Читать книгу Narcissism and the Literary Libido - Marshall W. Alcorn Jr. - Страница 10

Ideology necessarily implies the libidinal investment of the individual subject.

Jameson, The Political Unconscious

This book is about change—changes in people, changes in value, changes in thinking, changes in perception, changes in attention, and changes in the intensity of attention. This subtle continuum between changes in people and changes in the intensity of attention is part of the complexity of change. Because readers and teachers direct (and to some extent control) acts of attention, a better understanding of this continuum is important. We need a theoretical framework that will help us understand how changes in the intensity of attention affect social action and value.

There are many simple ways to explain changes in human behavior. People will change what they do if they are threatened by weapons or their paychecks are withheld. People will also change as a result of changes in the material conditions of their life. New technologies can change jobs and in so doing often change attitudes as well. In the liberal arts, however, there has been a long-standing assumption that language, in and of itself, can cause change. This power, located ambiguously in language, has been traditionally termed rhetoric. Rhetoric designates a force in language manipulating how people experience value. Too often, this assumption about the power of rhetoric to affect change is either totally dismissed as wishful thinking or so crudely believed that different political groups are willing to harm others in their attempt to control or regulate language use.

Because of the importance of human change, both social and psychological, we must investigate more thoroughly the subtle resources of rhetoric. For many scholars, rhetoric refers to a formal study of language and communication. Rhetoric is concerned with the rules, strategies, and structures of discourse. For others, rhetoric describes the experience of a discourse stimulating change. This often ignored relationship between the structure and the experience of language is another concern of my study. The theoretical ideas that we entertain need to be supported by our experiences and our empirical observations. Theoretical discussions of language should help us make better sense of day-to-day experiences.

Kenneth Burke, whose study of rhetoric was broadened by his study of psychoanalytic theory, made an important contribution to understanding puzzling relations between language and experience when he equated the mechanism of rhetoric with identification. We are prompted to agree with speakers, he says, when we come to identify with them. In many respects, this book pursues Burke’s interest in the relationship between rhetoric and identification.¹ Identification, however, is a complex and unwieldy concept. The term applies equally well to situations where we imagine ourselves as different from what we are, as we try to imagine ourselves as like another, and situations where we imagine others as different from what they are, because we want them to be like ourselves. In the former case, we try to change ourselves in order to be more like others. In the latter case, we try to change—or perceive others differently—in order treat them like ourselves. Identification is crucial for all rhetorical functions, but the term identification oversimplifies the complexity of the psychological processes involved in responding to the discourse of others. For reasons I soon make clear, I have decided to elaborate on Burke’s term, identification, by giving special emphasis to another related term, narcissism. Recent study of narcissistic processes has yielded a more complete understanding of the various forms and intensities of identification.

The term narcissism is associated with the Greek myth of Narcissus and its theme of self-love, and is used by both psychoanalysts and literary critics to describe a wide range of conscious and unconscious, interpersonal and intrapersonal phenomena. If we turn to Freud to discover precisely what narcissism means, however, we are likely to turn away more confused. In his 1910 footnote to “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” Freud associated narcissism with autoerotic self stimulation and speculated that such tendencies could explain homosexuality.² By 1914 Freud saw wider applications for the concept of libidinal “self-love.” In “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud used the concept of narcissistic cathexis (the self’s investing energy in itself) to explain narcissistic rewards to be gained from sleep, schizophrenia, and hypochondria.³ These conditions, Freud postulated, offer satisfaction because they offer a regressive experience of returning to early childhood’s blissful oneness with the mother. Freud still imagined narcissism as a particularly self-reflexive dimension of experiencing and pursuing desire, but he began to take an interest in the concept’s potential to make sense of various transformations of libido. In his account of mourning in 1917, Freud explained the mourner’s loss of “libidinal” interest in the external world in terms of narcissism. Mourners, he suggested, lose interest in the outside world because they have “narcissistically” withdrawn libido into the self.

Freud’s concern for the puzzling symptoms of mourning, profound dejection, cessation of interest in the external world, inability to love, general inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of self-esteem, indicates an important truth about the nature of human libidinal attachments. People seldom respond to major loss by simply choosing and pursing a new object of desire. Instead, people suffer a feeling of emptiness that must be “worked through” before “transformed libido” can be directed to new objects. A physically painful experience of emptiness must be suffered by the self; a complex process of suffering must be accepted and endured before “libido” can be redirected again to the outside world. If an old refrigerator quits working, people typically junk it and eagerly go out to buy a new model. If “Lassie” dies, however, no one quickly dumps the body and walks happily to a well-stocked pet store. Changes in deeply invested objects of human desire are not simple affairs. Changes in desire often require complicated changes in people. To explain these changes adequately, one must understand Freud’s observations about “transformations in libido” and its relation to narcissism.

