The role of repetition in narcissism and self-sacrifice: A Freudian Kleinian reflection on the person’s foundational love of the other

ABSTRACT

Through reexamination of Freud’s thinking on the “compulsion to repeat”, including detailed study of his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), this paper brings to the fore a central tension in Freud’s thinking on the roles narcissism and love in his foundational view of the person. While Freud conceptualizes the person as self-serving, aiming primarily to maximize personal satisfaction in accordance with the “pleasure principle,” he develops an alternative view of the person as primarily loving, desiring to truly encounter the other and reality, even if painful, and guilty when he fails to do so (largely because of conflicting narcissistic/destructive aims). This basic loving desire is associated with Eros and the life instincts, which, counter to what is commonly thought, is what Freud ultimately posits as lying beyond the pleasure principle. From this perspective, narcissistic pleasures become associated with death. The paper goes on to show how while Freud struggled to conceptually ground the view of the person as contending with his desire to love and inevitable inner obstacles to it, Kleinian psychoanalysis takes this view as basic and develops it further. One significant development finds expression in ideas on how the desire to love is not only non-narcissistic, but, rather, is self-sacrificing. Clinical implications are noted.

KEYWORDS:

• Riviere
• death instinct
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• repetition compulsion
• narcissism
• sacrifice

Notes

1 It should be noted, however, that the topic of repetition compulsion has been addressed from many other angles and has been central to analytic discourse past and present (e.g., Lafarge 2019; Reis 2019; Šebek 2019).

2 I should emphasize here that I understand the “beyond” in “beyond the pleasure principle” to refer something out of accord with, or opposed to, what exists, not merely additional to it. As Freud sets out to understand how to explain what appears to be a human inclination to repeat unpleasurable events it is clear that this is the sense of the term that he had in mind.

3 Freud here is especially concerned with the other being different. He writes: “the same animalculae which inevitably perished if they were crowded together in their own nutrient fluid flourished in a solution which was over-saturated with the waste products of a distantly related species” (1920, 48).

4 It is significant that Freud here uses the same term he used to describe the process occurring in repetition compulsion – the term “binding” – to describe the very different phenomenon of the activity of Eros.

5 Although in Leonardo Freud already has the term “Eros” in mind, referring to it “as the preserver of all living things” (70). Its use in this text may be seen to be the beginning of his occasional and non-conceptual use of the term prior to 1920.

6 Thus, says Freud, psychoanalysis admonishes the ego: “Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself! Then you will understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps, you will avoid falling ill in future” (1917, 143).

7 The change to this motivation is associated also with a change in the nature of the prototypical events (from trauma-related to desire-related) and a change in the quality of pain and danger, here not associated with flooding.

8 It is important to note that in his (1937) “Analysis terminable and interminable” Freud ties the fact that so many people experience guilt and negative therapeutic reactions to the existence of a death instinct. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that he here brings together his economic and the object-relational models. The pulls towards the experience of guilt and towards restoring an initial state of inertia are not compatible. It would seem, rather, that in connecting guilt and the death instinct Freud was making two other statements. First, he was making a statement on human existence and thinking, emphasizing that is not “exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure” (243) – another kind of force is coming into play. Second, he was positing an inborn aggressive drive, which would account for the pervasiveness of guilt. It is also noteworthy that this paper was written one year after Joan Riviere’s paper on the negative therapeutic reaction. As it has been argued that Freud had Riviere in mind in describing in the “Ego and the id” patients exhibiting the negative therapeutic reaction (see Blass 2019b), it may be suggested that a latent dialogue between Freud and Riviere is taking place through Freud’s comments of 1937, which I refer to here.

9 There is much room for further reflection on the nature of this sacrificial stance that Riviere through Freud and Klein articulates. In this context, one important point to bear in mind is the close tie between self and object that is posited as part of the grounds of this Kleinian approach. Internal objects are thought to be not only within the self, but also what the self comprises. They constitute the self; and thus, to annihilate an inner object or to save them is, in part, also to do this to oneself (Blass 2014). There is a shared destiny and this shapes in part the nature and meaning of self-sacrifice. What one does for the object, one does also for oneself and vice versa. And yet there is also a difference between self and object. The self also hates the object, the frustration, envy and sense of dependence it arouses (even if the object is internal). Here, too, the Freudian roots of these underpinnings are enriching. They find expression most clearly in Freud’s (1915) “Thoughts for the times on war and death”. There he contends that primeval man first came to know that he himself will actually die in the pain he felt as he “saw someone who belonged to him die—his wife, his child, his friend—whom he undoubtedly loved as we love ours”. Freud continues: “His whole being revolted against the admission; for each of these loved ones was, after all, a part of his own beloved ego.” “But, on the other hand,” Freud adds, “deaths such as these pleased him as well, since in each of the loved persons there was also something of the stranger” (293).