
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 29

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 expres-
sions 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 per-
sons 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 produc-
tion of goods met real needs,” with our own, in which attachments to
possessions have become “more important than recognizing and ful-
filling inner emotional and authentic needs and deeper longings.”31
The analytic literature documents a range of sometimes astonish-
ingly freighted spending behaviors—stingy, punitive, guilty, compul-
sive, 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 psy-
choanalysis at its nadir, an unwitting captive of “the consumer soci-
ety” 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 ana-
lyst’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 concep-
tual space in which to consider ordinary, run-of-the-mill, and
30 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 sophisti-
cated 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 no-
tion 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 en-
compass not only the body but also clothing and other like prop-
erty, 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 prefig-
uring 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 Psy-
chology, 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
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 31

be championed by Rieff as a solution to the problem of distinguish-

ing 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 char-
acterized 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 theoriz-
ing 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 re-
lating 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. Win-
nicott’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, psycho-
analysts 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, democ-
racy, the law) to other people (father, workmates, neighbors) to be-
longings (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 border-
line of the self, and in one study, subjects placed “my belongings”
32 Narcissism in the Me Decade

closer to the core of the self than “my friends.” In this and subse-
quent 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 de-
cried 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 re-
jects the strict subject/object divide between the human and the in-
animate, instead seeing the world “full of ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘quasi-
subjects.’ ” 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 ana-
lytic 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
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 33

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 any-
thing 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 dysto-
pian 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 narcis-
sists.” And, in a short essay delineating normal personality types,
Freud listed the narcissistic alongside the erotic and obsessive, de-
scribing 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 gran-
diosity and omnipotence in his landmark 1914 essay, and analysts in
the 1970s and beyond would theorize grandiosity and worldly effi-
cacy under the rubric of narcissism, seeing both as critical to the
healthy person’s functioning. But the critics took little note of this
34 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 con-
versations about the modern self smoothed the way for easy accep-
tance 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 van-
ished 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 two-
hundred-plus-year history of remodeling its defining character, chid-
ing those who would shoehorn the “personality of America in one
eternal, unchangeable pattern.” It was the anxious and highly con-
scious questing itself that was descriptive of the national character,
he argued in 1955: “Being an American is not something inherited
 Th e C u l t u r e o f N a r c i s s i s m 35

but something to be achieved.” To be sure, Miller was writing at the

moment when the modernist project of remaking the self in the in-
terest 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 engorg-
ing 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 fam-
ily and poised for growth and possibility was a central figure. Bell’s
contemporary, the popularizing psychologist Abraham Maslow,
held that “individuation, autonomy, self-development, productive-
ness, self-realization” were the achievements of the healthy person-
ality.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 un-
der 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 self-
images 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
36 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 clini-
cal description of the analyst’s narcissist. Critics collapsed two op-
posed 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 mutu-
ality than were the critics who condemned him. On the contrary:
one could plausibly argue that Freud and his severe vision under-
wrote 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 narcis-
sism, 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 under-
standing human behavior, brought provision and gratification back
into discussions of analytic technique, and outlined a normal narcis-
sism that was the wellspring of human ambition and creativity, val-
ues 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.
38 Narcissism in the Me Decade

In psychoanalysis, as in cultural criticism, the 1970s were the de-

cade 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 detrac-
tors 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 ef-
fect of his work. Some, surveying the analytic field, sensed revolution
was in the air; others demurred, maintaining nothing had fundamen-
tally 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 nar-
cissism 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
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 39

were becoming more narcissistic. In a widely syndicated 1978 news-

paper 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 narcissis-
tic . . . but actually they are not narcissistic enough. They need food
for their self-esteem all the time.”3 Not narcissistic enough? So single-
minded 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, emo-
tional satisfaction over frustration. He decried the culturally man-
dated 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 genera-
tion. 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 “inward-
looking 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 philoso-
phy, 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
40 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 spokes-
men 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 possibil-
ity. 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 twenty-
five dollars to his name. He made his way to Chicago, where a child-
hood 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 main-
stream. 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 handshak-
ing 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
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 41

analytic revisionism in America, he formulated an optimistic alter-

native 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 Euro-
pean analysts. Adapting psychoanalysis to American culture, he re-
invented 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 Asso-
ciation in the 1960s to banished deviant to widely celebrated spokes-
man 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 psychoanaly-
sis, which, in proposing that the Freudian’s “drive” was not an ob-
servable entity but an abstraction derived from introspection, occa-
sioned more than a few angry responses from analytic colleagues.
Others see him struggling, with varying degrees of success, to nego-
tiate 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 ideal-
ized Freud—and, more important, the deaths of those analysts who
were charismatically tied to him by virtue of having known him
42 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 con-
signed 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 acquain-
tances alike. The year was 1938 and Vienna was crumbling; the an-
schluss 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 sym-
bolic event, a pivotal moment, and “the wellspring of the most impor-
tant commitments of my future”—a heavy burden for a mere tip of
the hat. Having earlier narrated the encounter in fine detail as a con-
tribution to the Freud Archives, Kohut was now hedging, maintain-
ing 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
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 43

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 de-
cades 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 moral-
ism, and its developmental telos. Kohut proclaimed that the ortho-
dox’s vaunted independence was chimerical and that becoming an
independent self was a wrong-headed, impossible aim. He dismis-
sively 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 de-
velopment of a cohesive self capable of articulating its ideals, pursu-
ing 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
44 Narcissism in the Me Decade

that individuals were endowed with fixed quantities of psychic en-

ergy 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 chit-
chat” assigned it a negative valence. To brand someone a narcissist
was, he argued, to say “down with him”; to envision someone capa-
ble 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 attri-
butes of a healthy personality. Object-love did not replace narcis-
sism, 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 all-
powerful while mirroring the child’s grandiosity, enabling the child
to delight in his own feelings of omnipotence and to revel in his exhi-
bitionism. 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
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 45

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 selfob-
ject 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 self-
esteem.13 The point was not to deny or to eradicate the child’s narcis-
sistic grandiosity and pleasurable exhibitionism but, rather, to see the
child at once frustrated and lovingly supported. Kohut’s mature, trans-
formed 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 feel-
ings 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 pathol-
ogy of our age.” Disorders of the self were not new but newly preva-
lent, 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 mem-
bers 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, iso-
lated in homes with but one or two parents and no other adults to
take on the parental role, children were far too underinvolved. Chil-
dren 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 capa-
ble 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,
46 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 capaci-
ties of parents to nurture children’s grandiosity and feed their self-
esteem, Kohut challenged the dogma not only of analysts but also of
social critics. Arguing that what could easily be construed as solip-
sistic 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 cul-
ture, in which disciplined restraint governed society and shaped so-
cial character, he would contend that the social environment had
changed since then, calling forth new characterological constella-
tions 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 en-
largement and intensification of his inner life,” the narcissist might
be seen as responding more creatively and courageously to the possi-
bilities 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 arbi-
ters 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 Christian-
ity, had shown that suppression of human drives, “the meek accep-
tance 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
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 47

modernity,” and it might easily be construed as exemplary of what

Christopher Lasch saw as contemporary culture’s defining self-
absorption. But Kohut was no simple-minded prophet of liberation.
To the end, he was enough the Freudian to hold that humanity’s aban-
doning itself to lust and aggression would lead only to disaster. Fur-
ther, 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 sup-
pressed 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 pep-
pered with neologisms and awkward phrases—selfobject, transmut-
ing 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,
48 Narcissism in the Me Decade

growth, and adjustment, and their focus on the self’s potentials in-
stead of its pathologies, marked a break with the austerity of ana-
lytic 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 ques-
tioning 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 be-
tween 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 Unbeha-
gen 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 gratifi-
cations, in particular to sexuality but also to the expression of aggres-
sion. 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 calcu-
lus, 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 re-
ferring to the Freudian dialectic that held there were no “pleasures
unpaid for in parallel pains.” Culture ruled over man not by subli-
mation but by a more draconian repression. If Western civilization
was premised on what Philip Slater called the “control release dialec-
tic,” 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.
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 49

Social critics brandished the sociological Freud to excoriate stu-

dent 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 cul-
ture 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 surround-
ings, 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 excep-
tion, 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 affec-
tion with sexual stimulation. The “intergenerational strife, mutual
killing wishes” of Freud’s theorizing represented, to Kohut, a defor-
mation 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
50 Narcissism in the Me Decade

distorted—turned “topsy-turvy”—by the mass media and misun-

derstood 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 “ana-
lytic parlor games,” subjecting friends to ill-informed and often ma-
licious 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 sci-
ence 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 the-
ory. Called “self psychology,” it had a new toolkit in introspective
empathy and a new metapsychology organized around developmen-
tal 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 fol-
lowers 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 escap-
ing both the banishment from the analytic mainstream and the mar-
ginalization 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 plural-
istic 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
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 51

the 1980s and 1990s of once-vilified analytic forebears and margin-

alized 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 cul-
turally advantaged and educated European analyst, he felt that un-
derstanding America was central to his vision. He thought it signifi-
cant 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 ortho-
doxy was bandied about in the early days of psychoanalysis, ana-
lysts 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 mid-
century 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
52 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 classi-
cal viewpoint in the United States. Through the 1940s and 1950s,
American theoretical eclecticism squared off against the reinvigo-
rated European doctrinal orthodoxy of these émigrés, so-called ego-
psychologists who rose quickly to leadership positions with the
American analytic establishment. They aspired to transform psycho-
analysis 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 ana-
lytic 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 analy-
sis,” Kohut told an interviewer shortly before he died, distancing
himself from the term’s associations with what he called “genius-
hood.” A new vantage point, yes, a new set of ideas, even one—the
charge of heresy on the table—akin to “the reformation in Christi-
anity, as it were,” but not a new paradigm. Kohut’s demurrals not-
withstanding, 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
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 53

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 ques-
tioning 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 tomor-
row,” their once revolutionary values “the rationalizations of a new
tyranny.”24
If Kohut appears to have been reading from the Kuhnian play-
book here, that may not have been altogether fortuitous. Kohut was
familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s landmark work, The Structure of Sci-
entific Revolutions, published in 1962. So too were many of his col-
leagues, who were quick to see the heuristic and rhetorical utility of
Kuhn’s signature concept of the paradigm. Kuhn challenged conven-
tional 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 adop-
tion of new paradigms. Thus, “normal science” was disrupted by sci-
entific 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 sci-
ence, 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 dis-
placed 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 perspec-
tives, 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 psycho-
analysis, but many also agreed that he borrowed and appropriated
without acknowledgment from his disciplinary forebears. A reviewer
54 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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.” Ko-
hut was charged on the appearance of his second book with being
“strangely unable to acknowledge” his debts and with failing to situ-
ate his findings in the discipline’s rich heritage. Attempts to account
for Kohut’s failures to properly credit his analytic forebears con-
demn either the purportedly lax disciplinary norms that underwrote
promiscuous borrowing (e.g., “plagiarism is endemic in psychoanaly-
sis”) 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 consid-
ered 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 frus-
tration,” 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 lev-
eled against Freud. He argued that none of his analytic predecessors
had, as had he, developed their ideas into a systematic and compre-
hensive whole and, more to the point, that once he had brought their
isolated observations together, he had made it easy for critics retro-
spectively 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 anoma-
lous they had been within the classical paradigm. Kuhn’s observa-
tion 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 psy-
chotic, his work censored and suppressed by Ernest Jones and others
who felt he posed too great a danger to the psychoanalytic move-
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 55

ment. Kohut, writing to a younger Ferenczi enthusiast in 1966, al-

lowed 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 para-
digm in place, can scientists appreciate and interpret the importance
of the anomalous results. Here the forgiving stance of Heinz Hart-
mann 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 hap-
pened 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: contempora-
neous 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 once-
charged question of whether his work constituted a new paradigm,
we can appreciate the many ways in which he expanded the disci-
pline’s scope and shifted its emphases. His conviction that self psy-
chology’s overthrow of classicism was necessitated “not primarily in
order to explain this or that clinical observation” but by the ambi-
tion 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 one-
self 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.
56 Narcissism in the Me Decade

Just as significant was that through narcissism Kohut offered so-

lutions to a range of problems internal to psychoanalysis. He pro-
vided a resolution to the contentious issue of the relationship be-
tween 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 shame-
ful but a natural fact of life. He revived and expanded upon Fe-
renczi’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 delin-
eated the narcissist as a type of person who was not hopelessly de-
fective but, rather, who could be helped. A theorist of internal plen-
titude 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 vital-
ity that Erikson associated with it—so at odds with ego psychology—
into his own conceptualization of the positive dimensions of narcis-
sism. 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 con-
tending 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 ev-
erything 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 as-
cent, their warnings—“Narcissism on Upswing, According to Ex-
 H e i n z Ko h u t ’ s A m e r i c a n Fr e u d 57

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 ana-
lysts’ 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 individu-
als’ 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 profes-
sional 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 inter-
ests. 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. Ko-
hut 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 fea-
tured 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
58 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 Fe-
renczi, Kohut was committed to a model that stressed the depriva-
tions narcissistic patients had experienced, and he advocated em-
pathically meeting their needs and supporting their strivings, how-
ever 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 deal-
ing with the narcissist in treatment. Kernberg precisely mapped the
malignant narcissist’s inner landscape, arguing it was not character-
ized 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 re-
spect to narcissistic pathology as the most censorious among them.
Christopher Lasch cited him repeatedly, especially in his own por-
trayal of the narcissist’s disturbed inner self and toxic relations with
60 Narcissism in the Me Decade

others. And the popular press turned to him for pithy quotes that,
set beside Kohut’s optimism, could appear judgmental and reprov-
ing. Yet Kernberg would not be so easily conscripted into the cultur-
alist critique around narcissism. He hedged on the relationship be-
tween 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 rigor-
ous 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 ambi-
tions 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 narcis-
sistic 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 malig-
nant 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, unem-
pathic 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 gran-
diose 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
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 61

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 indi-
viduals 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 ev-
erything 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 mur-
derousness that Kohut argued represented a deviation from the es-
sence 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 experi-
enced 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 person-
ality, 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 tell-
ing, envy, sadism, and corruption, all forms of “rationalized aggres-
sion,” 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 ideal-
ized extensions of themselves, devalued and “dethroned” if they dis-
appoint in any way. Those whom narcissists enlist to admire them are
62 Narcissism in the Me Decade

but “slaves” to be casually tossed aside and mercilessly mistreated but

not freed. Weakness—financial, social, sexual—is to be callously ex-
ploited. 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 nar-
cissists, other people “exist only ‘the way a hamburger exists for
them—to make them feel good,’ ” and another maintained along sim-
ilar lines that other people were so many candy machines to nar-
cissists: “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 Kern-
berg’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. Om-
nipotence may turn to “feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.” Be-
neath 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 cata-
log of the ways that we as humans make one another miserable reso-
nate powerfully with Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known dictum that
“hell is other people.” The anthropologist Ernest Gellner, who opti-
mistically saw nature tamed by growing affluence and good govern-
ment, suggested in his 1985 book The Psychoanalytic Movement
that the wars, famine, hunger, and plagues that were the stuff of in-
explicable but expectable human misfortune for our premodern coun-
terparts had been supplanted for us moderns by the miseries of deal-
ing 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
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 63

for fulfillment in life turned not on their intelligence or accomplish-

ments but, rather, on their relations with their fellow humans—how
they managed to get along with others at home, at work, and in so-
ciety. 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 uncontrol-
lable, due to incomprehensibility of other people’s attitudes, feel-
ings, and actions.5
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud characterized these re-
lations 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 com-
pensation” and prepared “to use him sexually without his consent,
to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to tor-
ture and to kill him.” Strife, competition, and enmity were to be ex-
pected 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 mani-
festations 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 sat-
isfaction 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 indi-
viduals by cohesion. At the same time, Freud envisioned humans
constrained from within, their drives for pleasure and destruction
64 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 submis-
sion to society’s moral demands. In effect, Freud theorized domina-
tion 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 rela-
tions among the masses of men and women who constituted society
beyond his broad-stroke invocation of hate turned to love with sub-
mission 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 narcis-
sistic 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 fam-
ily 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, post-
Freudian 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 cul-
turalists and Sullivanians, on the one hand, to the British object rela-
tions 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 point-
ing 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-
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 65

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 treat-
ments 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 ana-
lytic training. Memories of his failure tortured him. Told by an espe-
cially 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 pathol-
ogy 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, deflect-
ing attention from his own break, more muted than Kohut’s, with clas-
sicism. 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 pa-
tients 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 admi-
ration and longing, only to be displaced once again by angry, sadis-
tic, and hateful outbursts. Socially and at work this patient’s behavior
was appropriate, emotionally controlled, and stable. To Kernberg, the
66 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 at-
tacked 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 ob-
ject relations—his experiences of his parents as they were internal-
ized 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 psychi-
cally 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 inte-
grated into our sense of self. Patients displaying character pathology
by contrast were plagued by the persistence of objects not well inte-
grated into their self-image. The ways that such patients, who “al-
ways 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 charac-
teristically “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 flat-
tered 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-
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 67

tic idealization. Alert to the tragedy of such patients’ lives, the emp-
tiness and loneliness they experience as a consequence of their inca-
pacity 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 ac-
companied normal aging forced narcissists into catastrophic con-
frontations 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, torment-
ing internalized others and, in the analytic setting, of the tormenting
analyst.

Narcissists All?
Arguing there was “real evil” in the world, Kernberg insisted on dis-
tinguishing 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 se-
verely 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 an-
swers to questions such as the one put to him in 1978 by an inter-
viewer: “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
68 Narcissism in the Me Decade

a problem. When your internal mental structures tell you that “you
are doing all right” and that “you deserve to think well about your-
self, you can be proud of yourself,” when you in consequence are
able to operate effectively in the world, pursuing your “tasks, ambi-
tions 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 inordi-
nately good about themselves. Rather, it was the nature of their in-
ternal 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 com-
plex.” Were the roots of the narcissist’s subjective experience of “fu-
tility 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 af-
fect individuals’ internal object relations. Yet this proved no impedi-
ment to his instrumental marshaling of Kernberg’s clinical portrait
of the pathological narcissist—grandiose, exploitative, parasitic, shal-
low, empty—to support the framing premise of The Culture of Nar-
cissism: 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
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 69

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 “contrib-
uted enormously” to popularizing the concept. To grasp the differ-
ences in their approaches, consider consumption. Lasch claimed that
the narcissist was the “quintessential consumer” and that “by his na-
ture the narcissist has an insatiable craving for consumption.” There-
fore, 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 fos-
tered “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 responsi-
bilities, might conversely foster the altruism associated with normal
narcissism.16
But Kernberg rejected the Laschian notion that society could pro-
duce narcissism either normal or pathological. A society in which
mutuality was valued might force the already pathologically narcis-
sistic “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 go-
ahead” conferred after the earliest years of childhood. One of Ko-
hut’s closest associates agreed, explaining that material abundance
and other of the critics’ bogeymen—“the self-help ethic, disco-
theques 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 Kern-
berg, narcissism in childhood was normal; adults who “feel good if
70 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 oth-
ers” 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 narcis-
sist’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 tran-
scendence, 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 be-
fore.” The socially sanctioned sexual permissiveness that was among
Lasch’s bêtes noires, in offering “a cultural rationalization” for sex-
ual freedom over lifelong monogamy, might shield pathological nar-
cissists 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 man-
dated, he wrote, “individuals will simply continue to choose the pat-
terns that fulfill them.” Like Kohut, he saw normal narcissism as es-
sential 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 mo-
ment. Lasch faulted Americans for the superficiality of their desires,
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 71

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 indul-
gent, 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 in-
dividuals’ ambitions and creativity found both internal—in the form
of healthy narcissism—and external support. It was a world popu-
lated by idealized others, absent the hateful, devaluing, aggressive,
and simply “bad” internal objects of Kernberg’s theorizing and clini-
cal 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 nar-
cissist 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 narcis-
sism 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 ana-
lyst’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
72 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 thera-
pies 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 Kern-
berg’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 grandi-
ose 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 disap-
pointments 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 treat-
ment of the analyst that resulted from it. It was only when grandios-
ity’s comforting illusions—of “eternal youth, beauty, power, wealth
and the unending availability of supplies of confirmation, admira-
tion, and security”—were shattered that patients would come face-
to-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-
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 73

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 experi-
enced 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’ emo-
tional health and depth dependent on successful and ongoing nego-
tiation 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 pa-
tients, 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 jok-
ingly 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 him-
self 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, inva-
sion or being invaded, and in terms of forcefully overcoming barriers
between self and other and violating social prohibitions—all this be-
tween loving, committed partners. Kernberg located sexual outlawry
74 Narcissism in the Me Decade

in the committed couple, not in the promiscuous or rebellious, tell-

ing, 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 con-
ventional morality’s constant pressure on the couple, its “ritualiza-
tion of love, commitment, marriage, and family tradition,” as so
much “static warfare” against them. The richness of their private ex-
perience 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 sex-
ual 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 protec-
tion 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 obliga-
tion, 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 feudal-
ism” that supported this sexual regime were ultimately destroyed by
the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in the eighteenth and
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 75

nineteenth centuries, during which women finally rejected their senti-

mental but confining exaltation “on the pedestal of masculine ado-
ration” 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 con-
ventions 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 distin-
guishing between illusion and reality, seeing the inability to do so
symptomatic of narcissism. But, given the choice, he strongly pre-
ferred the illusions of gallantry—which in his own telling barely
contain men’s “animal strength” and barely disguise brutality, sav-
agery, 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 inti-
macy 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’ mu-
tual 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 cap-
tures 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 ad-
vantaged by their orgasmic capacities, women who would lay claim
76 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 manipula-
tion 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 captur-
ing 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 entangle-
ments,” 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, of-
fered 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 entangle-
ments, 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 feel-
ing” 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 triv-
ial, and, lacking the “assurance of permanence,” embittered and
“increasingly risky,” Lasch finds himself boxed in by his own his-
torical narrative. His are beguiling propositions. But they rely for
their rhetorical force on a summoning up of an imagined past of
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 77

reciprocity, romance, passion, tenderness, and sexual fulfillment be-

tween 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 Kern-
bergian nightmare, an ungovernable dystopia of emotional manipu-
lation, bottomless need, intense hunger, feral calculation, “intolera-
bly menacing” desire, and the “blind and impotent rage” of one sex
against the other. Women, no longer averse to sex and tactically ad-
vantaged 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 over-
whelming 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 con-
vinced 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” enact-
ment of modernity. The “so-called sexual revolution” of the present
represented but one oscillation in a long saga of shifts in sexual re-
gimes 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,
78 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 psychopa-
thology—“hysterical, masochistic, and narcissistic”—was often to
be found beneath their “apparent freedom and casual sexual behav-
ior.” Kernberg counterposed the poverty of socially sanctioned sex-
uality against the gratifications couples privately achieved, the lat-
ter immune to the dictums of moralists who attempted to “manipulate
sexual customs”—deploying “rules and regulations” and partition-
ing 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 sex-
ual 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 use-
fully 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 be-
tween 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 regu-
larly in his writings on intimacy. Yet his tone is optimistic, not em-
bittered, celebratory of the transcendence that a sexuality expressive
 Ot to K e r n b e r g ’ s Na rc i s s i s t i c Dys to p i a 79

of the full range of emotions offers those able to risk it, a transcen-
dence 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 para-
doxes. 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, deterio-
ration, 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 assassina-
tions, 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 na-
tional 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 coun-
seled “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
80 Narcissism in the Me Decade

