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1. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 55.

2. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), 7: 145. Henceforth all references to Freud come from the twenty-four-volume Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74).

3. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), The Standard Edition 14: 83-84.

4. In this book I have chosen to generally ignore the distinction between “narcissistic libido and sexual libido.” Freud sharply distinguished between attachments based on sexual instincts (erotic cathexis) and attachments based on ego need (narcissistic cathexis). See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), The Standard Edition 14: 249. According to Freud, the subject has an original libidinal investment in itself that is later transformed and invested in objects. Freud’s distinction is clearly an oversimplification of the mechanisms involved, but it does seem to have merit. Both Kohut and Kernberg are very persuasive in their analysis of such distinctions operating in analysis. Texts, however, do not offer the same concrete access to experience as analysis. For this reason I have not attempted to consistently work with this distinction. There are moments when I feel secure about describing an investment in terms of narcissistic as opposed to sexual libido, but for the most part I use only the term libido and emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between these two modes of cathexes.

5. Stephen Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 103.

6. Ibid., 102.

7. Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), The Standard Edition 14: 201.

8. A long complicated article could be written at this juncture about the distinction between “object libido” and “narcissistic libido.” As our understanding of narcissism has deepened, these ideas have undergone considerable readjustment and debate. I do not attempt to summarize an immense wealth of detailed discussion, but I can give a good sense of the range of these ideas by quoting from Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: “In classical drive theory,” he says, innate instincts make us who we are by driving our response to the sexual power of appropriate objects:

psychosexual urges and wishes propel experience and behavior, and one’s sense of self is derivative of the expression of these underlying motives. Various authors from different traditions have turned this causal sequence around, arguing that the maintenance of a sense of identity and continuity is the most pressing human concern and that sexual experiences often derive their meaning and intensity by lending themselves to this project. (99)

Some theorists want to make all examples of libidinal investment examples of object seeking behavior. Other theorists, however, see all examples of attachment as expressions of self-identity. I must admit that I can neither synthesize these two views nor choose between them. In the example of the blonde by the car I would not want to insist that, for heterosexual men, biology plays no role in “determining” the woman’s appeal as an example of “object libido.” I would, however, insist that glamour, which shapes sexual experience, is heavily determined by our culturally conditioned response to details—clothes, poise, body image, hair color—fashioned by dominant social value. These details—examples I presume of “narcissistic libido”—undoubtedly provide cues for sexual arousal.

9. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), 40.

10. Ibid., 45.

11. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Penguin, 1985), 12.

12. For a discussion of fantasy and rhetoric, see Jean Wyatt, Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women’s Reading and Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), and Ernest B. Borman, Discussion and Group Methods: Theory and Practice (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). For a discussion of transference and rhetoric, see Peter Brooks, “The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 334-48; and Meredith Ann Skura, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). For a discussion of identification and rhetoric, see Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives.

13. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Youth and Two Other Stories (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1921), 81.

14. Ibid., 90.

15. I see this fluidity of cathexes promoted by literary texts as the product of something present in the artist’s self-structure. Heinz Kohut, for example, describes the artist as having a fluidity of narcissistic cathexes; see Heinz Kohut, “Creativeness, Charisma, Group Psychology.” In Self Psychology and the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach, ed. Charles B. Strozier (New York: Norton, 1985), 189.

16. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 101.

17. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Direction, 1956), 69. I am indebted to Jeffrey Berman for drawing my attention to these issues of splitting and contradiction in relation to Fitzgerald’s comment.

18. Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 55.

19. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, 35.

20. Ibid., 35.

21. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975), 342

22. Ibid., 339-40.

23. Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), 82.

24. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions; also Otto Kernberg, Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (New York: Jason Aronson, 1976); Otto Kernberg, Internal World, External Reality (New York: Jason Aronson, 1980); Kohut, The Analysis of the Self; and Kohut, Restoration of the Self. Further useful studies from France include Bela Grunberger’s Narcissism: Psychoanalytic Essays (New York: International Universities Press, 1979); and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal (New York: Norton, 1985).

25. Thomas H. Ogden, The Matrix of the Mind (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1986), 134.

26. See Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, 48-51, for a thorough discussion of Freud’s attempt to make sense of narcissism and identification.

27. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 35.

28. Arnold Rothstein, The Narcissistic Pursuit of Perfection (New York: International Universities Press, 1984).

29. Jeffrey Berman, Narcissism and the Novel (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 1.

30. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 144.

31. For a broad discussion of theoretical and clinical support for the origin of artistic production in narcissistic compensations, see Lynne Layton and Barbara Ann Schapiro, eds., “Introduction,” in Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature and the Psychology of Self (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 1-35.

32. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Re constitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 15.

33. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), points out: ”Heart of Darkness was, among other things, an early expression of what was to become a worldwide revulsion from the horrors of Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo” (139). Captain Otto Lutken, a Danish sea captain who had commanded ships on the upper Congo for eight years, wrote a response to Conrad’s work: “It is in the picture Conrad draws of Kurtz, the tropenkollered [maddened by heat] white man, that his authorship rises supreme. The man is lifelike and convincing—heavens, how I know him! I have met one or two ‘Kurtzs’ in my time in Africa, and I can see him now,” (from London Mercury 22 (1930): 350). Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 259, points out that “much of the horror either depicted or suggested in Heart of Darkness represents not what Conrad saw but rather his reading of the literature that exposed Leopold’s bloody system between Conrad’s return to England and his composition of the novella.” Conrad wrote in the context of this British expose literature, and he wrote for the reading public that was responding to such literature. Chinua Ach-ebe’s, “Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782-94, is a useful corrective to many over idealizations of Conrad’s clearly compromised moral posture. But Achebe’s argument should not prompt us to overlook the propaganda effect present in the work’s historical context. The novel written with Ford Madox Hueffer, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925), is aggressively explicit in expressing emphatic repulsion with Leopold’s imperialism.