Beyond the Pleasure Principle (6 page)

Compelling grounds for entertaining the notion of a primary and normal form of narcissism arose when the attempt was made to apply the libido theory to our understanding of dementia praecox (Kraepelin) or schizophrenia (Bleuler). Those suffering from this
condition, for whom I have proposed the term paraphrenics, display two fundamental characteristics: megalomania, and withdrawal of interest from the external world (people and things). The latter development makes them unamenable to psychoanalysis, it makes them incurable no matter how hard we try. The paraphrenic's withdrawal from the external world, however, needs to be more precisely characterized. The hysteric and the obsessional neurotic likewise abandon their relationship to reality, assuming their illness develops to that point. But analysis shows that they by no means forsake their erotic relationship to people and things. They hold fast to it in their imagination, on the one hand replacing or mingling real objects with imaginary ones drawn from their memory, whilst on the other not initiating in respect of those objects any of the motor activities needed for the attainment of their goals. For this condition of the libido alone, and for no other, should one use the term indiscriminately applied by Jung, namely
introversion
of the libido. With the paraphrenic, however, the position is quite different. He really does seem to have withdrawn his libido from the people and things of the external world without replacing them with any others in his imagination. In cases where he
does
so replace them, this appears to be a secondary process, and to form part of an attempt at recovery that seeks to lead the libido back to the object world.
⁵

The question then arises as to the subsequent fate of the libido in schizophrenia once it has been withdrawn from objects. The megalomania characteristic of this condition points the way. We can assume that it arose at the expense of object-libido. The libido, having been withdrawn from the external world, is channelled into the ego, giving rise to a form of behaviour that we can call narcissism. However, the megalomania itself is not a new entity, but, as we know, only a magnified and more distinct form of a pre-existing state. This in turn leads us to think that the form of narcissism that arises as a result of the incorporation of object-cathexes
⁶
is a secondary one that develops on top of a primary one rendered obscure by a variety of different influences.

Let me stress once again that I am not seeking here either to resolve or further to complicate the schizophrenia problem, but
am merely bringing together what has already been said in other contexts, in order to justify introducing the concept of narcissism.

A third factor contributing to this, in my view legitimate, extension of the libido theory arises from our observations and interpretations of the inner life of children and primitive peoples. In the latter we find traits which, if they were to occur individually, could be classed as megalomania: an overestimation of the power of their wishes and psychic acts – the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’; a belief in the magical power
⁷
of words; a technique for dealing with the external world, namely ‘magic’, which appears as the logical application of these megalomaniac premisses.
⁸
We expect to encounter an entirely analogous attitude to the external world in the child of our own day and age, whose development is far less clear to us.
⁹
We thus find the notion taking shape in our mind that it was the
ego
that originally underwent libido-cathexis;
¹⁰
some of this libido is later transferred to objects, but essentially it stays put, and relates to the object-cathexes rather as the body of an amoeba relates to the pseudopodia that it sends forth. This aspect of libido lodgement inevitably remained hidden from us to begin with, given the symptom-based nature of our researches. The only things apparent to us were the emanations of this libido, namely object-cathexes, which can be sent forth and then retracted again. We can also discern what in broad tens we can call an antagonism between the ego-libido and the object-libido – the more replete the one becomes, the more the other is depleted. The highest phase of development achievable by the latter appears to us to be the state of being in love, which presents itself to us as an abandonment by the individual of his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis, and which has its antithesis in the paranoiac's fantasy (or self-perception) regarding the ‘end of the world’.
¹¹
What we ultimately conclude regarding the differentiation of psychic energies is that initially, in the state of narcissism, they remain clustered together, and hence undifferentiable in terms of our crude analysis, and that only the supervention of object-cathexis makes it possible to differentiate sexual energy, the libido, from the energy of the ego drives.

Before I go any further, I must touch on two questions that take us to the heart of the difficulties entailed by this topic. First: how does narcissism as we are here proposing it relate to autoeroticism, which we have elsewhere described as an early form of libido? Second: if we attribute a primary libido-cathexis to the ego, why is there any need to differentiate sexual libido from non-sexual energy in the ego drives? Wouldn't the supposition of a single, unified psychic energy spare us all the difficulties associated with trying to distinguish between ego-drive energy and ego-libido, between ego-libido and object-libido?

