The deconstruction of primary narcissism

Abstract

The author examines Winnicott ’s contribution to Freud ’s concept of primary narcissism. In Mourning and melancholia, Freud laid the foundations for this contribution, but it was Winnicott who turned it into a clinically useful concept. There are three of Winnicott’s ideas that can be seen as preliminary stages to his theory of transitional phenomena and illusion. They serve as an introduction to thinking about the analysis of the analysand ’s primary narcissism and the theoretical prerequisites that make the interpretation of primary narcissism possible. Through the exploration of three main points in Winnicott’s writings the author shows how Winnicott’s conceptualizations are both new and a continuation of Freud ’s thinking. His ideas are thus part of the overall theoretical pattern of Freud ’s metapsychology. The three main points are as follows:

1. In bringing maternal care and the presence of the psychic environment into the construction of primary narcissism, Winnicott made it possible to analyse narcissism. His ideas enable us to stand back from the characteristic solipsism of narcissism, which holds that everything comes from the self and only from the self. The latter concept tends to eliminate the role of the object and environment in the construction of the self. At the same time, by deconstructing the way in which the self is infiltrated by a certain number of narcissistic postulates, Winnicott made it possible to interpret the theory of narcissism itself.

2. Between the individual and the sense of self, Winnicott inserted the maternal object and her function as a mirror of affects who acts as a medium for the organization of self‐identity. Primary identity is established through the construction and elimination of a narcissistic identification that becomes meaningful in the context of a primary homosexual relationship functioning as a ‘double’.

3. A process of differentiation that governs the discovery of the object is in a dialectical relationship with narcissistic identification. That process can be understood only in terms of the responses made by the primary psychic environment to the baby’s primary aggression.

Key words:

• creativeness
• destructiveness
• found‐created object
• illusion
• messenger‐drive
• narcissism
• negative illusion
• primary narcissistic illusion
• objectification
• reality‐testing
• subjectification
• the double

Notes

1. I call her ‘Echo’ in memory of the way in which Narcissus treated Echo’s love and affection, causing her to feel ashamed, to become anorectic and to wither away.

2. All the children in that [large] family were in trouble of some kind or another: drug addiction, psychosis and antisocial behaviour were some of the ‘solutions’ that they had implemented.

3. Enactment.

4. For a fuller discussion of this particular example, see Roussillon (2002).

5. The trouve–créé is a term in French that is not a direct translation of Winnicott’s terminology. However, it has recently been widely used in the French psychoanalytic literature and refers to Winnicott’s conceptualization of the process involved in ‘creating the object’.

6. For more details on this point, see Roussillon (2001).

7. See Meltzer (1975).

8. Although the beginnings of this formulation can be seen in his earlier work (Winnicott, 1945).

9. In my view, disillusion is a slow process which does not destroy the capacity to delude oneself (as happens in melancholia, for example). Here illusion is ‘reversed’ such that it is always its negative aspect that is seen. In French, we would say: ‘Voir tout en noir’ [to look on the black side of everything]. This is the opposite of idealization: everything that can be expected of other people will turn out to be bad. This stems from very early disappointment with respect to one’s expectations; thereafter it is better not to expect anything so as not to risk more pain. Negative illusion destroys expectations.