Literary theory and rhetorical theory most often talk about transformations in value, rather than transformations in libido. We often think of changes in value as a rational (or an irrational) process that proceeds forward as if the subject were an inert appendage being dragged along by other very different forces. In some cases this is true; but it is not true in those cases that affect us most. As Jameson’s quote (see chap, epigraph) suggests, major transformations in value must occur first at the level of transformations in the “libidinal investment of the individual subject.” The changes that most require rhetorical skill, those made difficult because of deep investments in ideas and values, require complex libidinal transformations.

My intention in this book is to demonstrate that the central focus for rhetorical study should not be language exclusively, but should include the relations between language and libidinal structures. Libidinal structures are the components of self-structure. These structures are composed by our interaction with language and experience and they modify our sense of both ourselves and the world. If we look carefully at literary language, we can see interactions between self-structure and libidinal structure driving rhetorical operations. In order to understand this claim, however, we must develop a greater understanding of libido. I have claimed that the concept of identification can be more thoroughly understood by examining psychoanalytic research on narcissism. I also want to suggest that narcissism can be more thoroughly understood if we examine its relationship to libidinal transformations.

The concept of libido has always been charged with ambiguity, but psychoanalytic theory has found the term very handy for discussing the flow of human desire and for describing changes in the object or intensity of desire. Heinz Kohut talks of libido as a force that makes people and objects seem interesting. Libido is an energy investing objects (both human beings in the psychoanalytic sense of the term and material everyday objects like cars and clothes) with appeal and desirability.⁴ In the crudest sense, libido is the force of sexual attraction. This sexual dimension should not be underestimated. Stephen Mitchell points out that “sex is a powerful organizer of experience,” subtly affecting the tone of our perceptions.⁵ In common experience, however, the sexual energy of libido often seems quite diffuse. People are libidinally invested in many objects—clothes, cars, computers, guns, coffee makers. This does not mean that there is an explicit sexual experience generated by these objects. But it does mean that the investments made in these objects are not trivial. How can we understand this attachment? How can we understand, for example, the reluctance of the adult to junk an old coffee maker?

Mitchell’s discussion of the child’s early “sexual” experiences is helpful here: “Bodily sensations, processes, and events dominate the child’s early experience. . . . The child draws on and generalizes from the major patterns of bodily experience in constructing and representing a view of the world and other people.”⁶ These early constructions and representations are linked to strong feelings of pleasure and pain, and are “libidinal” systems of fantasy and memory that become building blocks for experience and self-identity. Because infantile sexuality is so poorly understood, libidinal perception and libidinal experience are also poorly understood. But it is clear that some modes of thinking and perceiving are especially energetic and linked to bodily experience. This form of experience seems related to the idea of “gut level” experience. It is similar to the child’s experience of the world, because this form of thinking is experienced in the body, not just in the mind. It is more “attached” to things—attached, for example, to old clothes or old coffee makers. Consequently, it is a mode of thinking more vivid, more intense, and more interesting than usual.

In addition, it operates according to its own principles, often indifferent to the demands of rational thought. Both Freud and Lacan argued that humans develop logical abstract thought in order to free themselves from childlike attachments to objects and images. But logic and abstract thought do not end more primitive thought attached to objects; it simply pushes it into the unconscious. According to Freud, “The system Ucs contains the thing-cathexes [the libidinal investments] of the objects, the first and true object-cathexes.”⁷ We might thus consider the unconscious not simply as a reservoir of repressed or forgotten memories, but as a system of unconscious libidinal attachments that affects our attention to and response to conscious objects.

Understood in the broadest sense, libido is a “psychic energy” that can invest almost anything with an attractiveness that does not at all seem sexual. Both advertising and art attempt to orchestrate the flow of libido in order to reposition or revalue particular cultural items, ideas, or situations. The glamorous blonde draped languorously over the hood of the red sports car may be “sexy” in the literal sense of the word, but her presence bestows the car with a “sexiness” of another order. The car becomes the center of an acquisitive gaze that makes all its details seem glamorous and noteworthy. Clearly, an understanding of libidinal “flow” can contribute to our understanding of rhetoric. The car ad example makes it clear that the cold metallic and mechanical structures of a vehicle can become rhetorically enhanced by means of libidinal manipulations. Advertisers know they can manipulate us into feeling an attachment for the car if they can first elicit an attachment we already have for the blonde.

Although narcissism is usually associated with self-love, it is rather easy to see how the admiration of cars and many other fashionably produced objects can be as narcissistic as gazing in a mirror. When we are libidinally invested in cars, it is often not the cars that we actually care about; we care about ourselves. In looking at the car, we are concerned about our own self-image.⁸ The car takes on value because we project something narcissistic about ourselves into it. The blonde does not give the car her sex appeal simply by appearing with it. We create the glamour of both the woman and the car because we project glamour onto the object. We are creatures of history and culture, and this makes us active and not passive in the creation of our own feelings. We project libidinal qualities onto objects—cars and blondes—according to complicated rules of status, gender, memory, and mood.