As to the first question, I say this: it is a necessary hypothesis that there is no entity present in the individual from the very beginning that is equatable with the ego; the ego has to be developed. Autoerotic drives, however, are primal; therefore something else must supervene in addition to autoeroticism, a new psychic process, in order to produce narcissism.

Any psychoanalyst called upon to give a definitive answer to the second question is bound to feel distinctly uncomfortable. One balks at the idea of abandoning empirical observation for the sake of sterile theoretical disputes, but nonetheless we cannot shirk the obligation to try to resolve the issue. Notions such as that of an ego-libido or an ego-drive energy etc. are undoubtedly neither particularly easy to grasp nor sufficiently weighty in content; a speculative theory of the relevant relationships would want above all to establish a sharply defined concept as a basis for everything else. But in my view that is precisely the difference between a speculative theory and a science founded on the interpretation of empirical facts. The latter will not envy speculation its privilege of resting upon neat and tidy foundations of unassailable logic, but will gladly make do with nebulously evanescent, scarcely conceivable basic ideas, hoping to grasp them more clearly as they develop, and willing if need be to exchange them for others. For these ideas are not the foundation upon which the entire science rests; instead, it rests solely upon observation. They are not the substructure but the superstructure of the whole edifice, and can be replaced or discarded without harm. We are currently seeing the same sort of thing happen
in physics, moreover, whose fundamental ideas about matter, centres of force, attraction and such like are scarcely less precarious than their counterparts in psychoanalysis.

The value of the concepts ‘ego-libido’ and ‘object-libido’ resides in the fact that they derive from thorough study of the intimate characteristics of neurotic and psychotic processes. The separation of the libido into one that pertains to the ego, and one that becomes attached to objects, is a necessary corollary of a primary hypothesis that differentiated between sexual drives and ego drives. This, at any rate, was the conclusion that I was driven to by analysis of both of the pure forms of transference neurosis (hysteria and obsessional neurosis), and I know only that all attempts to account for these phenomena by other means have utterly failed.

Given the complete lack of any guiding theory of drives, it is legitimate, not to say imperative, first to take a hypothesis of some kind and test it thoroughly and rigorously until it either fails, or proves valid. Now, quite a number of things tend to support the hypothesis of a primal separation of sexual drives and other kinds of drives, i.e. ego drives, not least its efficacy in the analysis of transference neuroses. I admit that this factor on its own would not be unambiguous, for it might well be a question here of indifferent psychic energy that turns into libido only through the process of object-cathexis. For one thing, however, this conceptual distinction corresponds to the distinction so commonly encountered in ordinary life between hunger and love. For another thing,
biological
considerations lend support to the hypothesis. The individual really does lead a double existence both as an end in himself, and as a link in a chain that he serves against his will, or at any rate regardless of his will. He even supposes sexuality to be one of his own designs – whereas on an alternative view he appears as a mere appendage of his germ-plasm,
¹²
to whose purposes he devotes all his energies in return for the reward of a mere sensation of pleasure. On this view, he is but the mortal vehicle of a – perhaps – immortal essence; like the lord of an entailed estate, he is but the temporary occupant of an institution that will outlast him. The separation of the sexual drives from the ego drives would simply mirror this dual function of
the individual. Thirdly, one has to bear in mind that all our tentative psychological theories will need to be grounded at some point in organic systems. It will then very likely transpire that it is particular substances and chemical processes that are responsible for the workings of sexuality, and which make it possible for the life of the individual to carry over into the life of the species. We take full account of this likelihood by substituting particular psychological forces for particular chemical substances.

