Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community

284 Pages·2017·2.344 MB·English

by  Barry Sheils, Julie Walsh (eds.)

NARCISSISM, MELANCHOLIA AND
THE SUBJECT OF COMMUNITY
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EDITED BY BARRY SHEILS AND JULIE WALSH
Studies in the Psychosocial
Series editors
Stephen Frosh
Dept of Psychosocial Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
London, UK
Peter Redman
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
Wendy Hollway
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
Studies in the Psychosocial seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic
and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in
each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of
a single dialectical process. As such it can be understood as an interdisci-
plinary field in search of transdisciplinary objects of knowledge. Studies
in the Psychosocial is also distinguished by its emphasis on affect, the
irrational and unconscious processes, often, but not necessarily, under-
stood psychoanalytically. Studies in the Psychosocial aims to foster the
development of this field by publishing high quality and innovative
monographs and edited collections. The series welcomes submissions
from a range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary orientations,
including sociology, social and critical psychology, political science, post-
colonial studies, feminist studies, queer studies, management and organi-
zation studies, cultural and media studies and psychoanalysis. However,
in keeping with the inter- or transdisciplinary character of psychosocial
analysis, books in the series will generally pass beyond their points of
origin to generate concepts, understandings and forms of investigation
that are distinctively psychosocial in character.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14464
Barry Sheils • Julie Walsh
Editors
Narcissism,
Melancholia and
the Subject of
Community
Editors
Barry Sheils Julie Walsh
Department of English Studies Department of Psychosocial and
Durham University Psychoanalytic Studies
Durham, UK University of Essex
Colchester, UK
Studies in the Psychosocial
ISBN 978-3-319-63828-7 ISBN 978-3-319-63829-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63829-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956122
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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Cover illustration: ‘Narcissus’ (1948) by Lucian Freud (1922–2011)
Image credit: Bridgemann Art Library
Photo credit: Tate, London 2016
Printed on acid-free paper
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Acknowledgements
This book emerged from the ‘Narcissism and Melancholia: Reflections
on a Century’ symposium held at the University of Warwick in 2015. We
would like to acknowledge the contribution of everyone who partici-
pated in this event, especially that of the late John Forrester whose ques-
tion ‘what might a community of narcissists look like?’ helped establish
the parameters of the volume. We would also like to thank the estate of
Lucian Freud for permission to reproduce ‘Narcissus’ as the cover image.
Chapter 4 was first published in Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and
Culture, Media, Groups, Politics. Number 62, September 2011: 111–133.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject
of Community 1
Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh
2 Narcissism and Melancholia from the Psychoanalytical
Perspective of Object Relations 41
Michael Rustin
3 Narcissism Through the Digital Looking Glass 65
Jay Watts
4 Something to Do with a Girl Named Marla Singer:
Capitalism, Narcissism, and Therapeutic Discourse
in David Fincher’s Fight Club 91
Lynne Layton
5 Melancholia, the Death Drive and Into the Wild 119
Derek Hook
vii
viii Contents
6 The Monster in the Mirror: Theoretical and Clinical
Reflections on Primary Narcissism and Melancholia 145
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
7 Shame, Pain and Melancholia for the Australian
Constitution 161
Juliet B. Rogers
8 Dr Fanon on Colonial Narcissism and Anti-Colonial
Melancholia 185
Colin Wright
9 ‘This Nothing Held in Common’: Towards a Theory
of Activism Beyond the Community of One 211
Barry Watt
10 Neurotic and Paranoid Citizens 235
Stephen Frosh
11 Narcissism, Melancholia and the Exhaustion
of the ‘Journeying’ Subject 255
Anastasios Gaitanidis
Index 269
1
Introduction: Narcissism, Melancholia
and the Subject of Community
Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh
Therapy
Trying to see you
my eyes grow
confused
it is not your face
they are seeking
fingering through your spaces
like a hungry child
even now
I do not want
to make a poem
I want to make you
more and less
a part
from my self.
B. Sheils (*)
Department of English Studies, Durham University, Durham, UK
J. Walsh (*)
University of Essex, Colchester, UK
© The Author(s) 2017 1
B. Sheils, J. Walsh (eds.), Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community,
Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63829-4_1
2 B. Sheils and J. Walsh
Let us begin by saying that the address of Audre Lorde’s poem ‘Therapy’
(2000, 281) is at once narcissistic and melancholic. By confusing the self
with the other, as well as admitting confusion about what is lost of the
other in the self, it enacts a process of identification that is both appro-
priative and impoverishing. ‘I want to make you/more and less’, Lorde
writes, surprising us with a contradiction, which is then amplified by the
concluding couplet, ‘a part/from myself’. Where we expect separation
(more or less), we find illogical conjunction; where we expect the fusion
of self and other (a part/of my self), we find fragmentation. The title sug-
gests that the predicament of the poem is clinical; however, the ramifica-
tions are more broadly cultural. It asks the question, how does an ego get
formed through its relation to the other? And, more paradoxically, how is
the space between the self and the other maintained by a desire that con-
tinually moves to collapse it? By wanting to make you, as Lorde’s speaker
claims, I want to create a space to contain my wanting. The spaces, then,
which the speaker’s eyes ‘finger through’ in this poem, are neither internal
nor external; rather they constitute the moving boundary between the
‘inside’ and the ‘outside’.
Likewise, Sigmund Freud’s twin papers, ‘On Narcissism: An
Introduction’ (1914) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917 [1915]),
take as their formative concern the difficulty of setting apart the ‘inner’
and the ‘outer’ worlds, and of preserving a stable image of a boundaried
self. As Samuel Weber puts it, paying tribute to the way the unconscious
always places us beyond ourselves, ‘the relation of self and other, inner
and outer, cannot be grasped as an interval between polar opposites but
rather as an irreducible dislocation of the subject in which the other
inhabits the self as the condition of possibility’ (2000, 68). Narcissism
and melancholia attend to the vicissitudes of this inhabitation. Both
terms, metapsychologically understood, address the difficulty of drawing
lines between the self and the world: the narcissist who declares ‘I am the
world, and the world is me’ obliterates the very distinction; the melan-
cholic, famously in Freud’s formulation, expresses a worldly impoverish-
ment as a self-destitution, object-loss is transformed into ego-loss: ‘In
mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in
melancholia it is the ego itself’ (M&M, 246). To speak of narcissistic or
melancholic identifications, then, is to explore how we are made through