of individuation.
I use the concept of narcissism, as the new post-Freudian psychoanalytic studies have come to understand it, to examine a web of phenomena affiliated with the rhetorical dynamics of identification and libidinal investment.
If an understanding of narcissism helps us to understand the particular shifts in attention and interest that direct a reader’s response to a text, an understanding of narcissism also can help to explain the larger force that makes rhetoric operate as a force of change. In certain respects, self-identity is enormously conservative and resistant to change. Freud emphasizes the ego’s desire to preserve itself. But at the same time, the ego wants to be greater and more powerful. Narcissism thus emerges as a form of desire in which the ego is willing to entertain change as a movement toward that ever mythical “greater being.” Narcissism presides over a state of affairs in which—because we always want to be more than we are—some aspect of the self, at some level, desires change. Of course, the permutations and duplicities of change are enormously complex, but the central motive for change would seem to be narcissistic in nature. We accept or embrace change only because we think it will somehow effect for us a “better” state of affairs.
This observation indicates that, as a term, narcissism should imply dialogical—not solipsistic—relationships. The attention we give the word narcissism usually triggers a dismissal of the ineluctably social nature of narcissistic relations. Such a dismissal vastly oversimplifies narcissistic phenomena. Narcissism needs an other. It needs an other to impress, to model the self on, or to respond to. Narcissistic behavior is thus especially involved with social fashion and social status. However, the social dimensions of narcissistic behavior, with their emphasis on vanity, are larger in scope than these terms suggest.
Freud’s concept of primary narcissism, with its emphasis on a blissful oneness with an imagined other, suggests the self in isolation. But secondary narcissism, which derives from primary narcissism, is emphatically social in its concerns. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan explains that according to Lacan “secondary narcissism, with its attributes of permanence as manifest in ego ideals . . . [is] the basic process of humanization as well as the cornerstone of human relations.”27 This insistence on a profound relationship between narcissism and “human relations” may seem surprising. But if narcissism seeks to improve an image of the self by looking elsewhere for identification, then narcissism is an essentially social mechanism. Narcissism, apparently the most private and individual of psychological forces, is also the most social, because it marks the self’s most fundamental response to an image of otherness. It is the primary force working at the cutting edge of the self’s differing from itself. The implications of these observations are important.
In serving to enhance the self, narcissism has the goal of enlargement of being. But narcissism has no innately specific direction. Nothing and no one, in and of itself, delivers increased being to the self. Plenty of people and things promise increased being. But this promissory status is infinitely paradoxical.
The “things” that “deliver” increased being to the self are largely imaginary. Given this state of affairs, narcissism becomes closely tied to the imagination. Imaginative experience helps to “supplement” objects and events with narcissistic promise. This dynamic relationship between narcissism and imaginative needs cannot be overemphasized. Narcissistic energy is usually bound, although precariously, by rather specific signifies or representations supported in their roles by culture, the family, or the singular nature of individual experience. In such cases of binding, however, the terms for signification are seldom fully adequate. Narcissistic desire generally wants more than the formulations it accepts. Freud speaks of narcissism in terms of “his majesty” the child. Kohut emphasizes the “grandiose” and “idealizing” gestures of narcissism. Because of what one theorist called “the narcissistic pursuit of perfection,” narcissistic energy actively and constantly exercises the imagination in order to see, grasp, and respond to people and situations in new and more desirable ways.28 Narcissistic energy funds both discourse and perception actively seeking to create a social and material world that can more fully satisfy narcissistic need.
In this context, writing becomes a rather powerful medium for transferring narcissistic needs into a social space. Narcissistic needs motivate the creation of rhetorically effective discourse structures, and the narcissistic energy activated by such rhetoric makes language a socially shared imaginative space where narcissistic needs are shaped and explored.
Rhetorical language, in both its production and its reception, is especially haunted by both narcissistic investments and the turnings—that is, the libidinal fluidity—of narcissistic investments. In any example of discourse, textuality is “sculptured” by a subject’s (reader or author) narcissistic investments: Some words or phrases are weighted, other words or phrases are elided or relegated to marginal positions by selective acts of attention. In any act of writing, writers perform this sculpting, and in any act of reading, readers configure the meanings of texts by enacting their own investments.
This sculpturing of value in language is universal. Language comes to an author from a social world that structures emotion as it libidinally invests language with “living” form, shape, and weight. As it is reworked by an author, however, language develops its own unique form, shape, and weight. Furthermore, as readers respond to discourse produced by another, they libidinally edit and configure, according to their own interests, the sculptured “messages” they perceive in the discourse.
To the extent that literary products are linguistic mediums for narcissistic investments, they are also mechanisms for the social interaction of narcissistic investments. Literary texts bring diverse readers together in shared concerns. They designate a space where cultural values, ideological claims, and even cultural discourse itself, under the pressure of conflicting social and personal concerns, undergoes conception, debate, and evolution. Whereas private narcissistic investments often help us to appreciate texts, it is also true that rhetorical interactions with others give texts added depth and importance. Such interactions encourage us to objectify our narcissistic investments—to state what we think and how we care about texts. In these interactions we often discover that we idealize what others repress, just as others may idealize what we repress. In this manner, literary texts can, and usually do, become a space where individual narcissistic investments are vigorously and socially negotiated.
The particular form of a text’s rhetorical resources for shifting libidinal investments derives—at least in part—from the narcissistic nature of textual production itself. An author produces a language invested with narcissistic concerns and this sculpting affects a variety of verbal structures—character, plot, imagery, theme, and signification itself. Jeffrey Berman points out that the Narcissus myth dramatizes all the “fundamental oppositions of human existence: reality/illusion, presence/absence, subject/object, unity/disunity, involvement/detachment.”29 As these “fundamental oppositions” play out their themes in regard to character, plot, imagery, and language in all literary texts, they provide a structure for an author’s narcissistic concerns and—as I argue—both a structure and a stimulus for a fruitful dialogical relationship between the codings of an author’s narcissistic text and a reader’s narcissistic interest.
Various empirical and theoretical resources could be used to support the claim that writing begins as a narcissistic gesture. But it may be most efficient to develop my argument by exploiting the work of Jacques Derrida. Although Derrida’s work is no longer as influential as it once was, it provides me with philosophical language which serves as a sort of shorthand representation for ideas that would be more cumbersome to develop in a psychological vocabulary. For Derrida, the center of writing speaks the futile attempt of the being of a subject to come into being through the presence of language. Writing is, in effect, a narcissistic crutch: “When Nature as self-proximity comes to be forbidden or interrupted, when speech fails to protect presence, writing becomes necessary. It must be added to the word urgently.”30