Precisely because I am normally at pains to keep psychology separate from all that is alien to it, including the mode of thinking characteristic of biology, I wish to concede quite explicitly at this point that the hypothesis of separate ego drives and sexual drives, i.e. the libido theory, is essentially biologically based, and is grounded scarcely at all in psychology. I shall therefore also be consistent enough to drop this hypothesis if a better and more serviceable theory of drives were to emerge from psychoanalytical work itself-though this has not so far proved to be the case. It might then turn out that – at the deepest possible level and at the remotest possible distance – sexual energy, the libido, originated as a part of the energy inherently active in the psyche that then separated off through differentiation. But such a proposition is of little relevance. It concerns things that are so far removed from the problems raised by our clinical observations, and so limited in their contribution to our knowledge, that it is no more worth contesting than it is worth applying in practice. Any such primal oneness is perhaps just as irrelevant to our analytical interests as the primal kinship of all the races of man is to the Probate Officer seeking proof of kinship between an heir and a testator. All these speculations get us nowhere. And as we cannot wait until the definitive theory of drives is handed to us on a plate by some other science, it is far more expedient to try to see what light can be thrown on these fundamental biological puzzles by a synthesis of
psychological
phenomena. By all means let us acquaint ourselves with the possibility of error, but let us not be deterred from rigorously following up the first hypothesis we mentioned,
¹³
viz. that of an antagonism between ego drives and sexual drives thrust upon us by our analysis of the transference
neuroses, and thereby discovering whether it can be developed in a fruitful and consistent way, and whether it can be applied to other disorders as well, e.g. schizophrenia.

Things would be different, of course, if it were proven that the libido theory had already come to grief in failing to explain this latter disorder. C. G. Jung has made precisely this claim (1912) and has thereby forced me to set out the considerations above, which I would much rather have been spared. I should have preferred to follow through to its conclusion the path already taken in my analysis of the Schreber case, without going into its underlying assumptions. Jung's claim, however, is premature at the very least. His reasoning is scant. He bases his argument in the first place on my own supposed admission that in the face of the difficulties of the Schreber analysis I felt driven to modify the libido concept, that is to say, to abandon the notion of its having a sexual content and to regard the libido as being part and parcel of psychic interest
¹⁴
in general. As to rectifying this misconception, Ferenczi (1913) has already said all that needs to be said in his thorough critique of Jung's book.
¹⁵
I can only agree with Ferenczi, and repeat that I have never voiced any such renunciation of the libido theory. A further argument of Jung's, asserting that there was no reason to think that the loss of the normal reality-function
¹⁶
could be caused solely by withdrawal of the libido, is not an argument at all, but an assertion of dogma; it ‘begs the question
¹⁷
and pre-empts debate, whereas the question whether and how such a thing might be possible really does need to be explored. In his next major work (1913), Jung touches briefly on the solution that I pointed to quite some time ago: ‘Now in all this we admittedly also need to take account of the fact – something incidentally that Freud refers to in his account of the Schreber case – that introversion of the
Libido sexualis
leads to a cathexis of the “ego”, which is conceivably what causes this reality-loss effect to appear. The possibility that the psychology of reality-loss might be explained in this way is indeed an enticing one.’ Unfortunately, however, Jung does not explore this possibility very far. Only a few lines later he dismisses it with the comment that on such a basis ‘the psychology of an ascetic anchorite would emerge successfully, but
not a dementia praecox’. To show how little this inapt analogy can contribute to a resolution of the issue, we need only remark that such an anchorite in his ‘eagerness to eradicate every trace of sexual interest’ (though only in the popular sense of the word ‘sexual’) does not even need to exhibit any pathogenic libido lodgement. Though he may have completely averted his sexual interest from human beings, he can easily have sublimated it into a heightened interest in the divine or natural or animal realm without falling victim to an introversion of his libido onto his fantasies, or a reversion of his libido to his ego. This analogy appears to disregard from the very outset any possibility of differentiating between interest arising from erotic sources, and that arising from others. If we also bear in mind that the researches of the Swiss school, however commendable, have elucidated only two features of dementia praecox – the existence of complexes familiar to the healthy as well as to neurotics, and the similarity between patients' fantasies and folk myths – whilst for the rest proving unable to throw any light on the actual mechanism of the disorder, then we can readily reject Jung's claim that the libido theory has been proved a ‘failure’ by its inability to solve the problem of dementia praecox, and is therefore finished in respect of other neuroses too.