Beyond the Pleasure Principle (8 page)

It is perhaps not entirely superfluous for me to emphasize that in describing women's love-life in these terms I am not remotely animated by any bias inclining me to disparage women. Quite apart from the fact that bias of any kind is alien to me, I am also well aware that these different patterns of development reflect the differentiation of functions within an extremely complex biological nexus; furthermore, I am quite ready to concede that there are innumerable women who love on the male pattern and also develop the sexual over-valuation characteristic of it.

Even for those women who remain narcissistic, and cool in their response to men, there is a path that can lead them to full object-love. In the child that they bear, they encounter a part of their own body as a distinct and separate object upon which, on the basis of their narcissism, they can now bestow full object-love. Then there are other women who do not need to wait for a child in order to progress from (secondary) narcissism to object-love. These are women who, prior to puberty, feel themselves to be male and manage up to a certain point to develop in a male way; their efforts in this direction are abandoned once female sexual maturity comes upon them – but
they thereafter remain capable of yearning for a male ideal, which really amounts to a perpetuation of the boy-like being that they themselves once were.

A brief summary of the various paths to object-choice may serve to bring these adumbrations to a close.

We love one or other of the following:

Category c) of the first type can only be substantiated at a later stage in the argument.

The significance of narcissistic object-choice in the case of male homosexuality remains to be discussed in a separate context.

The primary narcissism of the child that we have postulated, and that constitutes one of the premisses of our libido theories, can be more easily inferred from other factors than captured by direct observation. When one looks at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, one cannot but recognize it as a resurgence and repetition of their own long-abandoned narcissism. The trusty characteristic of ‘over-valuation’, which we have already discussed as a distinctive marker of narcissism in the context of object-choice, predominates in this affective relationship, as is universally known. There is accordingly a compulsion to ascribe to the child all conceivable perfections, something for which dispassionate observation would find no cause, and to conceal and forget all its faults – indeed it is in this context that denial of child sexuality has its place. However, there is also a tendency when faced by the child to suspend
all the cultural accretions that we ourselves came to accept only in the teeth of opposition from our narcissism, and to reassert through the child our long-abandoned claims to rights and privileges. Things are to be better for the child than they were for its parents; it is to be saved from subjection to those imperatives that we have accepted as paramount in life. Disease, death, the forgoing of sensual pleasure, the curbing of one's own will – none of this is to apply to the child; the laws of nature and of society are to stop at its door; it really is to become the very core and centre of creation once again:
His Majesty the Baby
,
²⁹
as we once thought ourselves to be. The child is to fulfil all the wishful dreams that its parents dreamed but never realized; it is to become a great man and great hero as proxy for the father, or get a prince for a husband as belated compensation for the mother. That most precarious aspiration of the narcissist scheme of things – immortality of the ego, so gravely threatened by sheer reality – is rendered secure by finding refuge in the child. Parental love, so touching yet essentially so childlike, is nothing other than the resurgent narcissism of the parents, which in its transformation into object-love unmistakably reveals its original nature.

There are certain questions that I should like to leave to one side for the time being since they represent an important area of study that has still not been fully dealt with: questions as to what disruptions the primal narcissism in children is prey to, what reactions it displays in resisting them, and what paths it is forced along in the process. The most significant part of all this can be identified as ‘castration complex’ (penis-fear in the boy, penis-envy in the girl), and can be dealt with in conjunction with the effects of sexual intimidation during infancy. Psychoanalytical research, which normally serves as the means for us to track the various fates of the libidinal drives when they have become isolated from the ego drives and then find themselves in conflict with them, allows us in this present context to draw inferences as to the nature of an earlier stage and psychic situation in which both sets of drives manifest themselves in harmonious interaction and indissoluble combination with each other as narcissistic interests. It was on the basis of this nexus that Alfred Adler arrived at his ‘masculine protest’, which he elevates to the status of being almost the sole driving force behind the formation of personality and neuroses alike, whilst grounding it not in a narcissistic, i.e. still libidinal impulse, but in a social value-judgement. The standpoint of psychoanalytical research has been to acknowledge from the outset both the existence and the importance of the ‘masculine protest’, but to argue, in opposition to Adler, that it is narcissistic in nature, and has its origins in the castration complex. It pertains to character-formation, to the genesis of which it contributes along with many other factors, and as such is wholly irrelevant to the elucidation of problems concerning
neuroses, the only noteworthy aspect of which for Adler is the way they serve the ego-interest. I find it quite impossible to suppose that the genesis of neurosis rests solely on the slender basis of the castration complex, no matter how powerfully the latter may manifest itself amongst the resistances displayed by men to treatment of their neuroses. I might add, too, that cases of neurosis are known to me in which the ‘masculine protest’ or, in our terms, the castration complex, plays no pathogenic role, or indeed is entirely absent.

Observation of the normal adult shows his erstwhile megalomania to be much reduced, whilst the psychic characteristics from which we inferred his infantile narcissism are scarcely distinguishable. What then has become of his ego-libido? Are we to suppose that it was entirely absorbed by object-cathexes? Such a possibility clearly contradicts the entire thrust of our argument. But we can find pointers to a quite different answer to this question in the psychology of repression.