In the Analysis of the Self, a ground-breaking book on the concept of narcissism, Kohut observes that whereas narcissism is usually associated with self-love (or the libidinal investment of the self), narcissism actually supports a wide array of libidinal investments. People, material objects, human activities, and even thoughts can be invested with “narcissistic libido.” Narcissistic libido, not only for Kohut (unlike Freud), contributes to “mature object relationships” (to healthy human relationships). It also forms “the main source of libidinal fuel for some of the socioculturally important activities which are subsumed under the term creativity.”⁹ Artists, Kohut argues, direct and invest “narcissistic libido” when they spend enormous time and effort in shaping a work—an apparently inconsequential flow of words or a squat block of wood—that becomes singularly important because it seems to “contain” or “express” a deeply human feeling.

Narcissistic libido helps to produce a work of art, and, in a different way, makes a work of art interesting. Narcissistic libido accounts for the laborious attention that critics give to such seemingly inconsequential products. The uninitiated often find art criticism tiresome, but the art critic usually takes great pleasure in the inspection, analysis, and discussion of art. Minute details that would seem accidental or irrelevant to many people appear full of meaning and consequence. Artworks repay such attention because they, in some manner, initiate complex imaginative experience and “gratify” the narcissistic libido of those who invest time in them.

People who appreciate art claim that it prompts them to see things differently, that is, to experience events differently. We sometimes imagine that these events are caused by the external object, but in reality these experiences are caused by the interaction between the observer and the object observed. These experiences occur when observers “invest” something of themselves in the object.

This notion of “investment” is an important idea; we might understand it best by considering our relationship to people. When narcissistic libido is invested in people, narcissistic needs can give people a special aura of “grandeur” or desirability. Kohut argues that this grandeur is the result of narcissistic libidinal investments. This grandeur is produced by an investment of “narcissistic libido” because an unconscious aspect of the observer’s self-structure makes the person observed seem attractive. Part of the psychic structure missing in the observer is perceived as existing in the object observed. Kohut points out:

The intensity of the search for and of the dependency on these objects [people] is due to the fact that they are striven for as a substitute for the missing segments of the psychic structure. They are not objects (in the psychological sense of the term) since they are not loved or admired for their attributes, and the actual features of their personalities, and their actions, are only dimly recognized.¹⁰

In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Linda Loman’s attachment to Willy illustrates the commonplace truth of Kohut’s ideas. Linda “more than loves” Willy, Miller writes, “she admires him as though his mercurial nature, his temper, his massive dreams and little cruelties served her only as sharp reminders of the turbulent longings within him, longings which she shares but lacks the temperament to utter and follow to their end.”¹¹ Because Willy serves Linda as a substitute for a missing part of her own nature, Linda does not see him fully. She is repeatedly hurt by his failings and his “little cruelties.” But, as Miller observes, she has developed an “iron repression of her exceptions to Willy’s behavior.”

In this example, as in many others, the investment of narcissistic libido in objects operates to make objects seem grand or valuable. At the same time, however, this investment can disguise the real nature of the thing admired. Certain people or objects are needed because of narcissistic need, but this same need dictates that these people or objects cannot be seen realistically.

This over inflation of the object or person should be an interesting theme for rhetoricians. I suggested earlier that narcissistic libido makes objects seem valuable primarily by disguising their true qualities; but I should draw more careful attention to this behavior. Narcissistic libido seems to disguise an object because it encourages us to pay only selective attention to it. Narcissistic libido can be considered a sort of light that, when shone on an object, can partly hide it by revealing it according to a particular and limited effect of shade and shadow; some facets are accentuated, other facets are hidden. Rhetoric constantly makes use of this lighting effect as it presents objects in particularly crafted ways in order to make them appear useful or valuable.

Rhetoric, I argue at some length, is facilitated through the libidinal manipulations of an object. Other psychoanalytic accounts of rhetoric emphasize the importance of fantasy, transference, and identification.¹² These phenomena are indeed important, but consideration of libidinal manipulation offers an added tool to investigate rhetorical transactions. It allows us to examine texts more closely, to see interactions between signifiers and experience, to see links between particular words and wider patterns of signification found in plots, characters, and even readers. For example, when Conrad’s Marlow first describes his impressions of Kurtz he says:

I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had heard enough about it, too—God knows! Yet somehow it didn’t bring any image with it—no more than if I had been told an angel or a fiend was in there. I believed it the same way one of you might believe there are inhabitants in the planet Mars.¹³

A few pages later, however, when Marlow hears the manager and his nephew talk about Kurtz, Marlow suddenly gets a vivid image:

I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a distinct glimpse: the dugout, the four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home—perhaps; setting his face towards the depths of the wilderness.¹⁴

The image appears when Marlow makes a narcissistic and a libidinal investment in Kurtz. The image makes Kurtz “real.” It is produced when Marlow, who wants to be a great explorer, identifies with Kurtz’s apparently brave decision to set “his face towards the depths of the wilderness.” Marlow has had some firsthand experience of the “depths of the wilderness,” and he begins to understand and take a real interest in Kurtz when he sees him turning to this exotic, threatening, and fascinating darkness. Kurtz therefore becomes real for Marlow when there is a narcissistic libidinal investment in his representation.