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 appreci-
ate 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 creativ-
ity 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 indi-
viduals experienced others internally, and in ways that inner expe-
riences 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 Oedi-
pus 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 get-
ting 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 en-
during 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 him-
self.” Fatally transfixed by his own image, Narcissus had long served
in the Western tradition as an object lesson in the dangers of exces-
sive love of self, and it is thus not surprising that analysts’ narcissism
connoted an all-enveloping vanity and admiration of self. The sex-
ologist Havelock Ellis, who is usually credited with having coined
the term in 1898, used it in reference to a state of absorbed contem-
plation and sometimes-erotic self-admiration, invoking as exem-
plary of this “exquisite” mental state the words of two nineteenth-
century 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 observ-
ers described similar states of erotic reverie in men, involving mir-
rors, masturbation, and “voluptuous emotions.” Freud, in perhaps
the first recorded analytic discussion of narcissism, in 1909 ex-
plained to his Viennese colleagues that “being enamoured of one-
self,” and, he added parenthetically, “of one’s own genitals,” was
“not an isolated phenomenon.” Narcissism was “a necessary devel-
opmental stage in the transition from autoerotism to object love,”
he added, part of “the regular constitution of all men.”1
84 Dimensions of Narcissism

In his 1914 essay “On Narcissism,” Freud maintained that narcis-

sism was not a perversion but normal, a form of self-interested ego-
ism found in “every living creature.” Some early analysts wrestled
with this and followed suit. Freud’s colleague Isidor Sadger empha-
sized 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 homosexu-
ality, which they considered a sexual deviation. As one of them
proclaimed to his assenting colleagues, everyone knew “that inten-
sive 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 ho-
mosexuality was rooted in a narcissistic love of self and that a dis-
abling incapacity for relationship followed from this. Leonardo
sealed the deal. Narcissism and homosexuality were fatefully inter-
twined. 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 develop-
mental 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 developmen-
tally 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 at-
tacked the Freudian developmental model that saw narcissism super-
seded by object-love, arguing instead that narcissism followed its own
developmental course from the primitive to the adaptive and mature.
 Self-Love 85

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 transfor-
mation of the heavily freighted self-love into the more neutral self-
esteem, 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 re-
pressed, 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 auto-
eroticism over object-love, from that point on he traveled “the path
of narcissism.”4
Freud had long been interested in Leonardo and, notably, in Leon-
ardo’s homosexuality. He read widely in the Leonardo literature,
poring over biographies; the Russian novelist Dmitry Merezh-
kovsky’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
86 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 “psychoana-
lytic pathography”—the encomium is Sándor Ferenczi’s, who pre-
dicted 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 autobiogra-
phy, informed by issues that had arisen in Freud’s self-analysis and,
as such, offering a window onto his personality. Jones found it sugges-
tive that Freud’s Leonardo exhibited a “passion for natural knowl-
edge” 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 ar-
gued, “sexually inactive or homosexual.”6
Freud’s simmering conflict over what he called “my homo-
sexuality”—and over mutuality and dependence, which he consis-
tently cast as feminine—would reach a crisis after the publication
of Leonardo, in a dramatic confrontation with Ferenczi that oc-
curred while the two were on holiday together in Palermo, on the
 Self-Love 87

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 fo-
cused 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 child-
hood 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 transla-
tion 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 con-
structed an imaginative and, in the estimation of many, persuasive
account of Leonardo’s perplexing personality—chiefly, of his homo-
sexuality, 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
88 Dimensions of Narcissism

Freud explained why this was so in a virtuosic if highly specula-

tive 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 every-
thing Freud gathered from his varied sources, the most significant as
he saw it was that in ancient natural histories the vulture was a fe-
male creature, impregnated only by the wind. Freud confidently con-
cluded 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 ear-
lier. To put Freud’s account in its simplest terms: Leonardo was
raised by his “real” mother, and—like legions of homosexuals sub-
jected 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 antago-
nism against their male offspring and suggesting it was not only the
 Self-Love 89

boy who had to master his oedipal feelings. The suckling child at the
maternal breast, Freud had written five years before Leonardo ap-
peared, 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 civi-
lized 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 double-
edged 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 favor-
ites, 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 hap-
less son by the unsatisfied mother-without-a-mate. Starved for a
husband’s caresses, the “poor forsaken” Caterina, “like all unsatis-
fied 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, espe-
cially because it coincided with his normalization of paternal ag-
gression in the Oedipus complex. In Leonardo Freud cast the mother,
90 Dimensions of Narcissism

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, de-
pendency and homosexuality figured centrally. Freud would emerge
from the clash proclaiming his independence and mastery, while Fe-
renczi 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 estab-
lished. 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 trav-
eled 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-
 Self-Love 91

ingly intimate correspondence—playful, engaged, and, for a pen-and-

ink age, remarkably contemporary in its urgent, rapid-fire feel. Freud
was fifty-two, Ferenczi thirty-five. By the time Freud proposed the Si-
cilian 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 Fe-
renczi 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 in-
credible feast,” Freud wrote to his wife, Martha: “Such a wealth of
color, such views, such fragrant smells, and such a sensation of well-
being I have never experienced all at once.” They spent two weeks in
Sicily, by day visiting ruins and exulting in the beauty of the surround-
ings. 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 Dan-
iel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a book Jung had
recommended, which provided ample material to fuel Freud’s devel-
oping 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
92 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 dic-
tate something, I jumped up in a sudden rebellious outburst, exclaim-
ing 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 eve-
nings 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 mid-
December 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 con-
sideration on the part of the bearer of authority have been more
correct?” Shortly before dying, Ferenczi ruefully invoked the inci-
dent 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 contra-
dicted him for the first time. (Palermo.)”16
In a flurry of letters following the Sicilian journey, Ferenczi as-
sured 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-
 Self-Love 93

tionship. In reply, Freud seized on Ferenczi’s abjection, writing that

he “often felt sorry for” him on account of his disappointment, link-
ing it to Ferenczi’s expectation that he would, on the holiday, “wal-
low 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 ef-
forts. “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 con-
structing this fantasy.17
Ferenczi replied to Freud with a long, self-lacerating letter, detail-
ing 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 [psychoana-
lytic] superman whom we have constructed,” Freud added, acknowl-
edging 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 re-
lationship, 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 “mu-
tually 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 Al-
pine 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
94 Dimensions of Narcissism

to a planned meeting “as to the slaking of hunger and thirst” and

promised he would bring “nothing but two open ears and one tem-
poral 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 facul-
ties sustained Freud as he carried out the self-analysis that Jones saw
as a heroic but solitary venture. Through the 1890s, the newly mar-
ried 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 Mar-
tha’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 be-
tween 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 attrac-
tion” 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
 Self-Love 95

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 character-
ization of it as “the most intimate you can imagine.” Gay, portraying
Freud as intellectually and emotionally isolated in the midst of a bus-
tling 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 “every-
thing 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.
96 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 memo-
ries of the trip were the ones, he wrote to Freud, “in which you di-
vulged to me something of your personality and your life”—into the
role of analyst. Freud related his dreams, which were “entirely con-
cerned 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 com-
panionship” with Freud, in his “longing for absolute mutual open-
ness,” 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 homo-
sexual investment has been withdrawn and utilized for the enlarge-
ment 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 bub-
bling to the surface. Freud’s proclamation to be homosex-free not-
withstanding, Fliess was still everywhere in Freud’s life, “incorporated
in others”—Jung, Ferenczi, and Alfred Adler, with whom he was en-
gaged 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 confron-
tation in Palermo he was gripped by a species of homosexual panic,
 Self-Love 97

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 homosex-
ual 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 re-
jected 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 person-
ality, luring them with fantasies of complete emotional and intellec-
tual merger. Each of these relationships followed a scenario of
enchantment, mutual admiration, and dependency followed by bru-
tal disappointment, ending in mixtures of disillusionment, recrimina-
tion, devaluing, murderous rage, or banishment from the analytic
fold—and as such served as object lessons for generations of ana-
lysts 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 submis-
sive posture vis-à-vis Freud’s life and work, overestimating the mas-
ter 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
98 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 object-
choice 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 phi-
lologists, 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 con-
sonant 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 heterosexual-
ity 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 pronounce-
ments 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 ho-
mosexuality and narcissism in Leonardo is premised on an ambi-
guity 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-
 Self-Love 99

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 the-
orize only sameness, not difference, when it came to homosexual
object choice. As Kohut later explained, classical analytic theory val-
ued 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 auto-
erotic, found easy acceptance. As Freud’s American translator Abra-
ham 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 homosex-
ual 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 feel-
ings, praised the others in his presence “for their physical and men-
tal 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 homo-
sexual character formation adumbrated in these instances, in which
liking—even love of—other boys or men figures centrally.
100 Dimensions of Narcissism

Freud’s texts and statements in fact oscillate between characteriza-

tions 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 one-
self instead of to another was at odds with the developing analytic
truism that homosexuality lay at the root of social life. Psychoana-
lysts spoke with one voice on this issue, with Jung, for example, see-
ing 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 hetero-
sexuals 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.” Ex-
clusive 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 de-
votion 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 uninhib-
ited sexual impulsions”—which he himself thought a “remarkable
fact.” Freud’s argument was that social feeling was premised on sub-
limated homosexuality, which made for good collegial relations.28
Woman, more than the homosexual, was the disruptive force in so-
cial life.
 Self-Love 101

One year after his and Freud’s Sicilian trip, Ferenczi was theo-
rizing homoerotism, a term he preferred to homosexuality in its
foregrounding of the psychical over the biological, taking the mea-
sure 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 ro-
bust 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 los-
ing 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 heteronor-
mativity, 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 per-
son. 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 homo-
social and heterosocial in a 1927 publication, this was common
sense. “A man who falls in love” with a woman, he argued, was “ob-
viously 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 op-
posite 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,
102 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 post-
Freudian analytic literature of homosexuality. A paper by Otto
Fenichel from 1933 gives us a gentle, feminine homosexual narcis-
sist, who, like Leonardo, was over-identified with his mother and
who surrounded himself with friends who tellingly resembled him-
self. And a paper by Herman Nunberg published five years later
features a man whose taste in lovers ran to the “tall, strong and hand-
some.” But the developing consensus was that the homosexual re-
lated 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” qual-
ity, 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 con-
nected 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 attrac-
tion 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” character-
istic of men was itself premised on a “marked sexual overvaluation”
 Self-Love 103

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 ambig-
uous 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 inca-
pacity for relating to others argued at the same time that the social
relations constitutive of society were premised on homosexually-
tinged 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, ide-
alized 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 heterosex-
uals was at issue. Immediately upon reading a draft of “On Narcis-
sism,” Ferenczi questioned Freud’s suggestion that self-love and object-
love made competing claims on individuals. The person in love, Freud
wrote in the essay, “seems to give up his own personality” in favor
104 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 ob-
jects into its compass and using them as sources of pleasure through
the mechanism of introjection, a concept that Ferenczi had intro-
duced 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 con-
ception of narcissism. His Viennese colleague Paul Federn coined
the term healthy narcissism in the 1930s to denote a range of ob-
served 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 main-
tained that there were aspects of the healthy, normal self rooted in
narcissism, better conveyed in “layman’s language” than in the psy-
choanalyst’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. Individu-
als’ 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
 Self-Love 105

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 re-
sourcefulness, 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 ca-
paciously, 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 criti-
cal 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 feel-
ings about the self. In “On Narcissism,” Freud used the word Selbst-
gefühl—self-feeling, translated by the editors of the Standard Edi-
tion 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 “love-
relations” 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
106 Dimensions of Narcissism

and importance for granted, focusing attention on its sources, regula-

tion, 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 individu-
als, premised realistically on their own achievements, barely fluctu-
ated in response to the “trivial offences and disappointments” of
everyday life, while their weaker counterparts relied on the “appro-
bation 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 self-
esteem 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 ac-
cept their limitations—giving voice to the analytic view that devel-
opment 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 narcis-
sism 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 conversa-
tion to the center, to celebrate what defenders of Freud’s orthodoxy,
 Self-Love 107

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 Transforma-
tions 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” repre-
sented 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 no-
tion 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 nar-
cissistic, 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 candi-
dates in 1972, a measure of how tightly the two were still inter-
twined 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 un-
settle 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’
108 Dimensions of Narcissism

“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 exten-
sions 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 ap-
pearance but the inward mode of relating that was critical in dis-
criminating 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 inter-
est to orthodox Freudians.
Otto Kernberg, although less focused on healthy narcissism than
Kohut, like his colleague conceptualized narcissism in terms of self-
esteem regulation and explored the ways it fluctuated in day-to-day
gratifying or frustrating experiences with others, as well as with in-
dividuals’ 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 im-
ages in our mind of those we love and by whom we feel loved.” The
 Self-Love 109

problem was not that “the narcissist is too much in love with him-
self,” 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 nar-

cissist quickly and quietly dropped from view. And once self-love was
recast as self-esteem, it was transformed into a popular—if almost im-
mediately 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 get-
ting the self-esteem “ball rolling,” exhorted readers to love them-
selves 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 self-
esteem 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 ad-
mire 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
110 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 self-
esteem (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 de-
tractors—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 institu-
tions 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 every-
one). “Low self-esteem is merely the latest form of social pathology
commending itself to specialists in the cure of souls,” wrote Christo-
pher 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
 Self-Love 111

pathology; Lasch was at the time of its publication more interested

in selfishness than in self-esteem, and he was writing before self-
esteem 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 sur-
rounding self-esteem entirely new; one can find a record of a psy-
chologist 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 profes-
sional view, picked up by the popular media, was that it was, as de-
scribed by Kohut, the cold and rejecting parents who were the prob-
lem, the parents who criticized instead of praising and accepting
their children.43
The renovation of self-love was also the occasion for the renova-
tion 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 ar-
gued 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
112 Dimensions of Narcissism

narcissism referred to “to self-love, or self-esteem.” To a public de-

bating 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 re-
doubtable American archetypes, from the frontiersman of the nine-
teenth century to the technology entrepreneurs of the twenty-first.
Dependency is, by contrast, anathema to many, associated with sub-
ordination, 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 once-
independent 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 help-
ing professions and prompting their children, subjected to “enlight-
ened childrearing,” to embrace “dependence as a way of life.” Ram-
pant narcissism was the result. Heinz Kohut provocatively argued the
contrary case. It was not enlightened but emotionally distant par-
ents, unresponsive to their children’s needs for affection and unable
to nourish their vitality, who spawned narcissists. Children needed
114 Dimensions of Narcissism

adults who could respond with delight, not condemnation, to their

grandiosity and fantasies of omnipotence. The independence champi-
oned by social critics and orthodox analysts alike was a fiction, Kohut
argued. “There is no such thing.” From his vantage, a well-oiled inter-
nal 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 to-
gether the threads of an alternative analytic perspective in which
independence was not an unqualified good but, rather, a sometimes-
fantasized 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 trou-
bling characterological flaw to a necessary dimension of the healthy
person’s functioning. Critics for the most part overlooked the ana-
lytic revaluation of independence, drawn as they were to the Freud-
ian 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 perfec-
tion 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 alone-
ness and love of self. The concept was contested from the start, seen
 Independence 115

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 sov-
ereignty 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 nar-
cissism’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 ubiq-
uitous, feminized dependency threatening the body politic. The crit-
ics’ indictment gained force as they joined it to a critique of con-
sumer 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 narcis-
sism,” he altogether missed that the dominant strand of it repre-
sented a repudiation of the values he himself held dear.

Hallucinatory Independence
Freud first used the term primary narcissism in reference to a hy-
pothesized 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, capa-
ble of attaining satisfaction merely by hallucinating its achievement,
just as one might experience pleasurable feelings in dreams. The Freud-
ian 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 imagin-
ing its needs might be met by so much “screaming and beating about
with its arms and legs.” It was nothing short of sovereign: “His Maj-
esty 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
116 Dimensions of Narcissism

dependent than an infant. Writing in 1911, shortly after the appear-

ance 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 fic-
tional. Not for another twenty years, in his essay “Female Sexual-
ity,” would he theorize, let alone mention, the child’s dependence on
its mother. It is worth noting that in Civilization and Its Discon-
tents, 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. Be-
yond the womb, Ferenczi consistently saw a hovering maternal pres-
ence, 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 mater-
nal presence was a master illusionist, instinctively intuiting the in-
fant’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 knowl-
edge of or interest in “the nurse’s existence and activity” only under-
scored 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 acknowl-
edged measure of the goodness or badness of the mother is how far
 Independence 117

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 Ferenc-
zian 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 in-
ferred. 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 repro-
duction” of the parents’ own abandoned childhood narcissism. And
he hypothesized that the megalomania of adult schizophrenics, prim-
itive peoples, and children alike was not a “new creation” but a
magnification of a previously existing infantile condition. This meg-
alomania, 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 pro-
posed 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, every-
one. “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, in-
vested 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 prob-
lematic 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 unneces-
sary 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
118 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 revi-
sionists, 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 Hungar-
ian, offered perhaps the most extended critique of the concept, start-
ing 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 sensi-
tivity 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 dis-
turbance 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 them-
selves 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, sug-
gesting that the monarch, like the infant, perforce inhabits “two
 Independence 119

worlds simultaneously, one soberly realistic and the other utterly

fantastic.” The paternal idiom of kingship leaves no room for mater-
nal 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 sus-
tained the Freudian infant’s pleasurable yet illusory autarky were
absent from Freud’s work and field of vision. While Ferenczi regis-
tered and later Michael Balint theorized a morally neutral interde-
pendence, Freud saw in this most helpless of states a wholly implau-
sible 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, indepen-
dence 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 every-
thing 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,
120 Dimensions of Narcissism

credited the household’s harmony to his wife Martha’s gentle na-

ture. 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 fifty-
three 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 me-
thodical and unobtrusive efficiency, she allowed Freud what was
even by the conventions of bourgeois households of the time an ex-
traordinary 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 Mar-
tha’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 help-
ing 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-
 Independence 121

tients for sessions, each lasting fifty-five minutes. Every spare mo-
ment 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 publish-
ers 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 re-
turned to solitary work in his study, writing letters and analytic pa-
pers, until heading to bed at one or later. Through all this, Martha
was quietly and efficiently organizing, managing, coordinating, clean-
ing, 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 labor-
intensive undertaking. As was typical in such home-centered enter-
prises, family members were pressed into service. There were manu-
scripts 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 man-
uscript 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, Mar-
tha’s younger sister, who moved into the Freud household in 1896,
122 Dimensions of Narcissism

ten years after the death of her fiancé. Bernays oversaw much of the
logistics of Freud’s professional life, from mailing packages to cor-
responding 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 as-
suming 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 dependen-
cies 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 de-
pendence to heroic freedom, culminating in Freud’s manful over-
coming 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 de-
pendence 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 decade-
long psychoneurosis. These assertions notwithstanding, Jones admit-
ted that Freud more than Fliess had a “need of psychological depen-
dence.” 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,
 Independence 123

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 be-
tween 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, pro-
vided 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 sat-
isfied 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 re-
mains unclouded,” Freud wrote in 1910, the cause referred to here
being psychoanalysis—this in the midst of the jealousies, dissen-
sions, 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
124 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 friend-
ship.” 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 him-
self, 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 ana-
lytic colleagues had a hand in imbuing the term with the morally
freighted psychological dimension it still carries today. Since the six-
teenth 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 land-
owner, 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 work-
ing men claimed political rights for themselves and as political
movements deemed dependency antithetical to independent citizen-
ship, 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 pur-
ported withdrawal from productive endeavor invited the charge of
 Independence 125

parasitism that shadowed her past the midpoint of the twentieth-

century 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 de-
pendent on the mother; rather, he desires her. “To be really progres-
sive, free and independent, an individual must shake off his infantile
attachment to, and dependence on, the parents—whether as real in-
dividuals, as memories of these individuals, or as incorporations of
these individuals within the self,” one analyst wrote in 1927, para-
phrasing 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 attach-
ments, 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 rea-
sons,” depended more on their partners of the opposite sex for sex-
ual gratification than did men. In the social sphere, it was far more
common to see traits associated with independence such as “enter-
prise, responsibility, initiative, and self-reliance” in men than in
126 Dimensions of Narcissism

women, tethered as they were to their parents. Analysts would later

develop the concepts of “morbid dependency” and “extreme depen-
dency” to account for a woman’s anxiety-fueled clinging to a domi-
neering man in whom she seeks the strength she does not herself
have or a person’s overreliance on another to the extent of not rec-
ognizing 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 natu-
ralizing 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 charac-
ter.” 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 Psycho-
Analysis, which he edited. Thus rebuffed, Suttie went on to publish
in psychiatric, not psychoanalytic, journals, and he and his revolu-
tionary 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 nor-
mal, 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,
 Independence 127

