Beyond the Pleasure Principle (38 page)

On the Introduction of Narcissism

1
. [The title given in the
Standard Edition is On Narcissism: an Introduction
– but this is a startling mistranslation of Freud's wording (
Zur Einführung des Narzissmus
). Far from introducing us to an apparently well-recognized phenomenon, as the
Standard Edition
mis-title implies, Freud is signalling the introduction of a whole new theory of narcissism (cf. the fifth paragraph of the essay!).]

2
. [It is at once striking and instructive that the phrase ‘with sexual pleasure’ (
mit sexuellem Wohlgefallen
) is simply omitted from the
Standard Edition
.]

3
. [Freud's term
Unterbringung der Libido
(in other contexts
Libidounter-bringung
) is a metaphor that cannot be adequately replicated in English. The relevant verb (
unterbringen
) means ‘house’, ‘accommodate’, ‘find an appropriate niche for’. The
Standard Edition
has ‘allocation’, but this suggests something quite different from Freud's original.]

4
. Otto Rank (1911) [‘Ein Beitrag zum Narzissismus’ (‘A Contribution on Narcissism’)].

5
. Regarding these propositions, cf. the discussion of the ‘end of the world’ in the analysis of Senate President Schreber (1911); cf. also Abraham (1908) [Freud deals with the Schreber case in ‘Psychoanalytic Remarks on an Autobiographically Described Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’; an English version of Abraham's treatise may be found in K. Abraham,
Selected Papers
(London 1927; New York 1953), Ch. 11].

6
. [‘Cathexis’ is an ugly and opaque term – coined by James Strachey – that has nothing of the apparent simplicity of Freud's metaphor
Besetzung
. Unfortunately, however, Freud's word has no direct or uncontentious equivalent in English, and Strachey's well-established hellenism is therefore reluctantly retained throughout this present volume (together with the associated verb ‘cathect’).]

7
. [The obfuscatory tendencies of the
Standard Edition
are epitomized by
the fact that it renders Freud's
Zauberkraft
– a word that any child would instantly understand – as ‘thaumaturgic force’!]

8
. See the relevant sections of my book
Totem und Tabu [Totem and Taboo]
(1912–13). [See Chapter III.]

9
. See Ferenczi (1913) [Sándor Ferenczi, ‘Entwicklungsstufen des Wirklich-keitssinnes’ (‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’,
First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis
, London, 1952,
Ch. VIII
)].

10
. [See also
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, below,
p. 91
. This idea will be revised later on, once Freud has evolved the notion of the ‘id’; see
The Ego and the Id
, below,
p. 121
, and the corresponding
note 45
. The
Standard Edition
carries a lengthy Appendix by the editors on the ‘considerable difficulty’ attaching to this particular metaphor of Freud's.]

11
. There are two mechanisms involved in this ‘end of the world’ scenario: when the entire libido-cathexis streams out onto the love-object, and when it all floods back into the ego.

12
. [Cf.
OED
: ‘The germ-plasm is the essential part of the germ-cell, and determines the nature of the individual that arises from it’ (sample quotation dated 1890).]

13
. [The first two German editions of the essay printed
ersterwählte
– the first hypothesis
chosen
– whereas subsequent editions printed
ersterwähnte
– the first hypothesis
mentioned
. The
Standard Edition
opts for the original version – but there seems little logic in this, given that Freud did indeed ‘mention’ this hypothesis just a few paragraphs earlier.]

14
. [This curious term is Freud's own (
psychisches Interesse
).]

15
. [Freud is referring to Ferenczi's review of Jung's
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido
(published in English under the title
Psychology of the Unconscious
).]

16
. [Freud's term is
Realfunktion
, derived from Pierre Janet's
la fonction du réel
.]

17
. [Freud gives this phrase in English.]

18
. [
Positionen
. This is a recurrent term of Freud's in connection with the libido, especially with regard to the loci that it comes to occupy as a result of cathexis.]

19
. [
Ichveranderung
. See also below,
The Ego and the Id
,
note 43
.]

20
. [See the
Longman Dictionary of Psychology and Psychiatry
, ed. Robert M. Goldenson, New York and London, 1985: ‘
actual neurosis
– a neurosis which, according to Freud, stems from current sexual frustrations, such as coitus interruptus, forced abstinence, or incomplete gratification, as contrasted with psychoneurosis, which stems from experiences in infancy or childhood. The term was applied primarily to anxiety neurosis, hypochondriasis,
and neurasthenia, but is rarely used today.’ See also the final paragraph of Chapter IV of
Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
below.]