Many things in daily experience are made more real, alive, and important because of narcissistic investments. As teachers, we know the importance of this moment of special “recognition,” a moment when students feel that they can “relate” to the text. This is a crucial event for classroom discussions—in its own terms and in terms of the critical resources we can bring to bear on it. Yet this event is infrequently discussed, and too often negotiated in intuitive terms only.

Most often our libidinal investments are relatively fixed by the structures of our character. We might consider character as something very much like an organization of libidinal investments. These investments are relatively stable, so we see the world according to customary patterns of perception and value. In reading, as I argue in some detail in the following chapters, rhetorical strategies make libidinal investments fluid so that libido can shift to new objects, allowing us to consider as “interesting” objects we might in other situations dismiss or recognize only according to established patterns of habit. Through rhetorical manipulation, things not otherwise invested with narcissistic libido become invested with narcissistic libido.

Just as the blonde can make the car seem interesting, a Romantic lyric about the wind can suddenly seem important when it engages rhetorical structures that promote identification and shifts in libidinal investment. Students who may initially care little about Shelley’s meditations on the west wind in Italy can often identify with the mood changes described in the poem and soon come to feel that the experiences described are very much like their own. In “light” of this perception, metaphors such as the “breath of Autumn’s being” and images such as “dead leaves,” “winged seeds,” and “sweet buds” become the focus of a caring attention that frequently deepens and intensifies the reader’s own appreciation of both nature (the objects of nature are visualized more acutely) and inner experience. Students sometimes comment that after reading the poem they experience a kind of rejuvenation, a feeling that can accompany a mood change when it is no longer something passively endured, but something actively anticipated and cultivated.

My discussion of Conrad and Shelley indicates that shifts in libidinal investment help students (and people in general) to take a more particular interest in the subjects of discourse. In the following chapters I describe rhetorical structures as devices that allow libido to be more “fluid,” more able to move from one location to another. We often think of a text’s rhetoric as equivalent to the value it endorses: A text’s rhetoric is its message or its meaning. But we might more usefully think of a text’s rhetoric as broader and more encompassing, something quite different from message or meaning. Rhetoric, considered from this perspective, is not the message of a text, but the specific ways—often present in the form of textual scenes, structures, or vocabulary—by means of which texts prompt readers to entertain, in the literal sense of the word, a new argument about value.

If we think of rhetoric as a force that pulls a reader or listener from one value to another, then the rhetorical power of a text would reflect its ability first to divide readers from their own customary self with its rigidly invested values, and second, make them feel that such a customary self is not desirable. Rhetoric works by convincing us that, although we have not considered it seriously before, we are really happier with a new perspective. This new perspective is something we have hitherto disregarded or seen as undesirable, but by means of the text’s modification of our perceptions, we now see it as more compatible with our larger system of value. In the case of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” a student participating in the strategies and libidinal shiftings of the poem may come to see that poetry is not dead and unimaginative, but relevant and engaging.

Textual rhetoric is aided by the mechanisms with which literary texts promote a “fluidity” of libidinal investments.¹⁵ When the rhetoric of a text is successful, the libidinal structures of the reader are modified by the libidinally charged linguistic structures of the text. Texts that promote a fluidity of libidinal investments have more rhetorical power than texts that simply and rigidly assert a value position. Many literary works, such as Melville’s Billy Budd, for example, labor to promote fluidity by encouraging multilayered conflictual and complex judgments on values, each position inviting identification. When texts simultaneously both invite a play of identification and structure a perception of conflict, they put pressure on fixed patterns of libidinal attachments. Barbara Johnson comments on Billy Budd: “The effect of . . . explicit oscillations of judgment within the text is to underline the importance of the act of judging while rendering its outcome undecidable.”¹⁶ Often texts seem to need critics to encourage readers to appreciate such “fluid” modes of judgment that Johnson describes. But often enough, writers consciously discuss the importance of encouraging contradictory perceptions. For example, in The Crack Up, Fitzgerald argues that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”¹⁷

Literature is a verbal genre that is conspicuous in its ability both to induce identification and promote a conflictual vision of value. Literature is also a verbal genre that encourages us to appreciate and take aesthetic pleasure in an ambiguity or conflict that, in other contexts, we might find too stressful and disorienting. Thus, at the same time that it structures a perception of conflict, literature typically reduces our anxiety about it. As Aristotle observed long ago, we can take pleasure in literary representations of the tragic. Simon Lesser argues that

when we read fiction we are ordinarily relaxed and secure, so that we can see things that might elude us at other times. In imagination we can experiment, try out various approaches to our problems, alter this or that circumstance to see what results ensue.¹⁸

When the rhetoric of a text is successful, it weakens the rigidity of value commitment as it encourages satisfying narcissistic alliances and provides a secure space for entertaining new concerns, interests, and values.