We have learned that libidinal drive-impulses are subject to the fate of pathogenic repression when they come into conflict with the individual's cultural and ethical notions. What we understand by this is
not
that the individual has a merely intellectual awareness that these notions exist, but rather that he fully accepts them as his own yardstick and fully submits to the demands that they entail. As we have said, repression emanates from the ego; or, to put it more precisely, from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses, desires that one human being will readily entertain, or at least consciously process, will be rejected by another with utter indignation, or be stifled before they even enter consciousness. However, the difference between the two, which reflects the conditions in which repression takes place, can easily be expressed in terms enabling us to resolve the issue by means of the libido theory. We can postulate that the one individual has set up an
ideal
within himself against which he measures his actual ego,
³⁰
whereas the other has formed no such ideal. On this view, the formation of an ideal
³¹
constitutes the necessary condition on the part of the ego for repression to take place.

It is this ideal ego that is now the recipient of the self-love enjoyed
during childhood by the real ego. The individual's narcissism appears to be transferred onto this new ideal ego which, like the infantile one, finds itself possessed of every estimable perfection. Here too, as is ever the case in matters of the libido, human beings have proved incapable of forgoing gratification once they have enjoyed it. They are unwilling to forsake the narcissistic perfection of their childhood, and when – discomfited by the admonitions raining down on them while they are developing, and with their powers of judgement duly awakened – they fail to retain that perfection, they seek to retrieve it in the new guise of the ego-ideal. What they project as their ideal for the future is a surrogate for the lost narcissism of their childhood, during which they were their own ideal.

It is appropriate at this point to explore the ways in which this forming of an ideal relates to sublimation.
Sublimation
is a process involving object-libido, and consists in a drive latching on to a different goal far removed from sexual gratification, the main aim here being to divert attention away from the sexual.
Idealization
is a process involving the object itself, whereby the object is magnified and exalted in the individual's mind without itself changing in nature. This idealization can occur within the domains of both ego-libido and object-libido. Thus, for instance, sexual over-valuation of an object constitutes an idealization of that object. To the extent, therefore, that sublimation has to do with drives whereas idealization has to do with objects, the two concepts need to be clearly distinguished from each other.

The formation of ego-ideals is frequently confused with the sublimation of drives, to the considerable detriment of our understanding. Just because someone has traded his narcissism for veneration of an exalted ego-ideal does not necessarily mean that he has managed to sublimate his libidinal drives. The ego-ideal certainly demands such sublimation, but cannot force it to happen; sublimation remains a separate process that may be triggered by the ideal, but then runs its course entirely independently of any such trigger. It is precisely in the case of neurotics that one finds the most electric disparities between the sophistication of their ego-ideal and the degree of sublimation of their primitive libidinal drives; and it is
generally much harder to convince an idealist that his libido is inappropriately located than it is to convince the uncomplicated sort who has remained modest in his expectations. Sublimation and the formation of ideals also play completely different roles in the causation of neurosis. As we have seen, the formation of ideals intensifies the demands of the ego, and is the strongest single factor favouring repression; sublimation represents the let-out whereby such demands can be met
without
recourse to repression.

It would not be surprising were we to come across a special entity
³²
in the psyche charged with ensuring that narcissistic gratification is indeed achieved in accordance with the ego-ideal, and to this end incessantly scrutinizes the actual ego and measures it against the ideal. If indeed such an entity exists, there can be no question of our discovering it as such; all we can do is to assume that it exists, and we may reasonably suppose that the thing we call our
conscience
matches the description. By acknowledging this entity we are better able to understand the so-called object-of-attention delusion or, more correctly, object-of-
scrutiny
delusion, that crops up so conspicuously in the symptomatology of paranoid illnesses, and which may perhaps also occur as a separate illness or as a random element in a transference neurosis. Patients then complain that all their thoughts are known, their actions watched and monitored. They are informed of the workings of this entity by voices, which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she's thinking about that again’, ‘Now he's going away’). The complaint is justified, it depicts the true situation: such a power really does exist, and it exists in all of us in normal life, registering, scrutinizing, criticizing our every intention. Object-of-scrutiny delusions reflect it in a regressive form, thereby revealing both its genesis and the reason why the patient rebels against it. For what first triggered the formation of the ego-ideal – the duly appointed keeper of which is the conscience – was the critical influence of the individual's parents, communicated by voice, who were joined in the course of time by others involved in his upbringing, by his teachers, by the vast and indeterminate mass of all the other people in his milieu (people in general, public opinion).

Large quantities of essentially homosexual libido are drawn on for the purposes of forming the narcissistic ego-ideal, and achieve discharge and gratification through keeping it going thereafter. Conscience is instituted basically as an embodiment first of parental criticism, and subsequently of criticism by society at large, a process that more or less repeats itself in the emergence of repressive tendencies stemming from prohibitions and obstacles initially encountered in the external world. Neurosis then brings to light both the inner voices and the indeterminate mass, and the whole developmental history of the person's conscience is thereby regressively reproduced. However, his recalcitrance against this
censorial entity
derives from the fact that – in full accord with the fundamental nature of his illness – he wants to free himself from all these influences, starting with that of his parents, and withdraws his homosexual libido from them. He then sees his conscience in regressive refraction as a hostile force bearing down on him from outside.

The bitter complaining characteristic of paranoia also demonstrates that the self-criticism expressed via the conscience is essentially all of a piece with the self-scrutiny upon which it is based. The same mental process that has taken on the function of conscience has thus also lent itself to the exploration of the inner self, which is what provides philosophy with the material for its cerebrations. This may well have considerable bearing on the urge to construct speculative systems that is characteristic of paranoia.
³³