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 de-
pendency, which was evident in their inability to see to their needs,
not, as simple-minded critics would have it, in their hedonistic, self-
seeking 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 writ-
ten in the vernacular—not in the idiom of psychoanalysis—and in-
formed 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 four-
teen 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 des-
tined 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, foster-
ing new forms of discontent, anxiety, and envy in the process. Promis-
ing 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
128 Dimensions of Narcissism

skipped over the potential significance of a domestic balance of

power so significantly altered in women’s favor to which he had him-
self 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 depen-
dence” on the market, on vast bureaucracies, and on technological
systems beyond their immediate control nurtured feelings of help-
lessness 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 gratifica-
tion 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 depen-
dency. He maintained that the purveyors of the ethic of mass con-
sumption 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 con-
trol 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, allow-
ing that while these household appliances reduced the housekeeper’s
drudgery, they also ensured her dependence, explaining that a failure
 Independence 129

of the power grid would bring “housekeeping to a halt.” Some

feminists have seen women victimized in their pursuit of the im-
possible 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 victim-
ized 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 be-
tween a highly valued and well-disciplined sphere of productive ac-
tivity and a devalued, suspect, and impossible-to-control sphere of
consumption associated with women—inconstant and fickle, sen-
sual 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 pri-
vate sphere of particularized consumption, in contrast to the mar-
ket with its universalizing tendencies, and the housewife was ren-
dered 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 so-
ber social scientific and popular accounts of the housewife’s dimin-
ished duties in the first half of the twentieth century. The Norwegian-
American social critic Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term
130 Dimensions of Narcissism

“conspicuous consumption,” suggested that this womanly parasitism

was no mere unintended side effect of economic progress but a man-
date, 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 nar-
rative 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 alto-
gether 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, per-
sonified economic dependency—a development he and Weatherly
both decried. Meanwhile, feminist writers of the period also ex-
ploited the specter of womanhood reduced “from partners to para-
sites,” in their case to argue for women’s access to the world beyond
the home. They warned that idleness bred complacency and restless-
ness and questioned the normality of lives so wasted.25
A few feminist writers tried to counter the developing social-
scientific consensus that theirs was a parasitical sex. One in particu-
lar, 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
 Independence 131

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 broad-
ened 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 econ-
omists’ 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 eco-
nomics, 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 superin-
tended by the idle housewife. Families “buy everything—food, laun-
dry, 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. Farn-
ham advanced a version of the same argument, portraying the pre-
modern 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 satis-
fying avocations while at the same time proving themselves as obliv-
ious as any other writers on the subject of the physical toll housework
even in the most modern of houses exacted.26
132 Dimensions of Narcissism

Lasch critiqued consumer society from the perspective of the self-

sufficient subject with few needs and no superfluous wants. He ar-
gued 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 handi-
craft 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 mas-
terful 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 liber-
ate women from the oppressions of the family.27 He began to round
out his vision of familial autarky in The Culture of Narcissism, sup-
plementing the political and emotional dimensions outlined in Ha-
ven in a Heartless World with a material dimension that was anach-
ronistic 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 tech-
nology 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 princi-
ples 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 individu-
als’ 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
 Independence 133

independence was not analytically defensible. His critique centered

on three points.
First, Kohut insisted on distinguishing among the biological, so-
ciological, and psychological meanings of dependence and indepen-
dence, 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 de-
pendent 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 conse-
quence, 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 mislead-
ingly 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 narcis-
sism 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 indepen-
dence was a feeling made possible by the lifelong presence of
134 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 phenome-
nologically, arguing that the term captured a state in which individ-
uals 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 de-
mands, socialized only forcibly into adolescence and adulthood. Ko-
hut 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 un-
derstood mature autonomy as the capacity to rely on others, to ac-
cept 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 nar-
cissism 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 fel-
low psychotherapists at a seminar, “only mentioning that it has a
certain usefulness.”32 Primary narcissism offered a conceptual space
 Independence 135

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 other-
wise inexplicably childish behavior of adults who must control ev-
erything and who react with rage when thwarted. Therapists could
use primary narcissism as an aid to envisioning such adults as in-
fants 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 charac-
teristic.” 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? Pa-
tients’ 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 de-
fend 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 any-
one because they experience such need as a humiliation. The great-
est 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 character-
ized 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 consti-
tutive 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
136 Dimensions of Narcissism

cruel ventriloquism of what he took to be Freud’s pessimistic phi-

losophy, “I care for nobody and nobody cares for me.” That Freud
fashioned himself fiercely independent while being unable to toler-
ate 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 in-
fantile dependency” recurs regularly in the literature. “His Depen-
dence on Men,” Erich Fromm’s provocatively titled chapter in his
popular book, Sigmund Freud’s Mission, published in 1959, chal-
lenged 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 volu-
minous 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 inde-
pendence 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 de-
throne 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 sus-
tained by the dependent “way of life” that he argued was the new
cultural ideal, and saw nothing of what analysts might have consid-
ered 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 with-
out needs and without attachment. Analysts working in the classical
tradition pathologized dependency, gratification, and satiation,
contrasting them to the much vaunted independence, renunciation,
 Independence 137

and asceticism that were their own ideals. In favoring the latter over
the former, mainstream analysts were arguing from the same posi-
tion 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 col-
leagues, stressed the inevitability of dependence and the therapeutic
value of gratifications. Advancing their critiques of the modal Ameri-
can’s lack of independence, quest for instant gratification, and im-
mersion in the pleasures of the moment, social critics blamed psy-
choanalysis for offering a vision of life without restraints. In doing
so, they misread mainstream psychoanalysis, which held depen-
dency 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 frivol-

ity 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 narcis-
sistic than man, analysts in the next several decades confidently theo-
rized womanly narcissism as compensatory and biologically deter-
mined, 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 mobi-
lized in the service of heterosexual desirability. Freud, however, in
his essay “On Narcissism” gives us a female narcissist—in his esti-
mation “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
 Va n i t y 139

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 narcis-
sistic 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 com-
parable 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 remi-
niscent 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 sig-
nificant 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 self-
making 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
140 Dimensions of Narcissism

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.” Nar-
cissism would soon enough be associated with “selfish ruthlessness,
arrogance, vanity, and ingratitude,” but for the moment, in this con-
versation, pleasure and narcissism were aligned, much as they were
in Freud’s “On Narcissism.” The early-twentieth-century psychoan-
alysts and psychologists who made the case for narcissistic enjoy-
ments were challenging the negative moral valence that had histori-
cally trailed vanity.4
Over the next several decades, however, the distress occasioned
by penis envy overshadowed the delights offered by vanity in ana-
lytic 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 ana-
lysts 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 increas-
ingly 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 con-
versation around it had changed. Rather, Lasch invoked an expan-
sively 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 slav-
ishly bowed to fashion’s dictates and so often wore unflattering
 Va n i t y 141

attire? “Clothes fetishists” all, they were incomprehensibly given to

wearing the same things, as if obeying “a general command,” how-
ever ill-fitting and ill-suited their fashionable garments were. Taking
his cue from the pioneering sexologist Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psy-
chopathia Sexualis, Freud explained that fetishism, a newly defined
sexual abnormality, was rooted in emotional experience. The fetish-
ist according to Freud derived sexual pleasure from specific, non-
genital “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 frustra-
tion at the feminine clothing that inhibited the male gaze was, he
hypothesized, turned to worship of that same clothing as a substi-
tute 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 paral-
lel 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
142 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 “nar-
cissistically, as part of her own self.” Woman loves solely on the con-
dition 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 col-
league 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 narcis-
sism 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 genital-
ization 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 mir-
ror 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, appar-
ently 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
 Va n i t y 143

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 enhanc-
ing in turn—in a “vicious circle,” the London-based analyst J. C. Flü-
gel observed—the narcissistic self-regard that was their psychic and
bodily inheritance and that, moreover, set limits on their full partici-
pation in civic life. As Flügel explained, laying out but not critiquing
the vicious circle, the admiration women enjoyed impeded any capac-
ity 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 propo-
sition 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 fasci-
nated 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 elic-
iting 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
144 Dimensions of Narcissism

as a dicey, “peculiar state” marked by sexual overvaluation of the

other and a corresponding impoverishment of the self. The narcis-
sist’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, no-
tably, her narcissism at this point in Freud’s thinking derived from
social custom, not biological lack. It compensated “them for the so-
cial restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of ob-
ject.”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 narcis-
sism in favor of the psychological and even the social, Flügel wor-
ried the ways in which aesthetics and psychology were mutually
reinforcing and openly admitted to jealousy of women’s greater sarto-
rial freedom. Everyone expected and tolerated a degree of narcis-
sism 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 psy-
chological pleasures clothing afforded, chief among them narcissism
and exhibitionism, collectively embracing a drably austere and as-
cetic uniformity in their habits of dress. This move, which Flügel
believed starkly shifted the balance of power between the sexes, oc-
curred 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 simplic-
ity and uniformity expressive of their new-found, democratically
inspired fraternity, leaving the privileges and prerogatives of beauty,
 Va n i t y 145

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 nar-
cissism, to embrace it enthusiastically while men suppress their own
in the name of a common humanity. Flügel held that women’s disposi-
tion to narcissism, whether natural or fostered by social custom,
found reinforcement in their taste for fashion, but this was not neces-
sarily a bad thing. In his hands, it might even represent triumph.
Women’s “defiant use of powder-puff and lipstick,” and their irritat-
ing habit of applying both in public, might be symptomatic of a self-
absorbed 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 psy-
chologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and but a few psychoana-
lysts 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 fe-
male 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”
146 Dimensions of Narcissism

and dissatisfaction with self that analysts and others saw as pecu-
liarly female. Clothing, she wrote in 1916, resulted from man’s “at-
tempt 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 ob-
servers saw clothing as critical to the survival of the species, with the
“exquisite attire” of those young persons active in the sexual mar-
ketplace 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 “comman-
deered 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 moral-
ists. That clothing yielded narcissistic satisfactions was beyond dis-
pute, but whereas the analysts focused on woman’s insatiable need
for admiration would locate them in a nexus of heterosexual ex-
change, 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 self-
feeling. Clothing was from this perspective a “source of pleasure,”
 Va n i t y 147

heightening and ennobling “vital feelings” and exciting inner sensa-

tions, an “extension of personality” conditioned by “inner necessity.”
It might produce “the distinctly pleasurable tang” of power and ini-
tiative, 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 pleas-
urably “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 self-
expression” 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 confi-
dently when pleasingly dressed,” noted another. “One’s spirits re-
spond to one’s personal appearance,” wrote yet another. Dressed for
an outing, “I feel a rise in my animal spirits,” noted a nineteen-year-
old 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” sensa-
tions 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 herd-
like 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 re-
place those barely worn, simply because they preferred novelty to
148 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 inver-
sion 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 ap-
peared “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 con-
sensus 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
 Va n i t y 149

books with titles like The Eternal Masquerade (1923) and Narcis-
sus: 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 de-
nounce as empty vanity,” added the author of Narcissus. “In the mas-
querade,” 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 as-
piration 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 sexu-
ally 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 self-
admiration, 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 exten-
sion of the masculine self, “a predatory male body” that enabled the
150 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 competi-
tive strivings, it at the same time allowed men to engage in the care-
taking and aesthetic appreciation usually coded as feminine. Owners
of cars could take pleasure in the engineering and design that pro-
duced “states of well-being”—a maternal function usually the pre-
serve 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 legiti-
mate 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 estima-
tion were missing in men: jealousy, pettiness, assertions of superior-
ity and dominance, and mutual admiration. And, for a brief moment
in the 1960s and 1970s, men became like women in their body nar-
cissism, 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
 Va n i t y 151

Freud’s view of women was neither credible nor “the ordinary judg-
ment 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 grat-
ifications. 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 mention-
ing 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 him-
self as at once fascinated and mystified by woman’s enigmatic capac-
ity 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 narcis-
sism 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, re-
turns 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 pur-
portedly greater narcissism as cause for celebration, not condemna-
tion. 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,
152 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 con-
sisted 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, ac-
cepted 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 charac-
teristic of “normal fully-developed woman” and wrote rapturously
of the elusive and special female capacity “for outpouring and sur-
render of the self in love.” Riviere theorized a nonessentialist wom-
anhood and its private and public strategies in her “Womanliness as
a Masquerade” paper, published in 1929 and brought to wide atten-
tion 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 mani-
festo 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 pe-
nis 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 any-
one 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
 Va n i t y 153

that incorporation is the foundation for the independence of exter-

nal love-objects that Freud, in his 1914 essay, had seen as charac-
teristic of the narcissistic woman. Others may have believed the
narcissist incapable of relating to objects, but Riviere saw the narcis-
sist as capable of intensely relating to them—if only in their incorpo-
rated 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 nar-
cissism 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 trans-
formed 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 hus-
band occasioned, Riviere turned to the widows who had wanted mar-
riage 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 cen-
turies 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 inde-
pendent, contained, and masterful as any man. This woman’s se-
cret 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,
154 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 ban-
ner 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 thirty-
three, 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 narcis-
sism, a dimension of her life’s work that has neither been recognized
nor explored. Indeed, the most significant of the early psychoana-
lytic 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 narcis-
sism’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 Eliza-
beth in 1922, for example, she highlighted the monarch’s exhibi-
tionism 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
 Va n i t y 155

her subjects’ psychology, showing how they gratified their narcis-

sism 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. Femi-
nists have mined her “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” finding in
her an early, proto-Lacanian theoretician of a nonessentialist wom-
anhood 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 profession-
ally 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.”
156 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 masculin-
ity.” 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 wom-
anhood 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 femi-
ninity. 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 tri-
umphant pleasure of violating gender norms is balanced by the pun-
ishment her illicit behavior occasions. Riviere’s women are con-
stantly 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, ap-
prehensiveness, 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.
 Va n i t y 157

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 disappoint-
ments experienced by a range of men and women in mid-1930s Lon-
don, explaining to an interested laity how unrecognized “inner emo-
tional 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 psycho-
logical 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 straight-
forward “impulse to spend money for the sake of spending it” could
explain why a man would spend lavishly on clothing. What his sarto-
rially 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. Found-
ing 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
158 Dimensions of Narcissism

which people incorporated inanimate objects and made them part

of themselves. Riviere saw the craving “to possess, acquire, and in-
corporate” something outside the self, whether another person or a
material thing, and to “make it one’s own” as a primordial and un-
exceptionable 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 in-
clude 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 in-
voking 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 irre-
ducibly material and at the same time a site for negotiating what
Flaccus called the “subtle emotional displacements” all of us con-
stantly 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 encom-
passes love, hate, contempt, depreciation, envy, and greed. The ques-
tion was not whether individuals had these emotions, for that was a
given, but how they distributed them. Dangerous, unsettling emo-
 Va n i t y 159

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 accumulat-
ing 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 in-
ner well-being”—a means of self-soothing learned in infancy when
mother’s milk ousted the pain of hunger. The capacity to live con-
tentedly and satisfied rested on ensuring all was good within—
individuals’ “vanity and self-esteem” depended on it. “Our narcis-
sism 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 self-
satisfaction 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 par-
tial 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 self-
sufficiency, free of internal objects. Riviere by contrast conceived of
narcissism as a state in which internal objects were intensely experi-
enced, felt to be “essential parts” of the self and sometimes experi-
enced 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 intol-
erance,” even among psychoanalysts. She suggested to skeptics that
the fantasies we all have of “containing other persons inside our-
selves,” evident in comforting thoughts such as “I shall always have
160 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 rec-
ognition,” 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 behav-
iors 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 regu-
lates 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 rela-
tions that would prove foundational to Otto Kernberg as he theo-
rized narcissism in the 1960s. Like Riviere, Kernberg argued that
narcissism and object relations “go hand-in-hand” and that patho-
logical narcissism was not, as Freud had asserted, a state free of in-
ternalized 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 desper-
ate 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
 Va n i t y 161

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 grandios-
ity may point to feelings of worthlessness. A manifest dependence
on the analyst may coexist with a desperate fear of relying on any-
one. 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 associ-
ated with it. He saw healthy expressions of self in childhood exhibi-
tionism 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 am-
bitions. 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 transi-
tional 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 eventu-
ally 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 transi-
tional object and the selfobject as referring to the same thing and as
162 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 bur-
geoning closets, was but the girl’s grievance at her “sexual imperfec-
tion” 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 con-
quered” these feelings by indulging their feminine vanity, taking pride
in their figures and physical charms and attempting to make “them-
selves 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 con-
strued the girl as but a castrated boy and that saw women’s lesser lot
foreshadowed in the girl’s experience of “nonpossession of the pe-
nis.” 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 in-
deed 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 self-
esteem, 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 experi-
ence “mirroring acceptance” of their bodily selves from their parents
 Va n i t y 163

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 nar-
cissism and normative psychosexual development that had been de-
veloped 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 en-
gendered 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 expres-
sions 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 ob-
servable behavior toward others and in their inner worlds, the bio-
logically 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 femi-
nine traits” expressive of women’s greater narcissism, but the dynamic
of retreating to narcissism, whether in fantasy or in behavior, as com-
pensation 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 discus-
sions of narcissistic shopaholics, who were seen as easy prey for ad-
vertisers 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
164 Dimensions of Narcissism

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, de-
prived 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 say-
ing,” 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 com-

mentators’ jeremiads, encapsulating the contest between excess, sat-
isfaction, 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 maga-
zine profile of Christopher Lasch, who singled out the countercul-
ture’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 cele-
brated 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 impulsive-
ness 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 propo-
sition that the mind will seek pleasure—instinctual gratification—and
avoid unpleasure was foundational to classical Freudian drive psy-
chology. 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
166 Dimensions of Narcissism

patients’ wishes, desires, and demands were to be frustrated in the ser-

vice 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 counter-
weight 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 cen-
sored, and banished from the psychoanalytic fold. Their split—which
many analysts considered tragic, even traumatic—burdened the disci-
pline, 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, dif-
ficult, hopeless, and narcissistically inaccessible—were properly within
or beyond the analytic compass, testified to how unsettled the field re-
mained 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 self-
inflicted 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 gratifica-
tion 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
 Gratification 167

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 my-
self.” 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 cen-
tury. Whereas at the outset it was considered heretical that patients
might need or want gratification, by the 1970s Kohut and other re-
visionists had raised the possibility that it was part of the analyst’s
task to meet patients’ needs, especially if the patient exhibited nar-
cissistic pathology. It is not altogether surprising that social critics
were unaware of gratification’s shifting analytic fortunes. The ana-
lytic controversy around gratification was internal to the discipline
and, focused on questions of technique that had little cultural pur-
chase, 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 cul-
tural 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,
168 Dimensions of Narcissism

casting himself as an “enfant terrible” in revolt against his once-

beloved 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 ex-
changed more than twelve hundred remarkably intimate letters. Fe-
renczi 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 submis-
sion, exemplified in his stance of abjection—acceding to Freud’s vi-
sion 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 frustra-
tion,” 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 docu-
ment published only in 1985, which, in the very condition of its se-
cret 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-
 Gratification 169

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 al-
ternates 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 emo-
tional 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 indif-
ferent” 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 suffer-
ing, 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 self-
censor, in the analyst’s presence, a technique central to the develop-
ment 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 asso-
ciation” on the ideally compliant patient’s part, the analyst’s evenly
suspended attention ensured that he would not subject what the pa-
tient said to unconscious censorship. Rather, he would use his un-
conscious as an instrument—a receptive organ, as Freud put it,
170 Dimensions of Narcissism

much like a telephone receiver—prepared to receive the “transmit-

ting unconscious of the patient,” and, provided the analyst had “un-
dergone 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 recom-
mendations 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 un-
specified 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 Hun-
garian colleagues. What had happened in the intervening years, how-
ever, 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 arbi-
trary, 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 unre-
strained complexes.” The analytic process consisted “first and fore-
most” in the analyst’s “quantitative assessment of the dynamic fac-
tors 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 him-
self in the patient’s position. “One must ‘empathize’ [einfühlen],” he
proclaimed. Ferenczi went so far as to formulate his own psycho-
 Gratification 171

analytic rule, the “empathy rule,” as an alternative to Freud’s “fun-

damental rule.” Empathy, Ferenczi explained, invoking imagery bor-
rowed 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 mo-
bilized 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 be-
tween the viewer of art and the art object itself, arguing that what-
ever 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 Einfüh-
lung, 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 Rela-
tionship 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 writ-
ings, 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
172 Dimensions of Narcissism

part because James and Alix Strachey, who supervised the transla-
tion, 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 ap-
pears as “sympathetic understanding” in the Standard Edition trans-
lation, a less subjective and robust emotional stance than he actu-
ally had in mind.11 But to posit an empathic, responsive, and nimble
consulting-room Freud on the basis of misguided translation prac-
tices is to go too far, for Freud was also consistent in calling primar-
ily on the intellectual dimensions of the term and was throughout
his life suspicious of the analyst’s own emotions in the analytic set-
ting. 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 col-
leagues sixteen years earlier, in 1912, that they model themselves on
the surgeon, “who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sym-
pathy.” The “emotional coldness” of Freud’s enjoining stood in
stark contrast to Ferenczi’s recommended empathy, and it was alto-
gether 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 uncon-
scious 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 Sug-
gestive influences might induce patients to produce material to
please the analyst, but such influences were of no utility in uncover-
 Gratification 173

ing what was unconscious, the psychoanalyst’s quarry. Only the ana-
lyst’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 watch-
words 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 en-
gage in the difficult process of analysis. Patients give up their resis-
tances “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 ques-
tion 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 mechanisti-
cally 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
174 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 ex-
perience.” 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 absti-
nence.” 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 analy-
sis 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 ana-
lyst’s task to make sure that the patient’s suffering was not prema-
turely 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 absti-
nence, 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
 Gratification 175

years from 1893 through 1896, when he was working his way to-
ward the conclusion that the origins of the neuroses were exclu-
sively sexual. Freud’s first mention of abstinence in his correspon-
dence 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 men-
tion, however, refers to the “indescribably bleak” miseries of absti-
nence 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 prohi-
bition, more than once, on smoking his favored cigars. Freud com-
plained that this made his life unbearable. In one instance, he was
able to honor Fliess’s absolutist edict for seven weeks, but the depriva-
tion 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 car-
diac misery,” characterized by “violent arrhythmia, constant ten-
sion, 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 recommenda-
tion 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
176 Dimensions of Narcissism

Fliess. The issue surfaced time and again, however, in displaced form,
in his narrative of his own struggles to cease smoking. Freud plain-
tively 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 admit-
ted 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 absti-
nence 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 experi-
ence 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 so-
cially 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 “renuncia-
tion 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.
 Gratification 177