The reading of literature offers a protected space for what Stephen Mitchell calls “self-regulation”: “Human beings are simultaneously self-regulating and field regulating.”¹⁹ Humans attempt, at the same time, to maintain a coherent sense of self and a coherent sense of their relations with others. “We are concerned,” Mitchell says:

with both the creation and maintenance of a relatively stable, coherent sense of self out of the continual ebb and flow of perception and affect, and the creation and maintenance of dependable, sustaining connections with others, both in actuality and as internal presences. The dialectic between self-definition and connection with others is complex and intricate, with one or the other sometimes being more prominent. Self-regulatory and field regulatory processes sometimes enhance each other and sometimes are at odds with other, forming the basis for powerful conflicts.²⁰

This dialectic between internal and external world is central and inescapable for human thought. Too often in daily life, however, the human ego is too rigid and inflexible to be fully responsive to needed adjustments. Given this usual context of ego rigidity, the reading of literature can offer narcissistic support to insulate the ego from anxiety and reduce ego rigidity. In reading, the threatening world outside can seem held at a distance from vulnerable self-systems. The self does not face the world but only its representations of it. Chapter 4 discusses this protected space of reading in relation to Victor Nell’s description of the “state of absorption” common to readers. In this narcissistically protected space, our perceptions of the world can be more playful; libido is made more fluid to experiment with internal representations, thereby formulating new adjustments in both the self-system and the field system.

Reading is narcissistic in three senses. First it is narcissistic in so far as it offers a protected space for reading, space that is regressive, self-referential, and insular. Second, reading is narcissistic because it engages the narcissistic dialectics that contribute to the ongoing regulation of the self-system and thus greater mastery of psychic conflict. Literary engagement relaxes the ego, so it can entertain conflict and take pleasure in narcissistic dialectics that in other contexts would be too threatening. Last, reading is narcissistic to the extent that it experiments with imaginary libidinal investments and transformations.

Theorists from Freud to Lacan have described narcissism differently, but there is one thread that runs through all these theoretical positions: an interest in the nature, quality, and fluidity of libidinal investments. Freud first began to develop a complicated notion of narcissism when he saw its potential to explain transformations in libido. More recently, Otto Kernberg has developed his own understanding of narcissism by emphasizing the relationship between narcissism and the “vicissitudes of libido.” According to Kernberg, “Narcissism cannot be divorced from the study of the vicissitudes of both libido and aggression and from the study of the vicissitudes of internalized object relations.”²¹ For Kernberg narcissism is a term covering those processes whereby the various internal components—libido, aggression, and internalized objects—of the self are modified. Kernberg’s account of narcissism broadens Freud’s account by seeing narcissism in developmental and not exclusively pathological terms.

Kernberg’s explanation of the relationship between narcissism and libido is especially interesting because it suggests that libidinal attachments are not driven fundamentally by instinct, but driven by a culturally and psychologically conditioned flow of desire determined initially and most forcefully by early identifications with parents and caretakers. Stated simply, what we want is determined by whom we identify with. This simple statement, however, oversimplifies the relationships involved. A direct quote from Kernberg will give a fuller sense of the range and implication of his insight:

Libido and aggression differentiate out of the undifferentiated matrix common to the ego and the id. The organization of these two drives occurs under the influence of the developing internalized object relations, [that is, early self-structure building identifications with others] which, in turn, are integrated under the organizing influence of affects. . . .

The biologically determined intensity of affects can be channeled into ever more complex intrapsychic motivational systems; but—except under extreme circumstances—there is no direct mechanical relationship between biological pressures and psychic functioning.²²

The so-called “drives” of attachment and hostility come to us as feeling states as we participate in and imitate the subjectivity of those around us. The intensity of emotion—pleasure and pain—is partly a biological experience, but it is also an experience determined and structured by intrapsychic components. It is structured and made complicated by “developing internalized object relations,” or our use of the emotional structures of others as components in our own inner identity patterns. Thus, for Kernberg, it is not so much biology as various libidinal and aggressive organizations found in memory, identification, and perception (organizations of libidinal investments) that lay down structures that shape enduring patterns of human pleasure and pain.

Heinz Kohut, in a similar argument, suggests that “drives” are not biologically programmed “instincts,” but are derivatives of early forms of identifications. For Kohut, humans are “driven” most primordially by a desire to enlarge or secure the “being” of the self. Any “abnormalities of the drives,” Kohut argues, are merely “the symptomatic consequences of [a] . . . central defect in the self.”²³ Kohut, like Kernberg, disavows traditional Freudian theory. He argues that how we feel and what we want are largely the result of complex patterns of libidinal investments—not of instincts (innate biological drives)—directed primarily by our particular attachments, identifications, and interactions with others.

When narcissism is seen in the larger context of libido theory rather than in the more limited context of maladjusted behavior, we will be in a better position to understand the configurations of perception, emotion, and cognition that fund rhetorical transformations. The work of Kohut and Kernberg distinguishes between narcissistic personality disorders and narcissistic strategies for defense or development common to all people.²⁴ Kohut diverges more radically from classical psychoanalytic theory than Kernberg, but both men propose a theory of ego development emphasizing the role of narcissistic investments in the formation of the internal structure of the self. The particular nature of our libidinal investments in processes such as empathy, identification, idealization, loss, and mourning, for example, can alter who we are and what we think. It seems only too true, thus, that the “rhetoric” of early character formation is the work of libidinal investment.