21
. [
Angstneurose
. The long-established term ‘anxiety neurosis’ is reluctantly retained here but it should be noted that Angst means ‘fear’, and is normally used in precisely that sense by Freud. See also below,
Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear,
note 3.]

22
. Cf. ‘Über neurotische Erkrankungstypen’ (1912) [‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’].

23
. [Freud's important but challenging term is
Versagung
, from the verb
versagen
, itself cognate with English ‘forsake’ – one now-obsolete meaning of which is ‘To decline or refuse (something offered)’ (
OED
). What he means by the term is rather more clearly shown by the opening sentences of ‘Die am Erfolge scheitern’ (‘Those who Founder on Success’): ‘Our work in psychoanalysis has presented us with the following proposition: People incur neurotic illness as a result of
refusal
. What is meant by this is that their libidinal desires are refused gratification’ – i.e. by the savagely censorious entity within that oversees their every thought and deed. See also the penultimate sentence of this present essay: ‘We can thus more readily understand the fact that paranoia is frequently caused by the ego being wounded, by gratification being refused within the domain of the ego-ideal.’
The Standard Edition
routinely and astonishingly mistranslates the term as ‘frustration’.]

24
. [The voice here is God's; the lines are from Heine's
Neue Gedichte
(‘Schöpfungslieder’, vii).]

25
. [‘Release’ is used throughout this volume to render Freud's important but not readily translatable metaphor
Abfuhr
(the
Standard Edition
prefers ‘discharge’).]

26
. [
Konversion
. See also below,
Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through
, note 3.]

27
. [Freud's term – used here for the first time in his
œuvre
– is
Anlehnungs-typus
. Alas, it cannot be rendered directly into English, and so ‘imitative type’ is necessarily an approximate rather than a precise translation (as are the two immediately preceding instances of ‘imitate’, both rendering words derived from the verb
sich anlehnen
). However, this is a considerable improvement on the
Standard Edition
, which goes seriously awry when it translates Freud's term as ‘the “anaclitic” or “attachment” type’. ‘Anaclitic’ is a specially concocted word – but concocted on the basis of a startling misunderstanding of the German expression
sich anlehnen an
, as the footnote in the
Standard Edition
makes embarrassingly clear: the expression does
not
imply ‘attach’ or ‘attachment’; it simply means that A ‘is modelled
on,’ ‘is based on’, ‘follows the example of’ B; thus one might typically say that Beethoven's early symphonies
lehnen sich an
the mature work of Mozart, or that Freud's theories
lehnen sich an
the ideas and visions of nineteenth-century German literature (in the
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: New Series
Freud himself notes that the term ‘id’ (
das Es
) was devised on the model of Nietzsche's linguistic practice –
in Anlehnung an den Sprachgebrauch bei Nietzsche
).]

28
. [Freud's German is somewhat ambiguous; his wording is such that it could be understood to mean ‘who have
partly
relinquished their own narcissism'’ (this is the interpretation preferred by the
Standard Edition
).]

29
. [Freud cites the phrase in English, and is probably quoting the title of a painting exhibited in the Royal Academy, which depicted a baby being wheeled grandly across a busy London street while two policemen hold up the traffic.]

30
. [
sein aktuelles Ich
.]

31
. [
Idealbildung
. Freud is particularly fond of creating compound nouns ending in -
bildung
, the gerund of the verb
bilden
, ‘to form’ (cognate with English ‘build’), e.g.
Reaktionsbildung, Symptombildung, Traumbildung
.]

32
. [Freud's word is
Instanz
– a cardinal term in his vocabulary, but one that has no direct linguistic or indeed cultural equivalent in English, with the result that a number of different renderings are deployed in this present translation to match the relevant context. The key feature of the word is that it implies some kind of judicial or quasi-judicial authority making judgements about what is permissible and impermissible, acceptable and unacceptable – and doing so very often in implacably harsh and even sadistic terms involving ‘guilt’, ‘condemnation’, ‘punishment’ etc. This vision of the human ‘psyche as a domain under constant surveillance by draconian but shadowy forces is fascinatingly similar to that of Freud's fellow Jew and Austro-Hungarian near-contemporary, Franz Kafka.]

33
. Merely by way of conjecture I would add that the development and consolidation of this all-scrutinizing entity might also embrace the ultimate emergence of (subjective) memory and of the phenomenon whereby time holds no validity for unconscious processes.

34
. [Having thus far used abstract nouns (
Instanz, Zensur
) to convey the policing of the psyche, Freud gives the process a far sharper edge here by suddenly personifying it (
Zensor
).]

35
. I cannot here resolve the issue whether the differentiation of this censorial entity from the rest of the ego is capable of providing a psychological substantiation of the philosophical distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness.