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 substi-
tute father and finding himself forced to “intellectual self-reliance.”19
Ferenczi would focus increasingly on the technique of psychoanaly-
sis 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 hy-
pocrisy of subjecting patients to suffering in the name of treatment.
According to Ferenczi, it was Freud’s indifference to the therapeu-
tic 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 Ferenc-
zi’s presence that “patients are a rabble,” serving only to provide ana-
lysts 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 Fe-
renczi, and “in life I am inclined to intolerance toward them.” To
178 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 litera-
ture 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 In-
terminable,” 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 “suf-
ficiently 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 experi-
mentation,” 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 overeager-
ness 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 behav-
ior 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 in-
vested 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 feel-
ings” both positive and negative toward the patient, to allow him-
self to be empathic but also “frankly exasperated.”22 Where Freud
hated his patients, he would love them.
 Gratification 179

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 Freud-
ian coolly aloof and minimally responsive analyst who was at fault.
Ferenczi would substitute for the Freudian analyst’s “expectant si-
lence” 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 “in-
exhaustible patience, understanding, goodwill, and kindliness.” He
would encourage patients to surrender to their spontaneously experi-
enced 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 hy-
pocrisy” 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 stan-
dard analytic approach was inadequate needed “to be adopted and
to partake for the first time in their lives of the advantages of a nor-
mal 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 pres-
ence of angry, reproachful, or critical patients whom they in fact
180 Dimensions of Narcissism

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, trance-
like 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 expla-
nations but to the analyst’s sincerity and “maternal friendliness.” Pa-
tients were better served by analysts who responded honestly to criti-
cisms 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 atten-
tion to the ways you speak to your patients and pupils, Ferenczi ad-
vised: “Loosen, as it were, their tongues.”24
Freud listened “thunderstruck” to Ferenczi’s disquisition, warn-
ing 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 trau-
matizing 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 meet-
ing, it would turn out, ending with Freud declining to shake Fe-
renczi’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
 Gratification 181

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 mad-
ness, characterized as the work of a dying analyst. His writings were
censored by Freud’s faithful acolytes. Much of what has been writ-
ten concerning this episode and of its traumatic effects on the ana-
lytic 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 pa-
tient’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 genu-
ine to something unreal. In his Diary, Ferenczi objected to Freud’s
construal of transference love, chalking it up to the analyst’s “narcis-
sistic, 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 inter-
preting 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 feel-
ings for him. Ferenczi held that in so exhorting the patient, the ana-
lyst was unwittingly setting up a situation in which the child’s rela-
tionship vis-à-vis the parents was replicated, as parents similarly
182 Dimensions of Narcissism

exhorted her to feel loving and passionate feelings that were possi-
bly 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 ana-
lyst patients were, they longed to free themselves of the analyst’s op-
pressive 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 de-
mands on them.26
Freud’s technical recommendations, organized around abstinence
and privation, were of a piece with his construal of the analytic en-
counter 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 dis-
agreement between the two analysts: Freudian cool objectivity is al-
lied with the passionate intensity of transference love, while the Fe-
renczian setting, awash in empathy and warmth, is, if Ferenczi is to
be believed, passionless. In an ironic twist of historical fortunes, Fe-
renczi, who attempted to drain the analytic atmosphere of the height-
ened 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 Fe-
renczi, 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 impor-
tance historically of abstinence to psychoanalytic practice, especially
 Gratification 183

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 sex-
ual, 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 espe-
cially 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 ac-
tual 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 ses-
sions with the master. Marshaling these accounts to document dis-
crepancies between Freud’s words and actions has turned into a mi-
nor industry. The consulting room Freud was not the “mirror” to his
patients of his stated recommendations but a warmly human pres-
ence 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
184 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 excite-
ment. 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”; Fe-
renczi 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 ac-
cepted 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 “authori-
ties,” 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” im-
agery of the surgeon and the mirror he employed to convey the con-
cept was particularly unfortunate as it obscured the analyst’s very
human partnership with his patient.31
 Gratification 185

The trope of the analyst’s “humanness” comes up repeatedly in

considerations of technique, its strangeness when cast in the inter-
rogatory form of “can the analyst be human” symptomatic of the
difficulty in which midcentury American psychoanalysis found it-
self. 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 ana-
lytic setting characterized by an austerity and abstinence conso-
nant with his technical recommendations but absent from his ac-
tual 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 as-
cetic and authoritarian transference, attempting to preserve the latter’s
purity while bringing a measure of simple humanity into the ortho-
dox 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 rela-
tionship that qualified and softened its coldness.32
These extratransferential relationships testify to just how impov-
erished the relationship between analyst and patient had become in
the hands of the orthodox. The basic argument of Leo Stone’s land-
mark 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 “su-
perfluous 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 char-
acterized their interactions with patients. Highlighting the analyst’s
186 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 dan-
gerous 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 perfec-
tion” over “intuitive wisdom” in the treatment setting skewed the
analytic process. Skittishness on the question of the legitimate grati-
fications that might sustain “a palpably human context” was espe-
cially 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 psycho-
analysis until thirty years later, when Kohut reopened the conversa-
tion. Empathy was used only infrequently in the analytic literature
before the appearance of Kohut’s important 1959 paper, “Introspec-
tion, 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 associ-
ated with the concept than Kohut, who, well aware of the disdain
heaped upon Ferenczi by the orthodox, in championing empathy
 Gratification 187

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 relation-
ship was diminishing. Proper training ensured that an array of ob-
servers 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 interpreta-
tion 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 ortho-
doxy around empathy, arguing it was a far better technique for gath-
ering 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
188 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 ana-
lyst” 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 peep-
ing 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 ob-
jected 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 cau-
tionary 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 infa-
mous incident may account in part for why Kohut distanced himself
 Gratification 189

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 ana-
lysts from Ferenczi onward. From the start, Kohut would conceptu-
alize empathy—again, much like Ferenczi had—as “a rigorously con-
trolled 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 ar-
mamentarium, 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 ro-
bust 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 superven-
tion. 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 struc-
ture was projected but was a real presence and experienced as such.
Psychoanalysis was like small particle physics, he would later sug-
gest, with the analyst-as-observer part of the observational field. The
discipline’s objective truths only existed to the extent that they ac-
counted for the effects of the observational process. The analyst in-
fluenced 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 dis-
tinguish it from gratification. He argued that his self psychology
190 Dimensions of Narcissism

adhered more stringently to Freud’s recommendations than did or-

thodoxy, 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, data-
gathering analyst-as-computer who “emits interpretations.” Neutral-
ity 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 over-
stimulated hysterics who were Freud’s early patients, it was neither
appropriate nor helpful for the deprived, character-disordered pa-
tients with narcissistic issues who were increasingly seeking psycho-
analysts’ 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 experi-
enced in childhood with an “extra measure of love and kindness.”
Rather, they should immerse themselves empathically in their pa-
tients’ 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 recommen-
dations 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 Profes-
sion, 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
 Gratification 191

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 pretend-
ers 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 sub-
side,” 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 ana-
lytic mainstream, and the high orthodoxy of the New York Freud-
ians 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 adopt-
ing 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 “judi-
cious doses of kindliness and friendliness” deprived patients of the
freedom to decide what was best for themselves. He could even sug-
gest 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
192 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 tech-
nique, and it is in Green’s ambivalence on this score, which she mas-
terfully 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 faddish-
ness 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 grudg-
ingly admits to respecting Kohut’s technique with very difficult pa-
tients: “Whenever I read his clinical discussions, my therapeutic tech-
nique 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 per-
sonal kindness” endowed with the “intuitiveness and sensitivity and
kindness” working with the very sick demanded, and thus his dis-
pensing “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 impossi-
ble 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 transfer-
ences.” Ferenczi’s narcissistically split patients had developed deep
transferences to him once he had abandoned frustration for indul-
gence, and revisionists working in the suppressed Ferenczian tradi-
tion 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, control-
ling, tyrannizing, insatiable, and destructive—while adding he was
 Gratification 193

surprised at how well they had actually done in analysis. Kohut re-
solved the issue by, in effect, recasting the venerable but disqualify-
ing 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 impas-
sioned 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 gen-
erated 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 dis-
torted picture of classical technique. Green objected that the first
analysis “just didn’t make sense,” adding that “in the second, ‘Kohu-
tian’ analysis, he finally did what any one of us ‘classical’ analysts
would have done in the first place. His description of the first analy-
sis 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 an-
other 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 tech-
nique is very beguiling,” said one skeptic, adding that “it probably
represents a general corrective to what a lot of analysts have done.
194 Dimensions of Narcissism

But then, if that’s all you’ve done, you’re really a good bartender.”
The question of whether Kohut offered patients traditionally pro-
scribed 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 Ko-
hut 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 fig-
ured importantly in Freudian orthodoxy. Philip Rieff, Daniel Bell,
and others lamented that asceticism as a cultural ideal had disap-
peared, missing that if it could be found anywhere it was in need-
denying 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 mani-
festly indifferent to others, they were in analysts’ eyes nevertheless
hungry for praise and admiration, even love. Any pathological de-
sires they harbored for material goods was seen as secondary to their
greediness for other people and what they could get from them. In
 Gratification 195

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 mate-
rial, gratification.
Among critics, Lasch made the strongest argument about gratifi-
cation, holding that “ideologies based on the postponement of grati-
fication” were crumbling under the pressure of consumerism and
the revolution in sexual mores, both of which were weakening pa-
ternal authority, freeing women from bondage to the family, and
glorifying the young as consumers equipped with their own tele-
phones, televisions, and hi-fis. Like Lasch, Daniel Bell saw a water-
shed moment in the counterculture’s creation of a “world of imme-
diate gratification and exhibitionistic display.” But for Bell there was
no going back: the dynamism of twentieth-century capitalism de-
pended 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 Thor-
stein Veblen’s work, suggesting that the gratification, thrill, and en-
joyment to be found in using products ranging from cars to golf
clubs to dictating machines, not their value as status symbols, ac-
counted 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,
196 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 characteristi-
cally 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 au-
thority. He would have parents ignore the debased Freudianism of
the experts, but he praised the Kohutian mother’s provision of “op-
timal 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 ap-
proval, 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 prob-
lem. 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 frustra-
tion 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 stu-
dents 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
 Gratification 197

Notably, some social observers dissented from this jeremiad. They

argued that the brashness of the college-educated young was admi-
rable, evidence of their existential security. These young were famil-
iar 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 Mal-
colm, 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 conven-
tional morality and their own optimistic belief that the world ex-
isted for them. Others gave Malcolm’s argument a more political
spin, casting the young as courageous in their dissent against injus-
tice and seeing their distrust of their elders, who were quiescent in the
face of racism and who had led the country into Vietnam, as under-
standable. 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 dis-
mayingly 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 wished-
for present?
Some psychoanalysts, for better or worse living up to their popu-
lar 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 castra-
tion fantasies that were the analysts’ stock in trade but also with
198 Dimensions of Narcissism

“apocalyptic fantasies around an overwhelming external threat.”

Deprived of a belief in a secure future, subjected to “weekly, sched-
uled rehearsals for apocalypse,” anyone born after 1945 knew the
sirens and the drills, the radiation fears and worries about contami-
nated milk, “the insane fantasies of bomb shelters and stockpiled
foods.” Was it any wonder that they took refuge in sensual, immedi-
ate, 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 chil-
dren 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
 Gratification 199

patently reasonable in advocating attention to patients’ “matura-

tional needs.” Yet his polarities leave no place for individuals’ yearn-
ings for love, desires for “adoration and success,” and expressions of
grandiose ambitions and omnipotent fantasies, all seen in the ana-
lytic tradition since Freud’s time as narcissistic and normalized as
constitutive of healthy narcissism by Kohut. Strean could only char-
acterize 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 un-
able 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 narcis-
sism. 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 civi-
lization 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 toler-
ating “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 nar-
cissistic supplies”—could even spark envy in their analysts, who, one
reported, wished they could “partake of some of this good stuff.”55
200 Dimensions of Narcissism

Even the most censorious, it appears, were not immune to the plea-
sures 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 gratifi-
cation,” 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 feath-
ers.” 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 admis-
sion 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 ad-
diction,’ ” a perspective to which Schur assented with his observa-
tion 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 re-
mark 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
 Gratification 201

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 col-
leagues 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 an-
alysts 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 fel-
low Americans. Lasch linked the ascendancy of narcissism to what
he held were “quite specific” social and cultural changes: bureau-
cracy, 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 cul-
ture found pointed expression in the behaviors of grandiose, ma-
nipulative, and exploitative narcissists. The narcissist’s vague dissat-
isfactions, pervasive sense of emptiness, and deficient personality
were, Lasch suggested, realistic responses to “the tensions and anxi-
eties 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
 inaccessibility 203

highlighted the demise of the hysteric and the growing predominance

of the “so-called character neuroses” with their painful but not inca-
pacitating symptoms. As Lasch himself put it, “the underlying struc-
ture 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 show-
ing up with increasing frequency in the consulting room.2 Psychoana-
lysts held that these patients suffered not from repression—which ana-
lysts 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 sub-
tly 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 accom-
plished individuals who could see others only as sources of the “nar-
cissistic 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 com-
plained of “chronic maladaption in living, i.e., working, loving, and
playing.” By 1975, the new patient was familiar enough that one an-
alyst 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 “nar-
cissistic transferences.” Freud was himself not indifferent to the
plight of these individuals, some of them scarred by the narcissistic
204 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 want-
ing 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 main-
stream 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 dep-
recating of the analyst, they were capable at best of a sort of “auto-
analysis.” 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 tradi-
tion 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, main-
stream analysts would argue that among the criteria for undertak-
ing a classical analysis were the potential analysand’s generally ad-
equate functioning, strong ego, deep relationships with friends and
family, lack of narcissistic pathology, and “good tolerance for anxi-
ety, 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 patho-
logical narcissists, countering the consensus on analyzability. Kern-
berg pulled together half a century’s worth of analytic observations
on patients displaying narcissistic traits to delineate the pathological
 inaccessibility 205

narcissist as a particular, if paradoxical, type of person. He de-

scribed 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 in-
deed capable of establishing transferential relationships with ana-
lysts, arguing that their resistance to treatment was an expected, di-
agnostic 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 wor-
ried well. Opinion had already begun to shift by the time Kernberg
and Kohut were writing: analysts talked of their discipline’s “widen-
ing 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 pa-
tients. 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, narcis-
sists who had long existed. Both Kernberg and Kohut held that the
narcissistic transferences were not disqualifying, and that it was pos-
sible 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
206 Dimensions of Narcissism

Therapeutic Reaction,” and—with the publication of a biography

of Jones followed by the appearance of the edited Freud–Jones cor-
respondence—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 clas-
sic, seminal, masterly, ingenious, gripping, and elegant exploration
of the analyzability of those resistant to treatment. Indeed, the ana-
lyst 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 ortho-
doxy in 1922, arguing that narcissistic types were “nearly always
analysable.” She charged that analysts did not understand narcis-
sism 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 ana-
lytic 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 Riv-
iere 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 fig-
ure rising organically from contemporary American society, as well
as the assertions of analysts in the 1950s and beyond that the dis-
turbed 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.
 inaccessibility 207

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 disas-
trous. In the midst of the treatment, Riviere characterized her rela-
tions 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 charac-
ter pathology inadequately comprehended by analytic theory. Treat-
ing neurotics, among them hysterics with their identifiable symp-
toms, 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’ as-
sessment 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 mas-
ochism—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 nar-
cissists 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 nega-
tive therapeutic reaction paper, which she makes clear is about narcis-
sistic pathology, suggest that she wrote in some awareness—perhaps
even acceptance—of what others thought was her characterological
constellation.
208 Dimensions of Narcissism

That Riviere wrote from experience when she wrote on narcis-

sism and its treatment can only be known from the tangled corre-
spondence 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 instrumen-
tal. As he conceded to Freud, “seeing that she was unusually intelli-
gent I hoped to win her for the cause”—the cause being psychoanal-
ysis. Jones ignored Freud’s stated recommendation that the analyst
foreswear “an intimate attitude” and adopt an attitude of “emo-
tional coldness” to the patient, like “the surgeon, who puts aside all
feelings, even his human sympathy.” He instead assumed the pre-
rogative, 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 tu-
multuous 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 fiend-
ish sadist,” as he characterized her to Freud, “devoted herself to
torturing me without any intermission and with considerable suc-
cess 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 sani-
tarium 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
 inaccessibility 209

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 cir-
cumstances was painful and pointless. “You and I are too incompat-
ible 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 ana-
lyst, 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 ide-
alizations for what they were. She wrote to Jones that she had ex-
pected perfection in him, having endowed him “with so many vir-
tues.” But she was powerless to analyze her predicament. “Please
remember that I am completely in the dark and don’t ‘know’ or real-
ize 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 be-
tween Riviere and Jones grew even more fraught, with both the ex-
coriating and idealizing streams of her transference to him intensify-
ing. 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, acknowl-
edge 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
210 Dimensions of Narcissism

and defective,” and could she see in herself the contempt, deprecia-
tion, and attempts to tyrannically control the other that she would
later argue in her 1936 paper were at the core of narcissistic pathol-
ogy? “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 com-
pletely 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 as-
sumed 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 him-
self 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 defi-
ant” 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
 inaccessibility 211

now at this moment of crisis ensnared in their net. His very indiffer-
ence 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 sub-
stitute 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 be-
tween 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 mas-
culine, 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 anxi-
ety and despair and nothing to alter the balance of power in their
unequal relationship. Her analytic gambit failed, turning Jones reso-
lutely 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 un-
derstood psychoanalysis “better than any other member” of the Brit-
ish 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
212 Dimensions of Narcissism

prove the most enduring of the several registers in which her rela-
tionship 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 respira-
tory movement”—aroused voluptuous feelings within. Jones allowed
that he must have symbolized the instrument as the physician’s pe-
nis, 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 appur-
tenances 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?
 inaccessibility 213

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. Af-
ter 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, includ-
ing 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 an-
alyst, 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 (trans-
lated 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 exter-
nal actual ones.” But, given that among Jones’s professed motives in
referring Riviere to Freud was that “a valuable translator and mem-
ber” of the British Psycho–Analytical Society not be lost to psycho-
analysis, 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
214 Dimensions of Narcissism

“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 ap-
peared to him to be Freud’s seduction at Riviere’s hands, her “shew-
ing [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 capac-
ity 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 psycho-
analysis. 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 criti-
cizing 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 trans-
lator 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
 inaccessibility 215

woman” who overemphasized “the importance of the slightest fea-

tures 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 ob-
ject of exchange, the medium of barter, through which the two male
principals negotiated the terms of their conflicting agendas and, sac-
rificing her particular interests, cemented their own mutual bond.
Freud, seeing in Riviere “an uncommon combination of male intel-
ligence 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 drudg-
ery, 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 com-
bination.” Jones vehemently rejected the charge of jealousy as “ab-
surd.” Yet he later theorized jealousy in terms suggestive of this mo-
ment 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
216 Dimensions of Narcissism

the context in which they negotiated this “severe test,” Freud also
chided Jones for his suspicions that Riviere had “wanted to put her-
self 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 conces-
sions “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 analy-
sis with Freud did not go very deep, she later said. Perhaps recog-
nizing his self-professed diplomacy for the strategy it was, she never
developed the positive transference to him that she argued narcissis-
tic patients resist at all costs, instead parading “a substitute ‘friendli-
ness.’ ” 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 “cho-
sen 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 char-
acter” of her love and her unconscious guilt about it finds vindica-
tion 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 com-
prehend the patient’s (Riviere’s) desperate masking of guilt, depres-
sion, and love for those she relentlessly attacks.25 She almost certainly
 inaccessibility 217

wrote in awareness that portions of Freud’s essay captured almost

word-for-word currents that flowed between her and her colleague-
analysts (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 inter-
pretation that made its way from her pen, through Freud’s corre-
spondence, to the well-known footnote of his before appearing, fi-
nally, 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 characteristi-
cally tyrannical treatment of others (and the “hatred, vindictiveness
and murderous impulses” toward them the analyst sees) is an orga-
nized system of defense that protects her from experiencing the de-
spair, 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 get-
ting better,” exhibiting, Freud wrote, “a ‘negative therapeutic reac-
tion’ ” that was “the most powerful of all obstacles to recovery.” The
patient’s disheartening inability, even refusal, “to give up the punish-
ment of suffering,” was more undermining of the potential for cure
than was the “narcissistic inaccessibility” familiar to analysts. Pa-
tients’ 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 toler-
ate 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 self-
criticism 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
218 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 ear-
lier, however, it is plausible that the entire formulation of the narcis-
sist’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 tell-
ing 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 worth-
less.” 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. Evi-
dently this has been a very big thing between us.” Riviere, realizing
how she had been “so very unconscious and guiltless” in her sting-
ing critiques of Jones, immediately fell into an abyss of guilty self-
reproach. 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 sup-
port. 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
 inaccessibility 219

read as a criticism of his handling of her analysis, of his having al-

lowed 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 gra-
tuitously 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 disap-
pointed, 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 associa-
tions. 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 physio-
logically and psychologically more dependent on their partners’ ap-
proval. 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
220 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 ex-
pressing 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 con-
solingly to Freud of the burdens heaped on him by his overly sensi-
tive 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, out-
raging her, stripping her of his love, of her own self-respect and self-
confidence, 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 projec-
tions 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
 inaccessibility 221

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 geni-
tal relation to the desired parent” may be the motivating force be-
hind 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 determi-
native 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 writ-
ers on narcissism would propose. The men Riviere’s patient pur-
sued were neither full objects nor real persons to her but, rather, “the
means and instruments” of securing her own gratification, of obtain-
ing 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 nur-
tured by early deprivations accounted for the “acute and desperate
222 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 initia-
tive 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 rec-
ognize 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 sup-
port 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-
 inaccessibility 223

cissistically damaged. The efforts Kohut and Kernberg made to de-

scribe 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 repre-
sented by Ferenczi, Balint, and Winnicott we might now add Riv-
iere’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 cul-

tural 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 sud-
denly 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 Ameri-
cans 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
 Identity 225

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 Diction-
ary, 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 per-
sonhood 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 psy-
choanalyst D. W. Winnicott, a contemporary of Erikson’s, was out-
lining as the core of the self that ensured its aliveness. Observers
complained that Erikson never adequately defined identity, conceiv-
ing 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 Vi-
enna 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 ana-
lysts, 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
226 Dimensions of Narcissism