This theory of development (found in different ways in both object-relations theory and self-psychology) emphasizes that the structure of the self develops initially in terms of the child’s earliest identifications. Identification means, as Thomas Ogden states, not only “a modeling of oneself after the external object, but, as in the case of superego formation, a process by which the functions of the external object are instated within the psyche.”²⁵ The self thus takes its internal structure, its being, its emotions, fears, and motivations, from its interaction with others in its world. Identification is not simply a gesture that identity performs; it is a gesture that can form and transform identity.

Freud’s work indicates that identifications follow the paths of our libidinal investments.²⁶ Our most profound identifications, however, seem to be in response to the experience of loss. First of all, we suffer when a person close to us is lost because, as Freud says, we are “unwilling to abandon” our libidinal attachment to the object (the person). Though the object is gone, we cannot abandon it, and we are unwilling to accept substitutions. The object is present in our imaginations, and we persist in our attachment to it.

We are able to “work through” the experience of loss gradually as we come to internalize the lost properties of the object. Internalization occurs when libido attached to the object is not abandoned, but instead withdrawn to the self-structure of the mourner. The person in mourning, instead of giving up that which is lost, appropriates for subjectivity particular qualities belonging to one lost. A mourner internalizes for self-structure certain qualities of the person lost. In many cases, these are “admired” qualities” and they become self functions; for example, we may internalize a parent’s discipline or nurturing concern when we lose that parent. Human character is thus changed because of this narcissistic “transformation of libido.”

Acts of identification are not always as consequential as those acts of identification that heal the psychic wound of loss. But all acts of identification, attachment, and admiration can be considered narcissistic. Narcissism, in the broadest sense, does not refer to a specific model of deviant behavior. It refers to a theoretical understanding of the dynamic relationships between our “internalizations” of “external” objects and our libidinal models of aspiration and identity. Although many theorists continue to emphasize the primary importance of early childhood experience in the development of self-structure, contemporary theorists are more open to considering the impact of adult experience on character.

Theories of narcissism seek to understand the ways various needs and self-images are activated or adopted in times of stress. Narcissism refers most fundamentally to a process: “the cathexis of the self,” the self’s libidinal involvement with itself, its mode of investing energy in evaluative, protective, and developmental functions. In order to develop, the ego must cathect itself and must have itself as the object of its own aspirations. If the ego did not cathect itself there would be no superego, no ego ideals, and no truly human behavior. Thus the growth of human identity is necessarily “narcissistic” in the broad sense of the term. Such a usage does not imply a negative character disorder; it merely characterizes the necessarily self-referential psychodynamics 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

Considered from this perspective, writing offers a narcissistic compensation for a sensed failure in presence and being.³¹ Writing becomes a compromise formation that both expresses the ontological insecurity of being and ameliorates that insecurity through the production of signification. Writing allows a self to augment its anxiously depleted self-presence, by the supplement of the word. Writing is a libidinal investment whose form seeks to extend and increase libidinal investments. From a Lacanian perspective, the word is a particularly apt ontological gamble. Writing is a “want to be,” but it is a “want to be” that wants to be read. Writing always courts an other; writing seeks to be “the desire of the other.”

Writing produces, magnifies, and extends the presence of self-consciousness by seeming to represent it in language for others. In seeming to represent self-consciousness in language, writing converts it into a commodity and places this commodity (self-consciousness) outside the self for consumption. Writing thus offers an imaginary representation of self-consciousness as a commodity for recognition and appropriation. The text, as a “representation” of self-consciousness, provides a space, a habitation (in the form of signifiers), inviting an other to take up presence. It offers, in a subtle form, a verbal body to shore up the insecurity of a self’s presence. Writing, then, begins as a narcissistic crutch; it is a verbal, artificial prop for self. Successful writing, however, becomes much more than a prop or a crutch. It produces for the artist a kind of social recognition that mitigates narcissistic fears. As Freud points out, the reality of the artist’s social recognition is a very powerful force. We must understand why the artist is given such recognition and admiration.

Fundamentally, the text mediates between the narcissism of a writer and the narcissism of a reader. The text links the insecure presence of a reader to the insecure presence of the author. Both come to the signifier for substance and, according to their appetites, both find something of value. But this process is curiously paradoxical: The writer (among other goals) seeks to appropriate being and status by attracting the reader’s recognition; readers, on the other hand, seek to appropriate being and status by recognizing themselves in the signification produced by the writer. Both come to signification, the word, because of what they lack. Yet, when the libidinal shifting of the texts is fruitful, the interaction between the reader and author (at the locus of the text) seems able to manufacture a commodity, an experience of “satisfaction” not available to either. If both author and reader feel themselves “recognized” in a satisfactory way, the pain of inner lack is ameliorated and a certain mysterious absent commodity, “being,” is satisfactorily produced and consumed (even though it may or may not be, in a strict sense, shared).