36
. [
Selbstgefühl
. The
Standard Edition
bizarrely renders this as ‘self-regarding attitude’. For useful definitions and examples of ‘self-feeling’ as a technical term current in nineteenth and early twentieth-century thinking, see
OED
.]

37
. [
Ichgerecht
. The
Standard Edition
has ‘ego-syntonic’, but this is misleading as well as obfuscatory given that the term
Syntonie
(‘syntony’) was not introduced into psychiatry (by Eugen Bleuler) until 1925 – more than a decade after Freud's
Narcissism
essay.]

38
. [
Objektbefriedigungen
. This is one of Freud's more brutalist compounds. As the ensuing paragraphs make clear, it is elliptical for ‘gratifications
pertaining
to objects’.]

39
. [Zensor. See above,
note 34
.]

40
. [On the face of it, Freud's German (
Perversionen wiederherzustellen
) means ‘restore’ or ‘reinstate’ the individual's perversions (the Standard Edition duly translates it in this sense); but it is more plausibly an elliptical usage highlighting love's benignly restorative effect on the individuals themselves (
wiederherstellen
is a standard expression for ‘restore to health’).]

41
. [
Massenpsychologie
. In the
Standard Edition
this term is routinely translated as ‘
group
psychology’.]

42
. [
In Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
Freud will draw an important distinction between ‘consciential fear’ and ‘social fear’; see below,
Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
,
note 56
.]

43
. [
Umbildung
.]

Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

1
. [
Abreagieren
. The term, together with the attendant therapeutic concept, was introduced by Freud and Breuer in their
Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria
, 1895). ‘Abreaction’ is defined in the OED as follows: ‘The liberation by revival and expression of the emotion associated with forgotten or repressed ideas of the event that first caused it. Hence “abreact”, to eliminate by abreaction’. In
Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
(published twelve years after
Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through
), Freud was to comment that he had long since ‘abandoned the abreaction theory’ (see below,
p. 219
).]

2
. [This paragraph and the three that follow – all printed in smaller type than the rest of the text when first published in 1914 – amount to an extended parenthesis, interpolated between two paragraphs that essentially belong together.]

3
. [
Konversionshysterien
. ‘Conversion’ in Freud's sense is defined in the OED as ‘The symbolic manifestation in physical symptoms of a psychic conflict’; the
OED
entry also includes the following quotation from Freud's disciple Ernest Jones: ‘The energy finds an outlet in some somatic manifestation, a process Freud terms “conversion”.’]

4
. [
Deckerinnerungen
. The
deck
- element of the neologism means ‘cover’, ‘conceal’.]

5
. [
Kindheitsamnesie
. ‘Childhood amnesia’ in Freud's sense is amnesia
concerning
childhood – not amnesia
during
childhood.]

6
. [‘Relationary processes’ is more a guess than a translation. Freud's neologism is
Beziehungsvorgänge
– and there is no clue as to which of the various meanings of the word
Beziehung
he had in mind. The
Standard Edition
offers ‘processes of reference’.]

7
. [‘Thought-connections’ is also a guess – all the wilder for the fact that in itemizing the various ‘psychic processes’, Freud chooses a word (
Zusammen-hänge
) that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be used to describe a ‘process’…]

8
. [Freud is referring to the case of the ‘Wolf-man’; see below,
Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
,
note 20
.]

9
. [
aus den Quellen seines Verdrängten
. Freud's key term
das Verdrangte
is not easy to render in English: the direct translation is ‘the repressed’, but substantivized past participles tend in English to refer to
people
, not to things or to abstracts (‘the damned’, ‘the defeated’, ‘the oppressed’ etc.). The traditional ‘techno’-translations of Freud have long since established ‘the repressed’ as the English jargon-word, but in many contexts the term would not be readily comprehensible to the non-specialist reader, and is therefore generally avoided in this present volume.]

10
. [
Dämmerzustände
.]

11
. [Here – as also in the penultimate sentence of the preceding paragraph, and on numerous other occasions throughout these essays – Freud uses the term
Motiv
. The
Standard Edition
routinely translates this as ‘motive’ but this is potentially misleading: whereas ‘motive commonly refers to the
purpose
of an act, i.e. the end result envisaged by its perpetrator (‘the killer's motive was money’),
Motiv
in Freud's usage almost invariably seems to be a quasi-scientific, not to say mechanistic term meaning ‘motive force’, thus relating to the
generation
of an act or event, not to any supposed aim or purpose. See also
Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
, Ch. IX, and the corresponding note 57.]

12
. [The inverted commas are Freud's.]