“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 dismiss-
ing 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 in-
creasing regularity thereafter; in the analytic corpus, its usage dou-
bled 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, counter-
ing its lifeless scientism and flat prose with his own talk of vitality,
creativity, aliveness, growth, and development. Some of the concep-
tual 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 nu-
anced, 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 reg-
ister. 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 “con-
crete 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 psycho-
analysis 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 inhibi-
tions which prevented him from being what and who he thought he
knew he was.”5 Critics and analysts would later reframe this shift,
 Identity 227

substituting the narcissist for the Eriksonian person-bereft-of-

identity 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-for-
identity 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 hon-
esty 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 object-
relations 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 symp-
toms. We are concerned with living persons, whole living and lov-
ing.” 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 cul-
turalist Freud—not the straitened master worshipped by system-
atizing disciples. Erikson turned to his Freud as an authorizing touch-
stone even as he staged a “quiet revolution” against foundational
228 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 popu-
lar commentary. Modern man, the argument went, had lost his sense
of self and was in consequence fated to be forever searching for him-
self, 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 criti-
cal 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-
 Identity 229

vidual. The “weary and skeptical” midcentury character he evoked

was no match for the late-nineteenth-century’s sturdy bourgeois fig-
ure. Men in the nineteenth century were faced with few choices, vo-
cational 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 consis-
tent. 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 be-
reft of “a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity.” Ap-
plied first in a clinical setting to denote pathology, the term was
quickly normalized as a description of an expected stage of adoles-
cence 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 con-
founding 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 sub-
jectively 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
230 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 of-
fense, 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, ex-
plained, 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 col-
league 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 ego-
psychological 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 polic-
ing 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 com-
munity, fueled by the “anticipation of new potentialities” and en-
gaged 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 im-
portant 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 neces-
sity,” thus revived an aspect of Freud’s thought that eluded the
 Identity 231

orthodox analysts’ grasp. But it was not only to Freud that Erik-
son 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 par-
ents 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 confu-
sions of identity, questioning who they were and what they would
become.
Erikson allowed that it was almost self-evident that his experi-
ence of “the hard and heartless” experience of emigration and Amer-
icanization, which made many identities into a “super-identity,” nur-
tured 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.
232 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 ad-
dressed, invoking iconic cultural types (the Western rancher, the over-
protective “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 syn-
thesizing 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 “un-
qualified if not justified self-esteem.” He was struck by the American
penchant for “ego-inflating” behaviors, and characterized the ten-
dency 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 sug-
gested, 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 con-
trasts and abrupt changes, of proud autonomy and exuberant initia-
tive, and of “a fashionable and vain ‘ego’ which is its own originator
and arbiter.” This “self-made ego” was neither European nor Freud-
ian, but distinctively American in its ability “to reshape itself in in-
teraction 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.” Er-
ikson’s decrying of the faddish equation of identity with the ques-
tion “Who am I” is suggestive of his desire to rein in the term’s popu-
lar referents. As with other such new and protean terms, however,
 Identity 233

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 intro-
duction, psychoanalysts sporadically attempted to delineate its sev-
eral, sometimes competing, dimensions. Yet, however carefully they
drew distinctions between the metaphysical and psychological dimen-
sions of identity, and however much they warned of its internal in-
consistencies 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 “al-
most without reference to his authority.” Unburdened with analytic
associations, identity, in Erikson’s hands, was also a relatively non-
ideological 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, Er-
ikson pointed to two “conceptual ancestors,” Freud and William
James, his characterization of them as “bearded and patriarchal
234 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 dimen-
sions. 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 psycho-
social 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 twen-
tieth 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 condi-
tions 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 Erik-
sonian 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 per-
haps 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
 Identity 235

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 Prin-
ciples 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 predi-
cated 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 iden-
tity. 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 delin-
eated healthy narcissism, was the first to conceptualize identity along
the lines that Erikson would later popularize. In several papers pub-
lished 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
236 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 aware-
ness 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 arti-
cles 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 Seven-
teen were told. “The real self is something to be discovered and cre-
ated,” 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 real-
ized 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, anx-
ious person, Mrs. B. had endured five years of intense suffering, in-
cluding 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
 Identity 237

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, under-
stood 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 char-
acterized 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 eth-
nic or cultural dimension to which Freud gave voice would fuel vari-
ous 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 “con-
stituted out of conflicting inner demands,” in favor of a distinctively
American liberationist notion of a creative self. This was the authen-
tic 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 de-
scribed 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
238 Dimensions of Narcissism

“aliveness” was made possible by a major shift, registered in 1975

by the sociologist Ralph Turner, “in what are conceived as valid in-
dications 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 exis-
tence. 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 imag-
ined. 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 de-
mands 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 fan-
tasies and the “mastery of reality tasks” in one analyst’s formula-
tion, an impossible to fully complete process of self-regulation that
brought one face-to-face with painful feelings. Likewise, the Winn-
icottian true self’s spontaneity, authenticity, and creativity were not
natural but produced in the context of a properly nurturing envi-
ronment 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 philoso-
pher says something is ‘really real,’ you can be really sure that what
 Identity 239

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 cul-
tural style. Isabelle Sutherland, Riesman’s subject, was highly liter-
ate, a Ph.D. psychologist training to be a psychotherapist and under-
going 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 lan-
guage of introspection and self-making. How, he wondered, was one
to get behind “talk of autonomy to autonomy itself? Or behind be-
havior 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 neces-
sarily limited nature of his world view. He admitted to ambivalence
toward Sutherland, characterizing her as a colorless exemplar of “pe-
destrian other-direction,” a woman whose bland, psychiatrically in-
flected contentment he interpreted as “a dull lack of the sense of the
tragic.” He acknowledged the difficulty of comprehending “the tex-
ture 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
240 Dimensions of Narcissism

part of a larger study of self-understanding, the educational psy-

chologist 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 re-
ported that the students wrote in mostly positive terms about their
physical appearances and intellectual abilities. What really ani-
mated them, however, were the positive and negatives dimensions
of their personalities, social attitudes, and relationships. Approxi-
mately 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, content-
ment, 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 col-
lege 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 self-
reflection, 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 major-
ity of UCLA students acknowledged that they were concerned with
self-discovery and questing, confirming the popular stereotype in
 Identity 241

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 stu-
dents in England and Australia were if anything more concerned
with finding their identities than were their counterparts in Califor-
nia, with the English confounding deeply held conceptions of na-
tional 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 in-
flated, its overlord the superego was, according to the psychoana-
lysts 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 ex-
plained, it was “judicial department of personality.” In analysts’ ac-
counts, it was usually described as a harsh, prohibiting, and repres-
sive 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 fa-
ther by renouncing his desires for his mother and identifying with the
would-be castrator. In this identification, the boy made clear his de-
sire to be like his father and at the same time took on the father’s
superego, making “the parents’ strictness and severity, their prohib-
iting and punitive function,” his own.31
242 Dimensions of Narcissism

It was precisely the threatening, all-powerful father, the father

capable of castrating his own son, whom analysts worried was miss-
ing in the America of the 1940s and 1950s. Wheelis saw the super-
ego’s decline in the transition from village society to mass society,
arguing that the former nourished the superego and the latter under-
mined its foundations. Modernity, with its highways, radios, televi-
sion, 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” chal-
lenged, 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 ven-
erable 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 phenom-
enon 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 gov-
ernment” in the Standard Edition—in the passage of national prohi-
bition, 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 do-
mestic 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 fam-
ily, 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 domi-
neering, devious foe who robbed him of his potency and of his right
 Identity 243

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. Fromm-
Reichmann 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 dy-
namics, which had wives waiting on their husbands, and the women
were “not afraid of their husbands as European women are.” Domi-
neering 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 Eu-
rope 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 pa-
rental 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 dis-
appointments 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 de-
caying paternalism.”35
It seemed to Erikson that the American boy was “on reasonably
good terms with his superego.” Erikson had been raised psychoana-
lytically on the “rigidly vindictive and punitive” conceptualization
244 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 con-
strual 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 ines-
capably 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 su-
perego, 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 im-
poverished these investigations were. Before the 1940s, the prosti-
 Identity 245

tute was treated as a foil against which men’s travails were played
out, with her own subjectivity mostly ignored. In the decades fol-
lowing, 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 con-
nections 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 pros-
titute 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 al-
lowed men to use her body as if it were theirs, a thing or organ be-
longing to them, but kept her sanity by imagining her “real self”
separate from her “consummated body.” She thus enacted quite dra-
matically 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, ex-
amining 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, am-
bition, childrearing—to sex.
Christopher Lasch’s bitter contention that, in his time, the prosti-
tute exemplified “the qualities indispensable to success in American
society” continued a long tradition of professional and popular com-
mentary concerning the prostitute’s falseness, aggressiveness, and
246 Dimensions of Narcissism

hostility to men. Writing in 1978, Lasch highlighted what he consid-

ered 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 mo-
ment, 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 cen-
tury 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 ac-
counts, 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 Mys-
tique, 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 divi-
sively 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
 Identity 247

knowing “who she is, or can be, or wants to be.”40 Critiquing Erik-
son 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 ar-
gued that the issue for women was the absence of any such progres-
sion 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 ac-
count of women’s development focused not, like those of his ana-
lytic 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 ‘re-
stored.’ ” 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 self-
containment 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 en-
deavors 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 hu-
manitarian endeavors touched by both would be enriched by women’s
full and equal participation.41
248 Dimensions of Narcissism

The Narcissism of Minor Differences

“There are many good things to be said about Erikson,” Kohut ar-
gued 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, how-
ever, 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, re-
ferring 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 psychol-
ogy,” that was almost sociological, having to do with “the observa-
tion 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 gestur-
ing 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 devel-
opmental continuity of his self.” Being cured, from this perspective,
 Identity 249

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 selfsame-
ness 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 con-
dition of existence,” that “there is no feeling of being alive without a
sense of ego-identity.” Kohut, like Erikson, refused to accept psychol-
ogy’s instinctual energy as the only legitimate coin of the analytic
realm, substituting for it the patient’s subjectively experienced emo-
tions 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 fea-
ture: that Oedipus was abandoned by his parents, “a rejected child”
put out to die. Claiming primacy for overturning the oedipal shib-
boleth, Kohut wondered why no one else had done so before him.
Two years earlier, in the same journal, the discipline’s flagship, Erik-
son 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 pa-
triarchal claims,” and locating the origins of the tragedy in “Oedi-
pus’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
250 Dimensions of Narcissism

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 om-
nipotence, 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 ma-
ture 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 nar-
cissism 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 devel-
opmental 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
 Identity 251

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 iden-
tity (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 cul-
ture (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 Iden-
tity proved malleable, familiar, and indispensable to analysts and
critics from the moment Erikson highlighted it. Erikson was a well-
known 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 suc-
cumbed 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 malignan-
cies 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 phe-
nomenologically inclined Viennese analyst Paul Federn, the genera-
tion of midcentury ego psychologists who were Erikson’s contempo-
raries and Kohut’s teachers entertained a notion of the self and its
needs that was relatively impoverished. Still, the intellectual envi-
ronment 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
 Conclusion 253

analytic community had woven the concept of a normalized narcis-

sism, 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 vacu-
ous 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 once-
formidable 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-first-
century 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
254 Conclusion

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 Jour-
nal, 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 nar-
cissism, the revived Kohutian argument goes, “fuels drive and ambi-
tion” as well as the “desire to be recognized for one’s accomplish-
ments.” Among its “documented” benefits are that it “makes you
attractive, successful, lovable and good in bed.” A psychologist sug-
gests that narcissism and “an inflated sense of self” could be benefi-
cial, 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-
 Conclusion 255

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 cer-
tainty” 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. Narcis-
sism 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 con-
structive, 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 Mi-
chael Maccoby, in articles and in his popular 2003 book The Pro-
ductive Narcissist, repeatedly invokes Steve Jobs as exemplary of
this narcissist, a visionary leader in whom the irresistibly charis-
matic 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 over-
come vital character flaws.”4
How much has been sacrificed in slighting the positive dimen-
sions 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 “path-
ological 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 preva-
lent in the present than in the past and asserted, contra Lasch’s pathol-
ogizing 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
256 Conclusion

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 char-
acters, 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 con-
temporary 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,” Mac-
coby 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 sug-
gested, created the illusion they loved their followers but were them-
 Conclusion 257

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 disap-
peared from the analytic literature until, in the 1940s, some analysts
referenced their work as they began exploring the appeal of narcis-
sistic 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 indi-
viduals barter away their independence, allowing themselves to be
dominated by charlatans proffering magic? The émigré analyst Chris-
tine 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 “secu-
rity 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 God-
like 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 high-
lighted. 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 of-
fered a pleasurable, though illusory, means of sharing in his power.
Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents of the lost omnipo-
tence of childhood, referring to the pleasure he imagined infants
258 Conclusion

derived from their self-sufficiency and “limitless narcissism.” It was

evident, he wrote in “On Narcissism,” that “another person’s narcis-
sism 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 lead-
ers 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 follow-
ers’ “attributions of specialness” to leaders that ensured their domi-
nation. 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 con-
vivial” 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 Enter-
prise featured with less than complete assurance as “The Last Char-
ismatic Leader?” James Bond, Martin Luther King, and the Kenne-
dys had it; Hubert Humphrey, Ralph Abernathy, and the Nixons did
not. Seventeen noted the mysterious air of the charismatic, “the
 Conclusion 259

impression that they’re leading the way, have some knowledge you
don’t have.” Mademoiselle, telling its readers “how to get it,” high-
lighted 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 charis-
matic 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 self-
esteem, 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 con-
sensus leaders. The model of leadership advocated in Daniel Gole-
man’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 techno-
logical 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
260 Conclusion

unconscious feelings” of subordinates.13 They were narcissistic in

their grandiosity; their followers were deficient in self-esteem, per-
petually 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 manage-
ment 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 rule-
and 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, sum-
moning up scenarios in which leaders inevitably “crash and burn,”
following a trajectory from “genius-to-folly.” The leader’s narcissis-
tic 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 associ-
ated with it are indispensable to successful leadership but paradoxi-
cally 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 ag-
gression, 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 profes-
sor Abraham Zaleznik wrote, and it was pointless to deny that ri-
valry, dislike, and competition were rife in them.15 In the leadership
literature, it is assumed that everyone has dependency needs: depen-
dency 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
 Conclusion 261

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 crea-
tures 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 weigh-
ing 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 Twit-
ter, in the executive suite and the halls of government. To them, nar-
cissism again explains everything that is wrong with American cul-
ture. 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 self-
promoting behaviors especially evident among the young, the most
narcissistic generation in history. In this view, the so-called “Genera-
tion 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 narcis-
sistic 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 Personal-
ity 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.
262 Conclusion

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 re-
spect 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 sat-
isfactions as they come.” These questions measure dimensions of
narcissism that both researchers and clinicians consider pathologi-
cal, 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 pro-
ponents claim, but the positive traits of high self-esteem, psychologi-
cal 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, how-
ever, 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 impli-
cations for others and healthy narcissism that is, many clinicians
would argue, benign or even a sign of mental health and the founda-
tion for robustly engaging with others and the social environment.
 Conclusion 263

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 “achiev-
ing 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 observa-
tion 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 self-
esteem if I’m not.” Easily held up to mockery, self-esteem and “unflap-
pable 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 be-
coming 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 self-
centeredness” or “narcissism at all” among the young but may in-
stead reflect “positive, rather than negative societal change.”21 They
may also reflect the fact that the popular language of self-esteem is
264 Conclusion

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 condemna-
tions 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 mis-
erable in their angst—was their collective crisis not just the per-
sonal 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 Pears-
all Smith has quipped that “the denunciation of the young is a nec-
essary 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 de-
nounced 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 ob-
noxious “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 ques-
tion, 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
 Conclusion 265

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 vari-
ants of how to manage, recover from, and otherwise deal with, or
distance yourself from, what one title terms “infuriating, mean, criti-
cal people.” Much of this advice channels a Kernbergian vision, char-
acterizing 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 para-
doxical as the analyst’s. The Everything Guide to Narcissistic Per-
sonality Disorder, for example, offers a complex version of narcis-
sism 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 fol-
lows 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 psy-
chologists tend to dominate. Consider self-esteem, which research
psychologists and psychoanalysts conceptualize differently. To many
research psychologists, high self-esteem is symptomatic of narcis-
sism, and healthy narcissism seems a “vague and somewhat mean-
ingless 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 inter-
preted as a narcissistic defense against actual low-esteem), and healthy
narcissism is seen as a clinically useful concept. Self-esteem to ana-
lysts is fungible, and since the 1970s they have envisioned people
regulating their self-esteem in the interest of maintaining positive
266 Conclusion

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 appear-
ances, entitled and self-absorbed, holding—as one woman admitting
to guilt of the same put it—“an inflated sense of our own fabulous-
ness.” 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, exhi-
bitionism: 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 pro-
nounced 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 ana-
lysts’ explorations of vanity and expressiveness, we now have censo-
riousness and disdain for women’s desires.
The psychoanalyst J. C. Flügel argued in 1930 that clothing en-
gendered 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
 Conclusion 267

much more to please their own vanity and to compete with other
women” than to elicit male admiration, he observed, wistfully imag-
ining women tempering their self-satisfied narcissism and turning
their attention to men—other than their dressmakers. Flügel wor-
ried that women’s capacity for heterosexual object relations was di-
minished by the narcissistic satisfactions offered by wearing, dis-
playing, and competing with one another through the medium of
their attire. Some recent psychoanalytic commentators in effect as-
sent 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 relation-
ship to the mother—“love, hate and envy.” Clothing shoulders a
heavy expressive load in women’s lives from this perspective, serv-
ing 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 individu-
als.” People increasingly dress for themselves, Twenge argues, for
comfort rather than to elicit the approval of others. Narcissists to-
day 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
268 Conclusion

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 wish-
ing 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, glory-
ing in the “ ‘I don’t care’ feeling” such garments encouraged and de-
lighting 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 consump-
tion as pathological is of little use in distinguishing between shop-
ping that is experienced as pleasurable and shopping that is experi-
enced as a compulsion, even an addiction, that must be engaged in
at the price of unbearable psychic distress. As exemplary of the lat-
ter, 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, psychia-
trists, 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 under-
standing of the phenomenon can appear. This literature casts com-
pulsive shopping as a largely female disorder that, variously, offers
“escape from psychic pain,” represents a “flight from feminine iden-
tification,” 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
 Conclusion 269

at root “a deferred reaction to anxiety over castration, the first cog-

nizance 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, indif-
ferent 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. Re-
call 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 sat-
isfy their impulses to consume—cars, appurtenances of household
and yard, electronic gadgets—even as they disavow them by associ-
ating 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 pro-
moted 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 self-
loathing will be shared by all.” Writing of the vogue for uncomfort-
ably tight, low-rise jeans among his peers, a male journalist con-
tends that “American men have come to vanity late and practice it
with the zeal of the newly converted.” He sees men co-opting a pe-
culiarly 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
270 Conclusion

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 “super-
fucking 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 Me-

Decade 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, renuncia-
tion, abstinence, and deprivation—were to be restored through a
program of asceticism in those who had tasted the delights of im-
pulse 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 posses-
sions,” 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 pos-
sible,” voicing the narcissistic fantasy of the self without needs that
animates the literature of lament.32 The position of self-sovereignty
 Conclusion 271

that Rieff and other critics ascribe to the nineteenth-century bour-

geois 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 adoles-
cent, the shopaholic woman, and the aging Boomer still in search of
his self.
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Ferenczi, Final Sándor Ferenczi, Final Contributions to the Problems and

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Ferenczi, Further Sándor Ferenczi, Further Contributions to the Theory

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 Abbreviations 275

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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 Horo-
witz, Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The “Crisis of Confi-
dence” 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 self-
absorption. “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. “Transfor-
mation 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e 1 5 277

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 Re-
view 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 Ameri-
can 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, Radi-
cal and Militant Youth: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry (New York: Prager, 1971);
Richard King, The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Free-
dom (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 Self-
Fulfillment 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, apro-
pos of graffiti on Madison Avenue exhorting New Yorkers to “Kiss the Beauti-
ful 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, “perpetu-
ally” at xvi, “propaganda” at 71.
278 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 5 – 1 7

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, Revolu-
tion in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York: HarperCollins, 2008),
astutely examines the discipline’s early years. Zaretsky, “Charisma or Rational-
ization: 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,” News-
week, 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, “His-
tory 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 Re-
view of Books, 11 April 1991. Dennis H. Wrong, “Bourgeois Values, No Bour-
geoisie? 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 8 – 1 9 279

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 Explo-
ration of the Compromise of Integrity,” International Review of Psycho-
Analysis 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 Re-
view 69 (1982): 283–295, arguing at 284 that Lasch uses narcissism “in a psy-
chiatrically 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 Narcis-
sism, 8, “approval” at 40, “wealth” at 39.
12. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Ba-
sic Books, 1978 [1976]); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the So-
cial Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1978 [1977]). “Free him-
self”: 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: Hough-
ton 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 land-
scape 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: Col-
lins, 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.’ ”
280 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 9 – 2 2

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: Double-
day, 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: Technol-
ogy 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 Equal-
ity: 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 Er-
nest 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 com-
mandment” at 19 (italics in original), “resistance” at 20; “urge” at 93; “imagina-
tive 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 hon-
eyed 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.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 3 – 2 5 281

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 Ber-
nard Shull and Silas L. Warner, “Viennese Zeitgeist and the Economics of Sig-
mund Freud and the Psychology of Austrian Economics,” Journal of the Ameri-
can Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 14 (1986): 1–13; see
also Lawrence Birken, “Freud’s ‘Economic Hypothesis’: From Homo Oeco-
nomicus to Homo Sexualis,” American Imago 56 (1999): 311–330. There is a
voluminous literature on Freud’s economic point of view; for a concise over-
view, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988 [1973]), s.v. “eco-
nomic.” Salman Akhtar, “Things: Developmental, Psychopathological, and Tech-
nical 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 af-
ter Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1966]), 12, “more sub-
stantial” 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 Psycho-
analytic 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.
282 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 5 – 2 6

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 Uni-
versity 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. Nor-
ton, 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 experi-
ence 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 Fra-
ser, “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, Af-
fluent 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 any-
thing else. Beaglehole offers a broad synthesis of contemporary psychological
and psychoanalytic thinking on the relations between persons and property (at
254–321).
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 7 – 2 9 283

27. See Harvey A. Kaplan, “Greed: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,” Psychoan-

alytic 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,” Psychoana-
lytic 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” ob-
served along similar lines at 93 that “money has certainly not originated be-
cause 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, “Psychopa-
thology 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, Psychoanaly-
sis 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 Compul-
sive Buying,” Social Science and Medicine, 58 (2004): 1709–1718.
284 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 0 – 3 2

33. “Fenichel, “Drive to Amass,” 72.