If desire, as Lacan says, needs an other, then there is a fundamental reciprocity linking the producer and consumer of literary productions. An author’s desire is essentially an expression seeking to elicit and draw power from the desiring response of a reader. Just as the child seeks recognition and narcissistic support from the mother and gains such support through both self-expression and the expression of frustration, artists seek both to gain recognition and to express their conflictual consciousness.

Just as the writer’s desire gestures toward a reader, the reader’s desire gropes toward an otherness desired and apparently configured in the text. Both author and reader are divided from themselves by their turning toward an otherness beyond them, in the text. This divergence of the author and reader from themselves, however, becomes the basis for a convergence of both author and reader on a textual medium that dramatizes, problematizes, reformulates—and in some paradoxical way satisfies—questions of being and value. This convergence of both author and reader in the text provides the basis for a metaphysically complex community established by the fantastic nature of the text.

Writing, we want to say, produces a message. But some messages, the kind we like to call literature, seem to multiply their meanings and, further, survive temporal interpretive transformations. Readers keep coming back to the ancestral bodies of many texts, thus keeping them relevant as they comment on and reinvest something of themselves in them. We could outline a history of the natural selection of texts, including the historical, political, and psychological forces that determine their character, their survival, and mode of reproduction. But such an outline is not my purpose here. I do wish to suggest that as authors and readers experience the various effects of recognition through textual production and response, literary texts become forms for reformulating libidinal investments. Literature becomes a vehicle whereby feelings, thoughts, and social arrangements that may not be initially a part of the discourse of a culture can become expressed, debated, and made “real” via the libidinal power of literary expression.

As teachers, we often get to see the generative effects of literary discourse in action in the classroom. It is interesting to see how highly personal literary recognitions quickly become a medium for social bonds between students. In response to texts, students often come to recognize what they care about and with whom they share this feeling. Psychologists argue that recognition is a very powerful and important experience. Recognition gives legitimacy to aspects of the self that may be unacknowledged or disowned. But we do not often acknowledge the wider social implications of recognition. Personal images and social visions are not disparate and isolated phenomena; they are intertwined and interactive. As a result of textual identifications, people come to fantasize about themselves differently, to define themselves differently, to act differently, and to have different ideas about an ideal community. They adjust their self-images and form bonds with like-minded people and begin to argue with others. They engage in politics. They formulate new definitions of authority and morality to justify the new visions of self and society that they have come to embrace.

Both readers and authors, I suggest, come to texts for substance; the substantial text is one that fills a certain emptiness within the self. The ability of texts to fill a certain emptiness within selves is a purely imaginary event, an event of “vision.” Yet this event can have real and practical consequences.

As the imaginary “form” produced by texts takes up habitation in human bodies, imaginary “form” gives definition to very practical things: law courts, governments, armies. Texts are imaginary verbal artifacts, but they give a culture and a community a language to discuss its concerns. James Boyd White argues that “the community that a text establishes . . . has a real existence in the world.”³² We might say, then, that writing does not merely attempt to appropriate an imaginary entity—“being”—from an other by means of a circular and reciprocal act of empathy and communication; it often succeeds. Through the effects of recognition, social reciprocity, and shared fantasy, literary texts and other art forms produce linguistic codes necessary for the social reshaping—the libidinal rebinding—of communal being.

Ontological insecurity may be the center for the production of writing. But this unstable center produces an imaginary product that produces the metaphors of value necessary for every cultural change and identity. Rhetoric originates from an ontological emptiness, but it moves toward an imaginary and verbal structure that fabricates the true “material” of social and personal being. Readers respond to certain texts strongly because they feel they themselves are somehow “at issue” (as indeed they are) in the imaginative form and social consequence of that text; they respond to complete or define themselves; and they respond to banish the vertiginous and uneasy experience that the rhetoric of the text produces within them.

To understand textual rhetoric, we must appreciate its powerful emotional force. But we must also free ourselves from the immediacy of our initial response to it. As scholars we should do more than provide yet another reading or another ideological analysis of some particular text. We must seek to describe the nature of this entity, rhetoric, that produces the various contradictory sundering and repairing effects described here. The study of rhetoric should take a broad perspective on the subject. It should venture into a interdisciplinary investigation of its various mechanisms and operations.

Writing creates rhetoric and puts pressure on libidinal attachments as it dramatizes sites of psychological conflict, demands recognition from an other, and compensates the neediness of the self. A theory of rhetoric, thus, must concern itself with psychological events. It must examine the psychological mechanisms that produce the “experience” of such textual supplementation.

A good theory of rhetoric must avoid positivistic assumptions that would cut off certain lines of inquiry at the outset. I suggest that literary texts offer a supplementation for depleted being. From a positivist perspective this claim must sound ridiculous. The self cannot in any real sense get more “being” than it already has. In a certain sense the biological body is all the “being” that the self will ever achieve. But these complaints miss the point by failing to understand the point of narcissistic concerns. The question that needs to be answered here is not whether or not the experience of compensation or self-supplementation has some final ontological ground, but how the imagined experience (false though it may be) becomes produced. Even if the need for being more fully “alive” is purely an imaginary need or experience, we must take it seriously and investigate its dialogical implications for signification.