34. “Possessions”: Ibid., 80 (emphasis in original). William James, The Prin-
ciples 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 own-
ership” 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 Winn-
icott 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 chil-
dren” and wonders whether his work contributes to the “construction of a
self whose primary characteristics are an endless, sybaritic sense of entitle-
ment 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 omnipo-
tence: 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 Con-
sumer 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 Psychol-
ogy 47 [1959]: 13–23), who tested “60 normal enlisted soldiers.” “My belong-
ings”: 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 Psychol-
ogy, 293.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 3 – 3 8 285

38. “Age-old” Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 72–73. “Synthetic desire”: Gal-

braith, Affluent Society, 127.
39. “We all began”: Michael Beldoch, “The Therapeutic as Narcissist,” Sal-
magundi 20 (Summer–Fall, 1972): 134–152, at 139. “Short essay”: Freud, “Li-
bidinal Types” (1931), Standard Edition 21:216–220. On the conceptual confu-
sion 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 hu-
miliation, see Nancy McWilliams and Stanley Lependorf, “Narcissistic Pathol-
ogy 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. “Con-
cise characterization”: Paul L. Wachter, “The Politics of Narcissism,” The Na-
tion, 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 Cush-
man, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psy-
chotherapy (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 Di-
etz, “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
286 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 8 – 4 2

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 es-
say, “Narcissism, For and Against,” in his Promises, Promises: Essays on Litera-
ture 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 Narcis-
sistic Rage,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 27 (1972): 360–400, at 364.
“Navel gazing”: Kohut, “Psychoanalysis in a Troubled World,” Annual of Psy-
choanalysis 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 Gir-
oux, 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 publica-
tion 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 Discov-
eries 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 hon-
orific appears many times in the analytic literature. Kohut, “Introspection, Em-
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 4 2 – 4 4 287

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 Semi-
Circle of Mental Health,” IJP 63 (1949): 395–407, at 395. Kohut, The Analysis
of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcis-
sistic 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 Psy-
choanalysis,” 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. Neu-
bauer, 12 July 1968, in Kohut, Curve, 207–208 and 208–209.
9. Kohut’s biographer Charles Strozier, who wrestled with his subject’s pen-
chant 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 actu-
ally transpired comes from Kohut himself: Strozier, Heinz Kohut, 58. “Personal
myth”: Kohut, “Future of Psychoanalysis,” 327. The passing of the psychoana-
lytic 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. Wit-
zleben, 7 April 1977, in Kohut, Curve, 345. “Independent self”: Kohut, Self
Psychology and the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Ap-
proach, 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. “Remobi-
lized 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.
288 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 4 5 – 4 9

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 Dis-
orders—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 Kam-
men, “A Whiplash of Contradictory Expectations,” Reviews in American His-
tory 7 (1979): 452–458, writes, at 452, that Kohut is apparently Lasch’s “con-
temporary guru.”
18. “Cult of personal relations”: Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 51. “Primi-
tive man”: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition
21:115. “Price of entry”: Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1959]), 372; “Control release dialec-
tic”: 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,” The-
ory 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.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 0 – 5 3 289

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 self-
psychology 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 Psychoana-
lytic Movement: An Interview with Dr. Heinz Kohut” (21 June 1981), Psycho-
analysis 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 associa-
tion 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,” Psychoana-
lytic Quarterly 54 (1985): 597–614; and James S. Grotstein, “Chapter 8: Mela-
nie 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 for-
mulate clinical phenomena in terms of the psychology of drives, but self psy-
chologists 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 un-
satisfactory.” The term paradigm was rarely used in the analytic literature prior
290 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 3 – 5 4

to 1960; between 1960 and 1980, it appeared in 378 papers included the Psy-
choanalytic Electronic Publishing digital archive. It quickly became associated
with narcissism; the New York Times dubbed narcissism modernity’s “paradig-
matic complaint.” For optimistic readings of the scientific status of psycho-
analysis, 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 Chang-
ing Ideas about Knowledge and Authority in Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 65 (1996): 158–200. “Jeremiahs”: Kohut, “Future of Psychoanaly-
sis,” 332.
25. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Uni-
versity 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 Restora-
tion of the Self: A Symposium,” Psychoanalytic Review 65 (1978): 615. “Phys-
ics”: 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 “ex-
tracted 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 “nor-
mal 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 System-
atic Approach to the Psychological Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disor-
ders,” 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 re-
view, in which the charge of “unconscious plagiarism”—subsequently excised
before publication—was leveled, with the qualification that such was “an en-
demic 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 Res-
toration of the Self: A Symposium,” Psychoanalytic Review 65 (1978): 616–
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 5 – 5 6 291

617, at 616. “Failing”: Saul Tuttman, “Kohut’s Restoration of the Self,” Psycho-
analytic 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; Gud-
run 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 Contribu-
tions 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”: Ko-
hut, “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 Repeti-
tion 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 pre-
analysis 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 Fe-
renczi 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
292 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 7 – 6 3

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 Ar-
onson, 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 aggres-
sion” at 685. “Lifeless shadows”: Kernberg, “Factors in the Psychoanalytic
Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities,” JAPA 18 (1970): 51–85, at 57, “de-
throned” 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”: Kern-
berg, “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 Unrea-
son (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.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 4 – 6 7 293

7. Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 60–61. “Primary mu-

tual 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,” psychother-
apy.net (2006), at http://www.psychotherapy.net/interview/otto-kernberg; the
colleague was Herman van der Waals, author of “Problems of Narcissism,” Bul-
letin 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 Treat-
ment: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (New York: Other Press,
2000 [1986]), “the report of the Psychotherapy Research Project of the Men-
ninger Foundation, 1954–1982.”
10. Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psycho-
analytic 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 Criti-
cal 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 Psy-
choanalytic 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 Con-
versation 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. “Narcis-
sistic idealization”: Kernberg, “Contrasting Viewpoints Regarding the Nature
and Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities: A Preliminary Com-
munication,” JAPA 22 (1974): 255–267, at 260, “transitory nature,” at 265.
294 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 8 – 7 2

“Wind up empty”: Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, 237; see also Kernberg,

Love Relations, 151.
14. “Phony pathology”: Kernberg in Rankin, “Interview with Otto Kern-
berg.” “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 Diminish-
ing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), discusses Kernberg at 39–41,
“tells us most” at 34. “Both abused and overused”: Kernberg, Borderline Con-
ditions, 16. “Lasch’s work”: Kernberg in “Conversation with Siniscalco.”
“Quintessential consumer”: “Gratification Now Is the Slogan of the ’70s, La-
ments a Historian,” People Magazine, 9 July 1979. “Narcissistic needs”: Kern-
berg 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 Psycho-
analysis, 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 develop-
ment of libidinal cathexes” while all but ignoring “the vicissitudes of aggres-
sion.” “Tyranny”: Kohut, Lectures, 33.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 7 3 – 7 6 295

21. “Fuller life”: Pines, “New Focus on Narcissism.” “Eternal youth”: Kern-
berg, “Contrasting Viewpoints,” 265. “Doing their own thing”: Kohut, in Tim-
nick, “ ‘Kohutian Movement’ Denied.” “Spitefully aggressive”: Kernberg in
“Why Some People Can’t Love,” 56. On the patient as victim, see Jerome Saper-
stein and Jack Gaines, “A Commentary on the Divergent Views between Kern-
berg and Kohut on the Theory and Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disor-
ders,” 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 Per-
sonality Disturbances: The Kernberg-Kohut Divergence,” Scandinavian Psycho-
analytic 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, Be-
yond 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
296 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 7 7 – 8 4

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 Psy-
choanalytic 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 Pro-
cesses,” 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 per-
cent”: 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 Ko-
hut,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 15 (1979): 170–189. For a dissenting view,
see Lynne Layton, “A Deconstruction of Kohut’s Concept of the Self,” Contem-
porary Psychoanalysis 26 (1990): 420–429.

4. Self-Love
1. The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon, ed. Joseph Devey (Lon-
don: George Bell & Sons, 1882 [1619]), 207. On the term’s coining, see Have-
lock 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 8 5 – 8 9 297

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), Stan-
dard 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. “Other-
wise”: Freud to Jung, 6 March 1910. “Psychoanalytic pathography”: Ferenczi
to Freud, 12 June 1910. “Only truly beautiful thing”: Freud to Lou Andreas-
Salomé, 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 pre-
pared”: Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998
[1988]), 274–275. In Minutes 2 (18 November 1908): 61, Freud charged Wil-
helm 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
298 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 9 0 – 9 4

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. “Re-
tarding and restraining”: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Stan-
dard 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 anal-
yses”: 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 Macal-
pine 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.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 9 5 – 9 8 299

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 remark-
able”: 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 char-
acterization 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 control-
ling 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 “homo-
sexual 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 oth-
ers”: 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
300 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 9 9 – 1 0 1

beings”: Freud, Three Essays, 144n.1, added 1915. “Extremely happy” and
“Prussian woman”: Fritz Wittels (18 November 1908), in Minutes 2:58. “Al-
coholism”: 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 Psychol-
ogy 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 Have-
lock Ellis uses the term autoerotism “when only one person is involved . . . ,
whereas Freud uses it when there is no object; for example, those who mastur-
bate with images [Bilderonanisten] would not be considered autoerotic” (brack-
ets in original). “In functions”: Kohut, Lectures, 40. “Road to homosexuality”:
A. A. Brill, “The Conception of Homosexuality,” Journal of the American Medi-
cal 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 Edi-
tion 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 subli-
mations of the homosexual feelings.” “Love for women”: Freud, Group Psy-
chology 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, Ar-
istotle, 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.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 0 2 – 1 0 5 301

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 Quar-
terly 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,” Psycho-
analytic 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 Trans-
ference” (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 “phan-
tasied 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 great-
est 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 Devel-
opment of the Sense of Self,” JAPA 23 (1975): 459–484, at 477. “Inner free-
dom”: Alice Miller, “Depression and Grandiosity as Related Forms of Narcis-
sistic 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 Equi-
librium,” IJP 28 (1947): 106–114, at 108. “Capacity to enjoy life”: Martin S.
Bergmann, “The Place of Paul Federn’s Ego Psychology in Psychoanalytic Meta-
psychology,” JAPA 11 (1963): 97–116, at 103. “Mental harmony”: Marjorie
Brierley, “Notes on Psycho-Analysis and Integrative Living,” 28 (1947): 7–105,
302 N o t e t o Pa g e 1 0 6

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 Educa-
tion 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 edi-
tors of the Standard Edition translated Selbstgefühl as “self-esteem”—for exam-
ple 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 narcis-
sism” was “its use as a synonym for self-esteem” that the editors of the Stan-
dard Edition chose to use “self-regard” rather than “self-esteem” in “On Nar-
cissism.” (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 con-
ceived 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). Conceptualiz-
ing 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 0 7 – 1 1 0 303

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 Ex-
amination 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 com-
ments 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”: Kern-
berg 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 sig-
nificant aspect of Freud’s essay, while Paul H. Ornstein credits Kohut with of-
fering “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 in-
crease. “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
304 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 1 0 – 1 1 4

(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,” Mademoi-
selle, 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 Your-
self?” 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 pur-
pose”: 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 Your-
self?” 184.
42. “Poll”: “America Seems to Feel Good about Self-Esteem,” Newsweek, 17
February 1992. “California”: David Gelman, “Pondering Self-Esteem,” News-
week, 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, “Narcis-
sism Looming Larger as Root of Personality Woes,” New York Times, 1 Novem-
ber 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 Narcis-
sism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Nor-
ton, 1978), 230. “There is no such thing”: Heinz Kohut, Self Psychology and
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 1 5 – 1 1 8 305

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 Discov-
ery of the Oedipus Complex,” American Imago 31 (1974), 1–64. Freud, “Fe-
male 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, “Developmen-
tal Aspects of the Interaction between Narcissism, Self-Esteem and Object Rela-
tions,” IJP 62 (1981): 323–337, at 326. “Tautological”: H. Shmuel Erlich and
Sidney S. Blass, “Narcissism and Object Love—The Metapsychology of Experi-
ence,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 40 (1985): 57–79, at 61. “Unnecessary
concept”: Robert Caper, “Response,” IJP 79 (1998): 390–391. “No recogniz-
able state”: J. O. Wisdom, “Comparison and Development of the Psycho-
Analytical 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 narcis-
sism can be considered a “myth [that] yet tells us something true.” For a defense
of primary narcissism, see, for example, André Green, “The Analyst, Symboliza-
tion 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 exis-
tence”: 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.
306 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 1 9 – 1 2 1

“Did not exist”: Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner, eds., The Freud-Klein Contro-
versies, 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 (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999 [1969]), 64–72. In “Primary
Narcissism,” at 10, Balint wrote that “it is remarkable that the paper, On Nar-
cissism, which introduced this theory does not contain a concise description of
primary narcissism. Nevertheless, it is well known that primary narcissism be-
came the standard theory used in describing the individual’s most primitive re-
lationship with his environment, and in this connection Freud referred to it re-
peatedly in his later writings.”
7. For a reading of primary narcissism focused on the paradoxes of author-
ity 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 Mos-
bacher (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 For-
rester, 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,
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 2 – 1 2 3 307

“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 Har-
old 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 Fe-
renczi, 24 March 1912, n.1. “Sophie”: Freud to Jung, 31 October 1910. “Mis-
tress 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 per-
sonal 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 impover-
ished”: 18 August 1907. There is a substantial literature on the Freud–Jung re-
lationship. 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,” Psycho-
analytic 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
308 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 4 – 1 2 6

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, “Psy-
chologische 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”: Fe-
renczi 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. “Ex-
cessive 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 Nan-
nie,” 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.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 6 – 1 3 0 309

“Physiological”: Benjamin, “Oedipal Riddle,” 204. “Obvious physiological rea-

sons”: 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 consider-
ation”: 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: Rout-
ledge, 1999 [1952]), 34–42; the concept was not discussed in the analytic litera-
ture 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 de-
pendency 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: Gen-
der and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. de Grazia with Ellen Fur-
lough (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 Politi-
cal and Social Science 56 (November 1914): 18–26, at 19. “Partners to para-
sites”: 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,
310 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 3 1 – 1 3 2

“The Married Woman and the Part-Time Job,” Annals of the American Acad-
emy 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 Educa-
tional 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 Ameri-
can 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 crit-
ics 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 ca-
reerism provides the indispensable basis of their prosperous, glamorous,
gaudy, sometimes indecently lavish way of life” (cited by Michiko Kakutani,
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 3 2 – 1 3 5 311

“Sounding Like Quayle Blasting Cultural Elites,” New York Times, 13 Janu-
ary 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 ego-
psychological tradition, see Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neu-
rosis (New York: Norton, 1945), 464.
29. “Fearful or stubborn”: Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and Psycho-
analysis—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 real-
ity. . . . 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
312 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 3 6 – 1 3 8

Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities,” JAPA 18 (1970): 51–85, at 55–56; see

also Kernberg, “Further Contributions to the Treatment of Narcissistic Person-
alities,” 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 regu-
lation of closeness with his epistolary intimates. Consider the sardonic com-
ment of Wilhelm Stekel, “On the History of the Analytic Movement,” Psycho-
analysis 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-the-
couch 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, Cul-
ture of Narcissism, xv, “fear of dependence” at 231. In his more technical discus-
sions 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 ana-
lytic traditions are in agreement—as narcissistic. That his vernacular and ana-
lytic 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 3 9 – 1 4 1 313

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,” Psy-
choanalytic 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 Sig-
mund Freud,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 29 (2001): 105–115, at 113.
5. “Pride and acquisitiveness”: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcis-
sism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Nor-
ton, 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 self-
hatred than with self-admiration.”
6. “Clothes fetishists”: Louis Rose, “Freud and Fetishism: Previously Un-
published Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society” [meeting of 24 Febru-
ary 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. Ar-
leen 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 ana-
lysts 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 or-
gan. In his 1909 discussion of fetishism, however, Freud briefly alighted on the
314 N o t e t o Pa g e 1 4 2

ground of pleasure and erotic exchange—suggesting the woman’s exhibitionis-

tic “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 Psy-
choanalytic Congress,” Psychoanalytic Review 15 (1928): 85–107, at 95. For
castration as a truism, consider the comments of Karl Abraham, “Manifesta-
tions 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 Hein-
rich Meng and Erich Stern, “Organ-Psychosis,” Psychoanalytic Review 42
(1955): 428–434, at 430: “Freud already has said that narcissism is more pro-
nounced 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 cas-
trated, 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 nar-
cissistic 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 accep-
tance 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 2 – 1 4 5 315

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,” Psycho-
analytic 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 Dif-
ferent 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 Ve-
blen’s more ironically cast analysis: Women’s “very narcissism makes them de-
sirable 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: Cor-
nell University Press, 1985), esp. 50–65.
12. Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, 101–110.
13. References to Flügel’s book are sprinkled throughout the analytic litera-
ture; see, for example, Elizabeth A. Reilly, “Skin Deep: Psychic Skin, Second-
Skin 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
316 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 6 – 1 4 9

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, “at-
tempt 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 plea-
sure”: Hermann Lotze, Microcosmos: An Essay Concerning Man and His Rela-
tion 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”: San-
born, “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 dis-
tributed by the Clark University psychologist G. Stanley Hall. “Ready for all
contingencies”: Flügel, “On the Mental Attitude to Present-Day Clothes: Re-
port 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, “Men-
tal 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 imagina-
tive 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 im-
pressive achievement in modern visual design.” “Mere caprice”: Bliss, “Signifi-
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 9 – 1 5 2 317

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. Ka-
plan, “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 Femi-
ninity,” IJP 78 (1997): 899–911; Hughes, “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade,”
Psychoanalysis and History 6 (2004): 61–175; Lisa Appignanesi and John For-
rester, 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. Non-
analytic treatments include Stephen Heath, “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade,”
318 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 5 3 – 1 5 8

in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan
(New York: Methuen, 1986), 45–61; Mary Ann Doane, “Masquerade Recon-
sidered: 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 Chil-
dren: 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 col-
lection, 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”: Riv-
iere, “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,
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 5 9 – 1 6 3 319

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, “Un-
conscious 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 Psychoana-
lytic Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 137. “Hand-in-
hand”: 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 Relation-
ships,” 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 transi-
tional object in Kohut, Seminars, 56–59, and in Kohut, The Analysis of the Self:
A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Person-
ality 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. “Flirta-
tiousness and whimsicality”: David Zippin, “Sex Differences and the Sense of
320 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 6 4 – 1 6 7

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 dis-
cussed in circa 13,000 analytic papers and letters between Freud and his disci-
ples. 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 ob-
jectively.” “Principle of indulgence”: Sándor Ferenczi, “The Principle of Relax-
ation 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 Re-
gression (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 Tech-
nique (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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 6 8 – 1 7 2 321

Wish and Psychoanalytic Stoicism,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 27 (1991):

332–350, at 341. “Spoiling”: Ferenczi, “Child Analysis,” 136. “Coddling”: Fe-
renczi, “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 Fe-
renczi, 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 Psycho-
Analytic Technique” (1928), in Ferenczi, Final, 99, referring to Freud as “a col-
league.” “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 inad-
equate,” 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 com-
plexes”: 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 Ikono-
mou, introduction to Robert Vischer et al., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems
322 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 7 2 – 1 7 4

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 His-
tory 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 short-
comings 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), Stan-
dard Edition 2:303.
14. “Showdown”: Freud to Abraham, 29 July 1914. “Lacking in normal-
ity”: Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), Standard Edition 12:
168–169.
15. “Forget”: Freud, “Transference-Love,” 170, “charms” at 161, “sup-
press” at 164, “abstinence” at 165. Beate Lohser and Peter M. Newton, Un-
orthodox 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 7 5 – 1 7 6 323

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 satisfac-
tions, or gratifications, and as treatment progressed and symptoms were re-
solved, Freudian analysts were to ensure that their patients were sufficiently
motivated to seek further relief by seeing to it that their suffering was not pre-
maturely 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 Knowl-
edge’: Unknown Documents from Freud’s University Years,” IJP 74 (1993):
775–790, at 775, citing Freud’s 1911 contribution to a memorandum celebrat-
ing 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 asceti-
cism 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
324 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 7 7 – 1 7 8

[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 Dy-
namic 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 Oc-
tober 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 Abra-
ham, 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 in-
crease 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 self-
appraisal 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 Novem-
ber 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-
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 7 8 – 1 8 2 325

day”; Freud to Ferenczi (16 December 1917), “I work all day . . . with nine
fools.”
21. “Therapeutic enthusiast”: Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
Analysis (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. “Expect-
ant 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”: Fe-
renczi, “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 Personal-
ity and Influence (New York: Harper and Row, 1972 [1959]), 62–65. On cen-
soring, 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,” unpub-
lished letter in Arnold W. Rachman, “The Suppression and Censorship of Fe-
renczi’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. “Affec-
tionate adieu”: Fromm, Freud’s Mission, 65. “Technical impropriety”: Freud to
Ferenczi, 2 October 1932. “Jones’s promise”: Rachman, “Suppression and Cen-
sorship,” 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
326 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 8 2 – 1 8 4

alone at the time had access to the unpublished correspondence between Fe-
renczi 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 absti-
nence 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 Persua-
sion: 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 In-
vestigation into Freud’s Technique between 1920 and 1938, Based on the Pub-
lished Testimony of Former Analysands,” International Review of Psycho-
Analysis 14 (1987): 373–389. Robert J. Leider, “Analytic Neutrality—A
Historical Review,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 3 (1983): 665–674, at 668, con-
cludes, 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, Frag-
ments 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 8 4 – 1 8 6 327

disavowed by his successors. “Horney”: Blanton, Diary of My Analysis, 65, “Fe-

renczi” 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,” Psy-
choanalytic 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 Psychoana-
lytic 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 pa-
tients insight was not sufficient (puzzling over “why a human being should re-
fuse 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 him-
self 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 “Re-
marks on Some Variations in Psycho-Analytical Technique,” IJP 39 (1958):
222–229.
33. Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation: An Examination of Its Devel-
opment 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 Situa-
tion and Transference—Postscript to an Earlier Communication,” JAPA 15
(1967): 3–58, at 3. “Arbitrary authoritarianism”: Stone, Psychoanalytic Situa-
tion, 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.
328 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 8 7 – 1 9 3