We must examine the various complexities of the experience of being more fully alive. There are numerous paradoxes to consider. Not every imaginary image of the fulfillment of being more fully alive, for example, can satisfy the imaginary need for being alive. Some images for the fullness of being can be shared between people, some images cannot. Some imaginary presences seem full, others seem empty. This is one of many paradoxes that surround this curious linguistic production. Many signified presences change their appearances as readers change. And many readers change in response to the ideological structures produced and marketed by cultures. Interpretation theory should explore these paradoxes. Interpretation theory should patiently and methodically explore the variety of psychological mechanisms that are the ground of textual rhetoric. Interpretation theory should seek to explain the psychological mechanisms that produce the effect of an experienced self-supplementation. A theory of textual rhetoric would thus appropriate another discourse explaining how rhetoric is an effect compensating for a depletion of being.

From a strictly economical point of view, writers write because they gain more reward than loss from the process. The same is true for readers: They read because they gain more than they lose.

How do we examine the complex psychological issues behind this simple gain? This question brings us back to the concept of narcissism. Narcissism is a name for a dialectical function presiding over an event we might call the transference of being. A species of narcissism occurs whenever being is transferred from one entity that has it (or seems to have it) to another entity that does not. This “thing” that is transferred from one self to another self is apparently imaginary. It does not exist in any “real” sense. Yet this “thing” that does not exist is central to human life and action, and is essential to the rhetorical functions of language.

How does one transfer something imaginary from one person to another? How does the receiver of the imaginary something acknowledge the receipt of a nonexistent entity? How does the receiver of an imaginary something sense, initially, the nonpresence of the nonexistent entity? These may or may not be valid metaphysical questions, but they are valid psychological questions. They characterize transactions we experience everyday. They describe experiences we take for granted, things that, as Fish says, “go without saying.” They also, I think, characterize many of the implicit, unspoken assumptions about existence and signification shared by writers and readers. If writers can rhetorically manipulate the hidden agenda of readers’ ontological or narcissistic concerns, they can find mechanisms for binding readers to texts, and readers to particular visions of life and community. If writers can induce us to narcissistically invest in imaginary things, these imaginary things can become real things.

The protected “narcissistic” space of literary enjoyment can insulate literary experience from real-world experience. But it need not. Many nineteenth-century readers saw Conrad’s skeletal image of Kurtz intensely, and saw this image as a clear political message, a fit representation of the Belgian rape of the Congo.³³ When experiences such as these are noted and discussed in newspapers, as they often are, they are a clear force for propaganda. They influence a culture’s image of itself and influence political action. We should not underestimate the degree to which literary response can be “absorbing” and transformative. We should not underestimate how literary experience, unlike the usual experience of reading a newspaper, can manipulate libidinal shifts and cultivate new value perceptions in a manner not commonly managed by nonliterary modes of representation.

An enduring theme of religious art shows Mary, the mother of Jesus, looking down with care into her son’s eyes. The gaze from child to mother is transparent. The babe does not look at his mother. More properly, he participates in her being. He is surrounded and supported by her presence. He bathes in the resonance of her joy. Psychologists have argued that this unspoken and largely unspeakable experience is the ground of the emergence of the self. Children take on being as they take in the being of the mother. The mother offers her being to her children’s need for being. Children are at one with the mother’s inner life, and in this inwardness they develop their own inwardness. The mother-infant bond is, as they say, a narcissistic bond. Narcissism, in this case, characterizes the exchange of being from mother to child and from child to mother. Both participants are unusually “safe” but also vulnerable and receptive, unusually empathic. They give what they do not “really” have and receive that which could not exist except in the relationship between the two.

All bonds are narcissistic. All development and transformation are grounded initially in the receipt of nonexistent supplies. At the turning points of our self-development, we often have little more than a sense of inner emptiness and the faint glimpse of an idea. Our response to emptiness and our “regulation” of these ideas and images is both delicate and subtle. But this response and our regulation of it is enormously important. If we fail to organize and regulate our ideas and images, others will do this for us. Advertising and politics thrive on the marketing and manipulation of libidinal attachments and imaginary “images.”

The narcissistic transference of being does not usually designate the portage of some homogenous substance “being” from one subject to another. Rather, being always has texture, style, and particularity. In this sense, there are countless varieties of narcissistic themes, countless forms of rhetorical structures. The mother has love, or anger, and usually both together, and these things come into her children as the substance of their being. The mother also has ideas, work, and values, which also “position” her children’s identity. It is crucial to note that the child, or adult, may be surrounded by various and numerous experiences, that is, surrounded by many people who can become objects of identification. But the self cannot by a simple process identify with all or take in all (or even the best) that is without.

Neither parents, nor politicians, nor advertisers fully control the self-system of the subject. Only certain things can be ferried across the gulf that separates one person from another. Only certain things will come to count as being. The study of narcissism requires a study of what things can count, how they come to count, and what the consequences are.