36. Ferenczi, “Elasticity,” 87–89.

37. “Mystical character”: Freud to Ferenczi, 4 January 1928. “Conscious as-
sessment”: 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 al-
lowed one patient, Clara Mabel Thompson (a well-known American analyst),
to occasionally kiss him: Ferenczi, Diary, 1–4; and Freud to Ferenczi, 13 De-
cember 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 Psycho-
analysis,” 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. “Aim-
inhibited”: 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 Psycho-
analysis,” 464. “Evenly suspended attention”: Kohut, “Forms and Transforma-
tions of Narcissism,” JAPA 14 (1966): 243–272, at 263. “Intrinsically signifi-
cant”: 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 absti-
nence 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,
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 9 3 – 1 9 4 329

for example, Hans W. Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-

Analysis,” IJP 41 (1960): 16–33, at 27–28: “In the narcissistic neuroses the li-
bido 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 estab-
lished.” “Narcissistically split”: Ferenczi, “Child Analysis,” 135–136. “Demand-
ing”: 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 “widen-
ing scope patients,” see Sandor Lorand, “Modifications in Classical Psycho-
analysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 32 (1963): 192–204, esp. 202. Stephen
Mitchell, “Wishes, Needs, and Interpersonal Negotiations,” Psychoanalytic In-
quiry 11 (1991): 147–170, at 151, captures the post-Kohutian evolution of ana-
lytic 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 introduc-
tion to Curve, claims the paper is autobiographical, at 4–6. “Skeptics”: Randolf
Alnoes, “Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disturbances: The Kernberg-
Kohut Divergence,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 6 (1983): 97–110.
“Didn’t make sense”: Malcolm, Impossible Profession, 118. “Succeeded”: Ar-
nold 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, Re-
cent 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 resis-
tances to insight but rather as attempts, often legitimate, to receive needed sup-
plies from the analyst.” On Kohut and needs, see Anton O. Kris, “Helping Pa-
tients by Analyzing Self-Criticism,” JAPA 38 (1990): 605–636, at 610–616;
and Lawrence Friedman, “Kohut: A Book Review Essay,” Psychoanalytic Quar-
terly 49 (1980): 393–422, at 416. “Aloofness”: Morton Shane in Lois Timnick,
330 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 9 5 – 1 9 6

“Rift May Threaten Freudian Theory,” Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1979.
“Pleasure-seeking infants”: Kohut to “E” (1981), in Search 4:702. “Have to as-
similate”: Malcolm, Impossible Profession, 118. On the simultaneous accep-
tance 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 Psy-
choanalysis,” 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 ana-
lysts 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: Trans-
action, 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 Muenster-
berger 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: Technol-
ogy 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,”
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 9 7 – 1 9 9 331

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 wal-
ruses.” 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 As-
pects of Dissent,” JAPA 19 (1971): 122–130, esp. 128, reporting analysts’ com-
ments 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 major-
ity of psychotherapists” privately encouraged “the desirability of sexual inter-
course 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 per-
spective. “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 cul-
ture, 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,
332 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 0 0 – 2 0 4

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 origi-
nal). “A good friend”: Wilhelm Stekel, “On the History of the Analytical Move-
ment,” 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: Ameri-
can 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”: Li-
onel 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 Psycho-
analysis,” 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 Psycho-
Analytic Work” (1916), Standard Edition 14:315. “Our analytic art”: Freud to
Eduardo Weiss, 22 May 1922, in Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, “A Discussion of
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 0 4 – 2 0 5 333

the Paper by Anton O. Kris ‘On Wanting Too Much: The “Exceptions” Revis-
ited,’ ” 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 oc-
currence 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 Abra-
ham, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: Marsfield Library, 1988
[1927]), 303–311; in this short paper, Abraham mentions these patients’ narcis-
sism more than a dozen times. “Good tolerance”: Henry M. Bachrach and
Louis A. Leaff, “ ‘Analyzability’: A Systematic Review of the Clinical and Quan-
titative 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 attribu-
tion. 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 be-
tween 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,’ ” Psy-
choanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19 (1996): 403–424, writes, at 411,
crediting Kernberg with delineating the term, that it “has the advantage of be-
ing as good a label as any for a recognizable syndrome.” On Kernberg, see esp.
his “Contrasting Viewpoints Regarding the Nature and Psychoanalytic Treat-
ment 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 com-
munity 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
334 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 0 6 – 2 0 8

Patient,” IJP 75 (1994): 649–664, at 661, asking why “Freud’s attitude of sup-
port” toward narcissistic patients “required rediscovery” by Kohut; and Charles
K. Hofling and Robert W. Meyers, “Recent Discoveries in Psychoanalysis,” Ar-
chives of General Psychiatry 26 (1972): 518–523. Among surveys that regis-
tered 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 Psy-
choanalysis: 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 trag-
edy”: 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 atti-
tude”: Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis”
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 0 9 – 2 1 3 335

(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 profes-
sional pride”: Riviere to Jones, n.d. [likely December 1917]; “too incompatible”:
n.d. [likely 11 February 1918]. On the eroticized transference, see the com-
ments 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”: Jo-
seph 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 extrava-
gant”: 25 October 1918. “Agitation about analysis”: Riviere, 21 December
1918, Diary of Joan Riviere, Riviere collection, Archives of the British Psycho-
analytical 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 evi-
dence of her masculinity complex. “What a pity”: Riviere to Jones, 20 Decem-
ber 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
336 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 1 4 – 2 1 8

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. “Scien-
tific inquiry”: Riviere, “Review of Forsyth,” 64–70.
21. “As an instrument”: Riviere, “An Intimate Impression,” Lancet, 20 Sep-
tember 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 de-
prived”: 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, Gen-
der 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 Appigna-
nesi 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 friendli-
ness”: 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 para-
phrases: “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 rela-
tions 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.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 1 8 – 2 2 4 337

“Pangs of conscience”: Freud, Ego and Id, 45, “abandoned love-relation” at

50n.1.
27. “Punishment”: Riviere to Jones, 28 December 1918 (emphasis in origi-
nal). “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 Psycho-
Analysis 15 (1988): 331–352.
28. “Sometimes quite naïve”: Riviere, “A Character Trait of Freud’s,” in In-
ner 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 Fe-
renczi, 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 atmo-
sphere”: 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
338 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 2 5 – 2 2 8

American History 69 (1983): 910–931, for a masterful survey of identity’s de-

but 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,” Contempo-
rary Psychoanalysis 23 (1981): 299–313, at 308–309. “Sociological orienta-
tion”: 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, “Identi-
fying 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 Whit-
man, “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 Psycho-
Analytic 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 (re-
porting 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”: Win-
nicott in Harry Guntrip, “My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Win-
nicott,” 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 2 8 – 2 3 0 339

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 Waller-
stein, “Erikson’s Concept of Ego Identity,” 245,n.5, both refer to Arnold Coo-
per’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 re-
spect to the search, man “must do so in order that he may be healthy and ad-
justed”: Vincent V. Herr, “Integration and the Self-Ideal,” in The Human Per-
son: 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. Da-
vies, “LSD Conference Opens on Coast,” New York Times, 14 June 1966. “Union-
ized social workers”: Martin Tolchin, “Psyches Conflict in Strike Parley,” New
York Times, 9 March 1964. “Intellectuals without a cause”: Brinton in Whit-
man, “Identity a Puzzle.”
10. “Psychoanalytic limbo”: Wallerstein, “Erikson’s Concept of Ego Iden-
tity,” 230. “More than one sense”: Heinz Hartmann, Essays on Ego Psychol-
ogy: 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 Psycho-
analysis, 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 prob-
lematic 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.
340 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 3 1 – 2 3 4

12. “Conceptual necessity”: Ibid., 18. See Friedman, Identity’s Architect,

29–36, for the complexities of Erikson’s parentage. “Strangely adolescent”: Er-
ikson, 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, “ego-
inflating” at 393. “What is popularly called”: Erikson, “Childhood and Trad-
tion,” 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 equa-
tion”: 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 His-
tory of a Concept,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1967): 287–365; atti-
tude, 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 Iden-
tity: Implications of Changing Psychoanalytic Concepts from Freud to Erik-
son,” 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. “Ob-
scure 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 cri-
ses”: Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 23–24.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 3 5 – 2 3 7 341

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 transcen-
dental theories of the soul in his writings. “Exuberant awareness”: Erikson,
“Identity, Psychosocial,” 61.
20. M. N. Banerjee, “Indian Psycho-Analytical Society,” Bulletin of the In-
ternational Psycho-Analytical Association 12 (1931): 387–392, at 388, report-
ing 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 Varia-
tions 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 Trea-
sure Hunt for Your Real Self,” Seventeen, October 1966. “Real self”: Helen
Merrell Lynd, “Who Are You?” Mademoiselle, August 1960. “True self”: Mel-
vin 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 Cole-
man 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 sana-
torium psychiatrist who had “helped her through the acute stages of her
anguish.”
342 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 3 7 – 2 4 2

23. “Long journey”: Ibid. “Constituted out of”: Leston Havens, “A Theo-
retical 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 Char-
acter 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 Uni-
versity 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 Inter-
view Survey (New York, 1960).
31. “Judicial department”: Wheelis, Quest for Identity, 98. “Parents’ strict-
ness”: 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,
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 4 2 – 2 4 6 343

dissented from the notion that father deprivation was at the root of identity
problems, noting that Winnicott’s work was demonstrating that the relation-
ship 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, “over-
whelmingly 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 deprecia-
tion” at 84. “Tastes and standards”: Freud (“An Outline of Psycho-Analysis,”
IJP 21 [1940], 82) in Erikson, “Childhood and Tradition,” 346. “Man’s enslave-
ment”: “Ego Development and Historical Change,” 395, “particular life style”
at 360. See Bingham, “Hippieland,” for an instance of the sort of parental leni-
ency 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,” Psychoana-
lytic Study of the Child 7 (1952): 387–392, attempting, at 389, to understand
why “the permissive aspects” of psychoanalysis “overshadowed all other as-
pects” in the United States, noted that in the 1870s a visiting Scotsman, observ-
ing 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, “Iden-
tity and Sexuality,” 216, “consummated body” at 225, “feminine surrender” at
228.
38. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminish-
ing 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.
344 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 4 7 – 2 5 1

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 love-
liness” 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 Sys-
tematic 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 Ap-
proach (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. “Intergenera-
tional themes”: Erikson, “On the Generational Cycle: An Address,” IJP 61
(1980): 213–223, at 217–218. “Inflated patriarchal claims”: Erikson, Child-
hood and Society, 314. “Rejection and expulsion”: Erikson, “Generational
Cycle,” 218.
45. Erikson, “Ego Development and Historical Change,” 380–382. “Aim-
inhibited 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 5 3 – 2 5 4 345

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 Adoles-
cence,” 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 auster-
ity,” and arguing that the discipline could only benefit from the shift underway
to concern “with specifically human phenomenology and concepts.” “Oblitera-
ting”: 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 Nar-
cissism 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, “Genera-
tion 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 Narcis-
sist: 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, confi-
dent”: 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 narcis-
sism”: 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 Every-
one Seem to Have It?” slate.com, 18 March 2009. “Documented benefits”: Scott
Barry Kaufman, “Why Is Narcissism Adaptive in Youth?” psychologytoday.com,
346 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 5 5 – 2 5 8

13 August 2011. “Makes you attractive”: Tracy Quan, “In Defence of Narcis-
sism,” 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 Vision-
ary 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 (em-
phasis 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: Harp-
erCollins, 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 Ef-
fect of the Narcissistic Personality,” American Imago 2 (1941): 347–355, at
353–354. “Extreme submissiveness”: Annie Reich, “A Contribution to the Psy-
choanalysis 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 Narcis-
sism: An Introduction” (1914), Standard Edition 14:89.
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 5 8 – 2 6 0 347

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. Fran-
cine 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 Lead-
ership,” Leadership Quarterly 17 (2006): 617–633, at 628. “Model of leader-
ship”: Maccoby, Productive Narcissist, 11. “Bland, opaque”: Abraham Za-
leznik, “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 Dy-
namics 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 deci-
sion making”: Amy B. Brunell et al., “Leader Emergence: The Case of the Narcis-
sistic Leader,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1663–1676,
348 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 6 0 – 2 6 2

at 1674. “Crash and burn”: Kramer, “Harder they Fall,” 58–59. “Resource and
hazard”: Zaleznik, “Management of Disappointment,” Harvard Business Re-
view 45, no. 6 (November–December 1967): 59–70, at 65–66.
15. “Distributing authority”: Zaleznik, “Power and Politics in Organiza-
tional 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 Condi-
tions,” 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 lit-
erature and a good deal of controversy about what the test measures. Among
critics’ articles are Seth A. Rosenthal and Jill M. Hooley, “Narcissism Assess-
ment 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
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 6 2 – 2 6 4 349

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 In-
quiry 12 (2001): 214–216.
21. “Eighty percent”: Mark Leary in Carl Vogel, “A Field Guide to Narcis-
sism,” Psychology Today, January-February 2006. “Confidence in success”:
Freud, “A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit” (1917), Stan-
dard Edition 17:156. “Always confident”: Jake Halpern, “The New Me Gener-
ation,” 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 Rosen-
thal saying that “narcissism is not a kind of self-esteem. . . . Equating confident
people with narcissistic people is like equating happy with manic and then say-
ing, ‘Well, maybe happiness isn’t such a good thing after all.’ ”
22. “Every generation”: David Elkind in Susan Krauss Whitbourne, “Fulfill-
ment at Any Age,” Psychology Today, 13 September 2011. The phrase also ap-
pears in Brent W. Roberts, Grant Edmonds, and Emily Grijalva, “It is Develop-
mental 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 Con-
dition: A Fact of Our Lives and Times, ed. Marie Coleman Nelson (New York:
Human Sciences Press, 1977), 128. “Absolutely hilarious”: Comment to “Stu-
dents Not So Self-Obsessed, After All, Study Finds,” Chronicle of Higher Educa-
tion News Blog, 17 January 2008. Pearsall Smith quoted in Brown, “Can’t Ap-
pease.” 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.
350 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 6 5 – 2 6 7

23. “New study”: Eric Hoover, “New Study Finds ‘Most Narcissistic Gen-
eration’ 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 “Narcis-
sism as Liberation”). “Inflated sense”: Lucy Taylor, “The Ego Epidemic: How
More and More of Us Women Have an Inflated Sense of Our Own Fabulous-
ness,” 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”: Adri-
enne 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 Misera-
ble 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 Narcis-
sism,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19 (1996): 403–424, notes,
 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 6 8 – 2 7 0 351

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 Jour-
nal of Psychoanalysis 48 (1988): 72–83, at 75. “Flight from feminine identifica-
tion”: 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 At-
tachments 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 Das-
ton, Carolyn Dean, Stephanie Engel, Jennifer Hochschild, Dan Stern-
berg, 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 March-
and, 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 Selt-
zer 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, fel-
low traveler in the realm of all things “psy”; her sustaining presence
 Acknowledgments 353

has been critical through the years this book has been in the making.
Michael Bernstein has given generously of his self and keen intelli-
gence, 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 espe-
cially 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 in-
formed 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 Tay-
lor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), reproduced with per-
mission 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 ap-
peared in “Narcissism: Social Critique in Me-Decade America,”
Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sci-
ences 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 avail-
able from: http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057
/9781137284501.
354 Acknowledgments

I wish to thank John Burnham for providing a platform to ex-

plore the ideas discussed here in chapter 2, in After Freud Left: A
Century of Psychoanalysis in America, ed. Burnham (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2012). At an earlier stage in my research, I
examined some of the issues in the same chapter in Histories of Sci-
entific 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 Psycho-
analysis, 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 adult-
hood 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, American superego, 241–244

314n7, 333n5 Anal stage, 27
Abstinence, 174–176, 182–186, The Analysis of the Self (Kohut),
326n29 40, 54
Adler, Alfred, 50, 184 “Analysis Terminable and Intermi-
Advertising: and affluent society, nable” (Freud), 178
21–22; and culture of narcissism, Analytic censorship, 177–182
15; and needs vs. wants, 25; Apocalyptic fantasies, 198
sexualized, 22, 280n17; and Asceticism: and affluent society,
vanity, 163–164 23; and gratification, 166,
Affluence, 18–23 176, 323n18; and independence,
The Affluent Society (Galbraith), 136; Rieff on, 34; and vanity,
18–19 160
Aggression: and developmental Austen Riggs Center, 231
stages, 27; and love, 73, 78; and Austerity, 166
malignant narcissism, 60, 61, 63, Autoeroticism, 83, 85, 98–99
65, 80; and materialism, 160 Automobiles, symbolism of,
Aichorn, August, 42 149–150
Albieri, Donna, 87, 88 Avarice, 27, 30–33
Alexander, Franz, 191
Altruism, 4, 39, 107 Bacon, Francis, 83, 200
Americanized Freud, 37–58; and Balint, Alice, 116–117
classical psychoanalysis, 49–58; Balint, Michael, 118, 119, 192,
narcissism in, 38–49 306n6
American Psychoanalytic Associa- Basch, Michael, 330n48
tion, 40 Behling, Katya, 120, 121
356 Index

Bell, Daniel: on affluence, 18, 20, Character Analysis (Reich), 233

22–23; on charisma, 258; on Character neuroses, 203
gratification, 167, 194, 195; on Charisma, 258–259
modernity, 35, 46–47; on needs vs. Child grandiosity, 44–45
wants, 25; social criticism by, 2, 57 “A Child Is Being Beaten”
Benjamin, Jessica, 323n15 (Freud), 234
Bernays, Minna, 119–120, Civilization and Its Discontents
121–122 (Freud), 48, 63, 116, 257
Bettelheim, Bruno, 198 Clark University, 91, 147
Bhattacharya, Haridas, 235 Classical psychoanalysis: and
Birth control, 128 Americanized Freud, 49–58; and
Blanton, Smiley, 29, 178, 321n8 asceticism, 166; and gratification,
Bliss, Sylvia, 145, 147, 149 320n2; on independence, 132–135,
Bonaparte, Marie, 95 136; Kohut’s revolution against,
Boredom, 38 49–58; on object-love, 84–85.
Bose, G., 235 See also Psychoanalysis
Boston Globe on self-esteem, Clinical Diary (Ferenczi),
263 168–169, 177
Boundary violations, 183 Clothes fetishism, 141, 313n6. See
Bowling Alone (Putnam), 2 also Fashion and vanity
Branden, Nathaniel, 109 Collins, Jim, 259
Breger, Louis, 94 Colossal narcissism, 213–219,
Breuer, Josef, 168, 323n15 256
Brierley, Marjorie, 322n12 Comfort, Alex, 76
Brill, Abraham, 99, 220 Competitiveness: and affluence, 19;
British Psycho-Analytical Society, and malignant narcissism, 63; and
98, 151, 154 vanity, 150
Brooks, David, 253, 254 “Confusion of Tongues between
Butler, Judith, 152 Adults and the Child” (Ferenczi),
179–180, 181, 325n226
California “Task Force to Promote Conspicuous consumption, 130
Self-Esteem,” 110 Consumerism: and affluent society,
Campbell, Keith, 261, 262, 348n18 22, 284n35; and culture of
Capitalism: and affluent society, 22, narcissism, 15, 70; and depen-
23; and dependency, 127; and dency, 127; and narcissism, 261;
gratification, 195; and greed, 3, 30 and needs vs. wants, 26
Cars, symbolism of, 149–150 Consumption: and culture of
Carter, Jimmy, 13 narcissism, 29, 32–33, 202; and
 Index 357

dependency, 127, 129–130; and Ego: and culture of narcissism, 16;

independence, 113; and vanity, and healthy narcissism, 104; and
268 identity, 229–230; possessions as
“A Contribution to the Analysis of portion of, 30
the Negative Therapeutic Reac- The Ego and the Id (Freud), 216
tion” (Riviere), 205–206 “Ego Development and Historical
Cosmopolitan on identity, 228 Change” (Erikson), 338n6
Counterculture, 3, 19–20, 39, 78, Einfühlung, 171–172
165, 195 Eissler, Kurt, 52, 230, 290n25,
Countertransference, 66 327n32, 336n24
Covey, Stephen, 259 Eissler, Ruth, 40, 52
Creativity: of fashion, 148; and Elegance, 25
independence, 133; and malignant Ellis, Havelock, 83, 300n26
narcissism, 71, 80 Ellison, Larry, 256
The Cultural Contradictions of Emotional Intelligence (Goleman),
Capitalism (Bell), 2, 18 259
Cultural personality, 226 “The Emotional Life of Civilized
Culture against Man (Henry), 21 Men and Women” (Riviere), 157
Culture of narcissism, 13–18 Empathy: and gratification, 166,
The Culture of Narcissism (Lasch), 2, 170, 186–194; Kohut on, 56; and
12, 13, 16, 17, 68, 110, 132, 255 leadership, 259–260
Cushman, Philip, 284n35 Envy, 145, 151, 160, 163, 222,
266
Democracy in America (Tocqueville), Erhard, Werner, 14
13 Erikson, Erik: framing of narcissism
Dependence: as feminine trait, 86, by, 6–7; on Freud’s abstinence
119–126; and homosexuality, 86, from smoking, 176; on identity,
96; and jealousy, 220; and Oedipus 56, 225–237, 243, 247, 248–251,
complex, 308n17; as pathological 338n6; on self-esteem, 105
problem, 136–137; and subordina- Escape from Freedom
tion, 113; and vanity, 160. See also (Fromm), 233
Independence Essence magazine on self-love, 109
Developmental stages, 27–28 The Everything Guide to Narcissistic
Dichter, Ernest, 21, 22, 32, 195, 270, Personality Disorder (Goodman &
281n19 Leff), 265
“Dreams and Telepathy” Exhibitionism, 141, 142, 144–145,
(Freud), 234 149–150, 163, 266
Drive theory, 59, 65 Extreme dependency, 126
358 Index

Fairbairn, W. R. D., 126 Fliess, Ida, 93–97

The Fall of Public Man (Sennett), 18 Fliess, Wilhelm: on abstinence,
Farnham, Marynia F., 131 174–175, 176; Freud’s relationship
Fashion and vanity, 140–150, 158, with, 87, 93–96, 122, 168
162, 266–269, 316n19 Flügel, J. C., 101, 143–146, 148–149,
Federn, Paul, 104, 105, 235–236, 266–267, 270, 316n19
252, 301n34 “Forms and Transformations of
Female narcissism, 138, 266. See Narcissism” (Kohut), 107
also Vanity Fortune on charisma, 258
“Female Sexuality” (Freud), 116 Fraser, Nancy, 124
The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), Free association, 189
224, 246 Free love, 76. See also Sexual
Femininity: and culture of narcissism, permissiveness
15; of dependence, 86, 119–126; Freud, Anna, 40, 119, 184, 219, 231
and identity, 246–247; of jealousy, Freud, Martha, 95, 120, 121
219; and vanity, 156–157; of Freud, Martin, 307n10
vanity, 163; of wants, 25–26 Freud, Oliver, 121
Feminism, 76, 78, 129, 224, 225 Freud, Sigmund: on aggression
Fenichel, Otto, 28–30, 102, 105–106, in relationships, 63; analytic
185, 250, 283n30 boundary violations by, 184; and
Ferenczi, Sándor: analytic boundary censorship of Ferenczi, 179–182;
violations by, 183; on empathy, 56, on clothes fetishism, 313n6; on
186–187, 188, 291n27, 321n8; empathy, 171–172, 188; on female
framing of narcissism by, 6–7; on narcissism, 11, 138; Ferenczi’s
Freud’s break with Jung, 124; on relationship with, 90–97, 119,
Freud’s Leonardo, 86; Freud’s 167–176; Fliess’s relationship
relationship with, 90–97, 119, with, 87, 93–96, 122, 168;
167–176; on gratification, 166, framing of narcissism by, 6–7;
167–176, 320n2; on homosexual- on gratification, 48, 165–166,
ity, 100, 101; on independence, 168–176; on heroic dependencies,
116, 119; on infantile grandiosity, 119–126; on homo natura, 49;
44; jealousy of Jung, 220; on Jones, and homosexuality, 90–103;
325n226; marginalization of, 50, on identity, 230, 233, 234; on
54–55, 166, 177–182; on self-love independence, 114, 119, 132–133,
and object-love, 103–104 136; on infant narcissism,
Fetishism, 141, 313n6 43–44; Jones’s relationship with,
Fine, Reuben, 331n53 213–222; Jung’s relationship with,
Flaccus, Louis W., 147, 157, 267–268 122–124, 297n5; Kohut influenced
 Index 359

by, 42–43; on leadership qualities Good to Great (Collins), 259

of narcissists, 256–257; on Gordon, Linda, 124
Leonardo da Vinci, 85–90; on Grandiose self, 45, 72, 163
narcissism as normal and patho- Grandiosity: child, 44–45, 46; and
logical, 4, 33–34, 83–84; on needs culture of narcissism, 11, 18, 33;
and wants, 23; on primary and independence, 133; infant, 44;
narcissism, 114, 115–119; Riviere in Kernberg’s narcissists, 4–5; and
as analysis subject of, 213–219, leadership, 260; and malignant
336n24; on self-esteem, 105, narcissism, 61; and vanity, 161
302n36; on treatment of narcis- Gratification, 165–201; and afflu-
sism, 203–204. See also specific ence, 20; and affluent society,
books and papers 22; and analytic censorship, 37,
Freud, Sophie, 121 177–182; and culture of narcissism,
Freud: The Mind of the Moralist 12, 15; and empathy, 186–194;
(Rieff), 24 instant and immediate, 194–200;
Friedan, Betty, 224, 246, 247 in Kohut’s framing of narcissism,
Fromm, Erich, 136, 233, 313n5 37, 40; and love, 167–176; as
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, 242, 243 pathological problem, 136–137;
and privation in analytic setting,
Galatzer-Levy, Robert M., 329n48 182–186; society as antagonistic
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 18–19, 24, to, 48; as target of Me Decade
25, 26 critics, 5
Gallantry, 75 Greed, 27, 30–33, 194
Gates, Bill, 261 Green, Aaron, 191, 192, 193,
Gay, Peter, 87, 95, 184, 323n18 194, 205
Gellner, Ernest, 62–63 Groddeck, Georg, 92
Gender: and jealousy, 219–220, 221;
and vanity, 266–271. See also Hallucinatory independence, 115–119
Femininity; Feminism; Women Hartmann, Heinz, 52, 55, 230
Gender Trouble (Butler), 152 Haven in a Heartless World
Generation Me, 261, 264, 267 (Lasch), 132
Generation Me (Twenge), 267 Healthy narcissism, 4, 85, 103–109,
Generation of Narcissus 254, 262–263
(Malcolm), 197 Hedonism, 20, 21, 79, 280n16,
God-complex, 154, 256 281n19
Goleman, Daniel, 259 Henry, Jules, 21, 22, 280n17
Good Housekeeping: on charisma, Heterosexuality: as narcissistic, 103;
259; on self-love, 110 and self-love, 84, 100, 102, 108
360 Index

Hofstadter, Richard, 17 Indulgence, 166

Hollander, Anne, 316n19 Infancy: dependence in, 133;
Home economics, 131 grandiosity in, 44; independence
Homosexuality: and dependence, in, 114, 115–119; narcissism in,
86, 96; Freud’s work on, 85–90; 43–44, 70, 249
and identity, 225; of Leonardo da Infantile sexuality, 86
Vinci, 87–88; narcissism connected Instant gratification, 194–200
to, 84, 107; and object love, 98; Interdependence, 20, 117, 119
and paranoia, 91–92; and psycho- Internalized object relations, 61, 160
analysis, 98; and self-love, 84, International Journal of Psycho-
97–103; and vanity, 139, 142 Analysis, 126, 181, 215
Horney, Karen, 184, 236, 237, 238 The Interpretation of Dreams
Household labor, 131 (Freud), 95
Hubbard, L. Ron, 14 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
Analysis (Freud), 212
Id, 16 “Introjection and Transference”
Idealism, 197, 209 (Ferenczi), 104
Identity, 224–251; and American “Introspection, Empathy, and
superego, 241–244; and culture Psychoanalysis” (Kohut), 186
of narcissism, 13; and healthy
narcissism, 56; and minor Jackson, Jesse, 258
differences, 248–251; pseudo- Jackson, Scoop, 258
personalities, 245; and realness, Jacobson, Edith, 52
237–241; searching for, 228–237; Jacoby, Russell, 281n19
women’s, 244–247 James, William, 30, 225, 233–235,
Identity crisis, 229 302n36, 341n19
Imperial self, 47 Jealousy, 219–222. See also Envy
Impulse gratification, 15, 66 Jersild, Arthur T., 240
Independence, 113–136; and Jobs, Steve, 255, 261
affluence, 19; and Freud’s heroic Johns Hopkins University, 64
dependencies, 119–126; hallucina- Johnson, Virginia E., 74
tory, 115–119; and leadership, Jokes and Their Relationship to the
260; and malignant narcissism, Unconscious (Freud), 171
62; phony, 132–135; and self- Jones, Ernest: analytic boundary
esteem, 106; and self-sufficiency, violations by, 183; Ferenczi’s work
126–132; and vanity, 143, 153, censored and suppressed by,
160. See also Dependence 54–55, 181; framing of narcissism
Individualism: and affluence, 20, 22 by, 6–7; and Freud’s departure from
 Index 361

Germany, 42; on Freud’s disdain analysis, 5, 49–58, 84, 191; on

for dependence, 119, 122, 135; on empathy, 186–194, 291n27;
Freud’s family life, 119–120; on framing of narcissism by, 3, 6–7;
Freud’s obsession with Leonardo Freud’s influence on, 42–43; on
da Vinci, 85–86; Freud’s relation- gratification, 166, 167; and
ship with, 213–222; on Freud’s healthy narcissism, 5, 106–108;
relationship with Fliess, 94–95, 96; on healthy narcissism, 161,
on Freud’s relationship with Jung, 162–163; on homosexuality and
123; on “God complex,” 154, 256; object-love, 99; on identity, 227,
Riviere as analysis subject of, 248–251; on independence,
205–206, 207–212; on women’s 113–114, 132–135, 136; on
dependence on men, 125 narcissism, 38–49; on narcissistic
Jung, Carl: analytic boundary personality disorder, 204–205; on
violations by, 183; Freud’s treatment of narcissism, 72
relationship with, 122–124, 168, Komik und Humor (Lipps), 171
297n5; on homosexuality, 100; Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 88, 141
marginalization of, 50; on women Kris, Anton, 206, 217, 218, 222
in U.S., 242 Kuhn, Thomas, 53, 55

Kann, Loe, 183 Lasch, Christopher: on character

Kardiner, Abram, 324n20 neuroses, 203; on consumption,
Kernberg, Otto: biographical 32–33, 113, 132, 202, 268; on
background, 64–65; and classical culture of narcissism, 2, 12, 15,
psychoanalysis, 5; on dependency, 16–17, 27, 36, 67, 263, 280n16,
135; framing of narcissism by, 3, 282n26; on dependency, 126–128,
6–7; on healthy narcissism, 312n35; on gratification, 165, 195,
108–109; on independence, 114; 196; on identity, 245–246, 251; on
on malignant narcissism, 57, independence, 115, 132–133; on
160–161; on materialism, 160; individualism, 2–3; on Kernberg,
narcissistic dystopia of, 59–80; on 59; on malignant narcissism,
narcissistic personality disorder, 68–69; on needs vs. wants, 24,
204–205; on self-esteem, 303n40; 25; on self-absorption, 47; on
on treatment of narcissism, 72 self-esteem promotion, 110,
Keynes, John Maynard, 26 330n50; on sexual antagonism,
Klein, Melanie, 64, 118, 219 76–77; social criticism by, 57; on
Kohut, Heinz: Americanized Freud trivialization of personal relations,
by, 37–58; analytic process of, 73; on vanity, 140, 313n5
329n48; and classical psycho- Latour, Bruno, 32
362 Index

Leadership, 254–261 Marxism, 233

Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory Masculine ascendancy, 75
of His Childhood (Freud), 84, Maslow, Abraham, 35
85–90, 98 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 23
Libido: and culture of narcissism, Masochism, 207
16; and healthy narcissism, 104; Masters, William H., 74
Kernberg on, 65 Materialism, 32–33, 127, 157–162,
Life magazine on household 270
consumption, 131 Matriarchy, 242. See also Mother
Lipps, Theodore, 171 attachment
Loneliness, 38 May, Rollo, 242
The Lonely Crowd (Riesman), 2, Me Decade, 5, 11, 79, 194
16, 19 Media coverage: on malignant
Love: and aggression, 73, 78; and narcissism, 57, 252, 264; narcis-
gratification, 167–176; Kernberg’s sism equated with selfishness in,
theories on, 73–74; ritualization 50. See also specific publications
of, 74. See also Self-love Megalomania, 117, 207
Lundberg, Ferdinand, 131 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
Lynd, Helen Merrell, 236, 237 (Schreber), 91
Menninger Foundation, 64
Maccoby, Michael, 255, 261 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 85
Mademoiselle: on charisma, 259; on Miller, Perry, 34–35
identity, 236 Mills, C. Wright, 246
The Making of a Counter Culture Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
(Roszak), 19–20 (Lundberg & Farnham), 131
Malcolm, Henry, 197 Moon, Sun Myung, 14
Malcolm, Janet, 190–191, 192 Moore, G. E., 238–239
Malcolm X, 258 Morbid dependency, 126
Malignant narcissism, 59–80; and Morrow, Lance, 79
façade of normality, 64–67; media Mother attachment: and homosexu-
focus on, 57, 252; normal narcis- ality, 99; and identity, 242; and
sism vs., 67–71; and personal independence, 116, 119; and
relationships, 60–64; and sex and self-love, 89. See also Oedipus
violence, 71–79 complex
Marcuse, Herbert, 48
Marin, Peter, 13–14 Narcissism: and affluent society,
Marital fidelity, 77 18–23; Americanized, 38–49;
Marriage, 74, 261 colossal, 213–219, 256; culture of,
 Index 363

13–18; elements of, 83–251; and Nightingale, Florence, 244

gratification, 165–201; healthy, 85, Normal narcissism, 71
103–109; and identity, 224–251; NPI (Narcissistic Personality
and independence, 113–136; and Inventory), 261–262, 348n18
jealousy, 219–222; and leadership, Nunberg, Herman, 102
254–261; and me and mine,
30–33; and needs and wants, Object love: in developmental stages,
23–26; normalization of, 4; and 84–85; and healthy narcissism,
objects and things, 27–30; and 103–104; and homosexuality, 98,
self-love, 83–112; treatment of, 102; internalized, 61; and malig-
202–223; and vanity, 138–164 nant narcissism, 65; and self-love,
The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in 44, 107, 117; and vanity, 139,
the Age of Entitlement (Twenge & 153, 267
Campbell), 261 Objects and things: and narcissism,
Narcissistic dystopia, 59–80; and 27–30; and vanity, 157–162
façade of normality, 64–67; normal “Observations on Transference-Love”
vs. malignant narcissism, 67–71; (Freud), 173, 181
and personal relationships, 60–64; Oedipus complex, 16, 43, 59, 80,
and sex and violence, 71–79 89, 125, 308n17
Narcissistic personality disorder, 4, Of Love and Lust (Reik), 162
204–205, 333n6 Olden, Christine, 257
Narcissistic Personality Inventory Omnipotence, 62, 116, 118, 160,
(NPI), 261–262, 348n18 250, 256, 257
Narcissistic supplies, 28 “On Narcissism: An Introduction”
Needs: and affluence, 19; and (Freud), 1, 11, 84, 102–103, 105,
narcissism, 23–26; as target of Me 114, 117, 138, 173, 258
Decade critics, 5; and vanity, 153 Optimal frustration, 54, 196
New Introductory Essays (Freud), Oral stage, 27, 28
151 The Organization Man (Whyte), 2,
Newsweek: on culture of narcissism, 19, 21
12–13, 16–17; on dependence, The Origins of Love and Hate
135; on self-love, 110, 111 (Suttie), 126
New York Times: on affluent society,
21; on Age of Narcissism, 2; on Pálos, Gizella, 183
culture of narcissism, 15; on Papers on Technique (Freud), 169,
grandiosity, 253; on identity, 172, 173, 189
225–226; Kohut’s obituary in, 43; Paranoia, 91–92
on narcissism, 264, 276n2 Parasitism, 129–130, 310nn25–26
364 Index

Parental introjects, 15 Psychoanalysis: The Impossible

Parenting: and disorders of self, Profession (Malcolm), 190
45–46; permissive, 196. See also The Psychoanalytic Movement
Mother attachment (Gellner), 62
Patriarchy, 74–75, 242 The Psychoanalytic Situation
Penis envy, 163, 222, 314n7 (Stone), 185
People: on Kohut, 39; on Lasch, 17, “The Psychological Basis of Personal
165 Identity” (Bhattacharya), 235
People of Plenty (Potter), 18 The Psychology of Clothes
Permissive parenting, 196 (Flügel), 143
Phony independence, 132–135 The Psychology of Self-Esteem
Pinsky, Drew, 348n18 (Branden), 109
Plagiarism, 54, 290n26 Psychology Today on normalization
Plentitude, 1, 62 of narcissism, 253
Political power, 6, 197 Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-
Potter, David, 18, 310n26 Ebing), 88, 141
Primary narcissism, 114, 115–119, The Psychopathology of Everyday
134–135, 305n6 Life (Freud), 212
The Principles of Psychology The Pursuit of Loneliness (Slater), 14
(James), 30, 235 Putnam, Robert, 2
Privation in analytic setting, 1, 174,
182–186 The Quest for Identity (Wheelis), 228
The Productive Narcissist (Maccoby),
255 Rádo, Sándor, 106
“Propaganda of commodities,” 15 Rage, 60
Prostitution, 245, 246 Rank, Otto, 138, 168
Pseudo-personalities, 245 Realness, 237–241
Psychic equilibrium, 78 Reich, Annie, 105, 106, 257
Psychoanalysis: boundary violations Reich, Wilhelm, 233
in, 183; economic hypothesis in, Reik, Theodor, 162
23; and gratification, 320n2; and The Restoration of the Self (Kohut),
homosexuality, 98; on indepen- 40, 57
dence, 114; popularity of, 50; and Rieff, Philip: on gratification, 48, 167,
primary narcissism, 117–118; 194, 199; on identity, 251; on needs
privation in, 182–186; technique vs. wants, 24, 34; social criticism
of, 169–171; treatment of narcis- by, 1, 57; on vanity, 270–271
sism with, 4–5, 72, 202–223. See Riesman, David: on capitalism, 22;
also Classical psychoanalysis on Freud’s view of the child, 134;
 Index 365

on gratification, 195–196; on 105; and identity, 250; and

identity, 228, 239; social criticism independence, 106, 133; and
by, 2, 16, 35; on treatment of malignant narcissism, 62, 67–68;
narcissism, 202; on work ethic, narcissism as form of, 4; normal,
19, 20 71; and object love, 28; promotion
Riviere, Joan, 207–212; as analysis of, 109–111, 330n50; and self-love,
subject, 205–206, 207–219, 108–109; as target of Me Decade
336n24; on female narcissism, critics, 5; in today’s society, 263,
150–157; framing of narcissism 265; and vanity, 147, 159,
by, 6–7; on jealousy, 220; on 161, 162
materialism, 158, 159; translation Self-expression, 146, 148
of Freud’s works by, 212 Self-gratification, 201
Rockefeller University, 64 Self-indulgence, 1
Roszak, Theodore, 19–20 Self-inflation, 106
Rycroft, Charles, 342n32 Selfishness: and culture of narcissism,
14; narcissism equated with, 50,
Sadger, Isidor, 84, 111–112 111
Sadism, 207, 217 Self-love, 83–112; and healthy
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 62 narcissism, 103–109; and homo-
Scarcity of resources, 19, 23–24, 60 sexuality, 97–103, 117; and
Schizophrenia, 16, 117 self-control, 90–97
Schreber, Daniel Paul, 91, 92, 97 Selfobjects, 134, 135, 161
Schur, Max, 200 Self-observation, 171
Scientific American on normalization Self psychology, 50
of narcissism, 254 Self-realization, 5, 14, 22, 34, 68, 165
Scott, Joan, 156 Self-sovereignty, 90, 115, 270
Segal, Hanna, 335n12 Self-sufficiency, 114, 126–132.
Self-absorption, 47 See also Independence
Self-admiration, 142. See also Vanity Sennett, Richard, 18
Self-assurance, 104 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
Self-censorship, 177 People (Covey), 259
Self-confidence, 62, 147 Seventeen: on charisma, 258–259;
Self-control, 1, 22, 90–97, 200 on identity, 236
Self-criticism, 217 Sex and malignant narcissism, 71–79
Self-esteem: and child grandiosity, Sexual abstinence, 175–176, 183,
46; and culture of narcissism, 11; 326n29
defining, 302n36; and Generation Sexualized advertising, 22
Me, 261; and healthy narcissism, Sexual liberation, 77, 128, 228
366 Index

Sexual permissiveness, 70, 76 The Theory of the Leisure Class

Sigmund Freud’s Mission (Veblen), 18, 130
(Fromm), 136 Therapeutic nihilism, 177
Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling), Thompson, Clara Mabel, 328n39
202–203 Three Essays on the Theory of
Slater, Philip, 14, 20, 48, 280n15 Sexuality (Freud), 98
Smith, Adam, 129 Time: on affluent society, 19; on
Smith, Logan Pearsall, 264 culture of narcissism, 14; on
Smoking, 176, 200–201 Generation Me, 264; on Me
Social criticism, 57–58, 252 Decade, 79; on narcissism, 276n2
Social facts, 28 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 13
Social relations, 60–64 Transference, 66, 173, 181–182,
The Sociology of Religion 189, 205, 208, 213, 335n12
(Weber), 176 Trilling, Lionel, 16, 202–203
Socrates, 107 The Triumph of the Therapeutic
Sovereignty, 114 (Rieff), 24, 270
Spielrein, Sabina, 142, 183 Turner, Ralph, 238, 240–241
Stekel, Wilhelm, 142 Twenge, Jean M., 261, 262, 267,
Stoicism, 24, 30–31 268, 348n18
Stone, Leo, 185–186, 192, 203 “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z”
Strachey, Alix, 172 (Kohut), 193
Strachey, James, 51, 172, 178, 322n15
The Strategy of Desire (Dichter), 21 Vanity, 138–164; and fashion,
Strean, Herbert, 198–199 140–150; gendered, 266–271; and
Strozier, Charles, 287n9 Generation Me, 261; and material
The Structure of Scientific Revolu- me, 157–162; as target of Me
tions (Kuhn), 53 Decade critics, 5; and women,
Subordination: and dependence, 150–157
113; sexual, 75; and vanity, Veblen, Thorstein, 18,
151–152 129–130, 195
Sumptuary laws, 25 Victorianism, 1
Superego: American, 241–244; and Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 142
malignant narcissism, 64 Violence and malignant narcissism,
Sutherland, Isabelle, 239 71–79
Suttie, Ian, 26, 118, 126, 135–136 Vischer, Robert, 171

“Task Force to Promote Self- Waelder, Robert, 52

Esteem” (California), 110 Wallerstein, Robert S., 289n21
 Index 367

Wall Street Journal on normalization Wolfe, Tom, 13, 14, 79

of narcissism, 254 “Womanliness as a Masquerade”
Wants: and affluence, 19; and (Riviere), 152, 155
narcissism, 23–26 Women: advertising to, 21; and
Watson, Amey E., 130–131 affluent society, 21–22; and
The Wealth of Nations consumerism, 127–128; Freud on
(Smith), 129 female narcissism, 11; and identity,
Weatherly, U. G., 130 244–247; and independence,
Weber, Max, 176, 258, 323n18 119–126; parasitism by, 129–130,
Welch, Jack, 261 310nn25–26; and sexual antago-
Wheelis, Allen, 228, 241–242 nism, 74–75, 77–78; subordina-
Whyte, William H., Jr., 2, 19–22, tion of, 75, 151–152; and vanity,
195–196 140–157. See also Femininity;
Wilson, Harold, 258 Gender
Winnicott, D. W.: framing of Work ethic, 19, 20, 79
narcissism by, 6–7; on identity,
225, 227, 237–238; on material- Young, S. Mark, 348n18
ism, 31, 157, 158
Wittels, Fritz, 119 Zaleznik, Abraham, 260