(Studies in The Psychosocial) Barry Sheils, Julie Walsh (Eds.) - Narcissism, Melancholia and The Subject of Community-Palgrave Macmillan (2017)

NARCISSISM, MELANCHOLIA AND
THE SUBJECT OF COMMUNITY
STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL
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
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Cover illustration: ‘Narcissus’ (1948) by Lucian Freud (1922–2011)

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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
1 Introduction: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject... 3
our passionate entanglements with others beyond our selves in ways that
eschew a settled reading of the ‘beyond’ in question. Allowing for great
interpretative elasticity, psychoanalytic theories of narcissism and melan-
cholia call into question the story of the contained, unit-self whose
known contours signal her possession of secure borders. They are also
terms of import for cultural analysis.
Whilst it is true that the term narcissism especially has come to be
deployed in ways that seem foreign to the complexities of Freud’s 1914
paper (by its reduction to a personality disorder for example), it remains
the case that neither narcissism nor melancholia can be thought about
today without expressing some debt to Freudian metapsychology.
However, whereas Freud was most evidently concerned to describe the
structure of ego-formation, many subsequent commentators have pre-
ferred to emphasize the cultural and normative dimensions of the terms.
If we consider their respective discursive histories, we can see that narcis-
sism and melancholia have been put to work in very different ways (see
more later in the chapter), and yet remain grounded by a shared concern
with modes of relation and identification. This shared concern, we would
suggest, is the basis upon which they’ve been most productively reani-
mated in recent years: the rise of melancholia as a critical aid to the study
of cultural displacement and dispossession (Khanna 2003; Gilroy 2005;
Butler 1997, 2004; Frosh 2013), and the determined redemption of nar-
cissism from its pejorative characterization as fundamentally anti-social
(Bersani 2010; DeArmitt 2014; Lunbeck 2014; Walsh 2015). What is
most noteworthy in this post-Freudian literature is the increasing rele-
vance of metapsychology to social and political theory, especially for the
purpose of theorising a reflexive and embodied subjectivity.
Significantly, Lorde’s ‘Therapy’, which, we suggest, returns us to the
formative dilemmas of Freudian metapsychology (both narcissistic and
melancholic), also carries the resonance of particular socio-political histo-
ries. Lorde begins by rejecting the self-evidence of the lyric ‘I’, insisting
rather on the confusions that condition her identity as a mid-twentieth-
century American poet who is not predictably white, or male, or straight:
‘Trying to see you/my eyes grow/confused’. She substitutes the ‘I’ with
‘growing eyes’, effortless expressivity with endeavor, and in each succes-
sive line de-stabilizes the ground of the line that went before: ‘my eyes
grow/confused/it is not your face/they are seeking’. ‘They’ are mine (my
eyes looking at you), yet ‘they’ are also plural and alien looking for some-
one other than you: ‘they’ are the instruments of both internal and exter-
nal regard.
Emerging from these estranging, mirroring relations is the contempla-
tion of a disregarded face, suggestive of an unrecognizable poet whose
desire is forced by historical circumstance to exceed the making of what is
standardly recognized as ‘a poem’. At the centre of Lorde’s endeavor lies
the psychoanalytic image of the feeding infant, uncertain of the differ-
ence between self and [m]other: every desiring ‘I’, it is implied, is ‘like a
hungry child’. And yet we are trusted to concede, through the terms of
our own self-regard, that a particular ‘hungry child’, racialized and sexu-
alized in a particular way, and given particular historical coordinates, is
not like every ‘I’. It is this joint articulation of therapeutic universality on
the one hand (we are all hungry, desirous children) and historical speci-
ficity on the other, which frames the endeavor of this volume. Against the
standardizing tendency within the grammar of metapsychology, we ask
how the concepts of narcissism and melancholia can be used to inform
and express historical difference today.
Terms and Conditions
Freud wrote ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ and ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’ in the space of three years, from 1913 to 1915, though the
latter paper wasn’t published until 1917. Despite their temporal proxim-
ity and shared commitment to untangling the same metapsychological
knots, the papers are remarkably different in tone and style. By the writer’s
own admission, ‘On Narcissism’ had a difficult birth, proving something
of a Frankensteinian monster, bursting at the seams with an overabun-
dance of material.1 But then came ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, ready to
be considered the more beautiful sister paper. The reception histories of
each text tell us something further about the power of this distinction of
style, since, whilst the former has been variously challenged, dismissed
or declared theoretically impenetrable, the latter has more often been
appreciated for a few of its most elegant formulations—formulations

derived from the convenient provision of a binary (mourning as opposed
to melancholia), which the narcissism paper conspicuously lacks.2 This
introductory chapter is not the place to visit in great detail the intricacies
of each paper, but it is worth setting out in précis, insofar as that’s possi-
ble, the formative challenges they present for a reader who is concerned to
tie questions of ego-formation to those of social relation.
We can begin with ‘On Narcissism’, the theoretical ramifications of
which can be helpfully enumerated:
(1) In positioning the different functions of narcissism in the male and

female negotiations of the Oedipus complex, the paper adds weight and
detail to Freud’s theories of the development of sexuality and in particular
to the ongoing problem of feminine psychology. (2) In providing an early
exposition of the ego-ideal, which foreshadows the development of the
superego (1923), it carves out an important space for later theorizing on
the relationship between narcissism and an account of culture. (3) In
exploring the twin characteristics of ‘megalomania’ and ‘a withdrawal of
interest from the external world’, it sharpens the distinction between the
transference neuroses and the narcissistic neuroses, and establishes narcis-
sism’s proximity to psychosis (and schizophrenia). (4) It reflects an impor-
tant alteration in Freud’s theory of the instincts, leading some to observe
that it represents the first systematic shift from id-psychology to ego-
psychology. (5) In outlining the availability of alternative object-choices
and describing the vicissitudes of each, it opens up avenues for investigat-
ing the development of intersubjectivity under the rubric of (what would
become) object relations theory. (6) In making frequent reference to terms
such as self-regard, self-esteem and self-contentment, it suggests a particu-
lar understanding of the concept of the self, which would come to have a
bearing both on the development of neo-Freudian strands of psychoanaly-
sis (e.g., the self psychology of Heinz Kohut), and, arguably, on the cultural
and discursive reverence for ‘selfhood’ in association with the narcissism of
late modernity. (7) Perhaps most problematically, by insisting on the uni-
versal state of primary narcissism, as the state to which the libido is driven
to recover, Freud’s paper of 1914 makes important connections with both
the incorporative features of mourning and melancholia (1917 [1915]),
and the ‘return to stasis’ of the death drive (1920). (Walsh 2015, 15)3
This brief catalogue gives us some impression of the diversity of the

paper’s speculations, but it’s the last point of connection—the idea of a
withdrawal of libido onto the object of the ego—that provides the most
important link between the terms of this volume.
Melancholia, as already suggested, comes equipped with its own oppo-
site, healthy mourning; it has also, on occasion, been placed as narcis-
sism’s necessary other, where narcissism connotes the fantasy of fullness
and self-sufficiency, and melancholia records the constitutive lack at the
heart of all subjectivity. But such a neat separation, we would suggest
from the outset, is more rhetorical than factual: in fact, Freud makes very
plain that melancholia tends regressively towards narcissism (MM, 250).
As the counterpoint to so-called healthy mourning and ‘working through’,
melancholia prefigures the conception of the death-drive with its ten-
dency to daemonic repetitions—through what Freud calls the ‘dissatis-
faction with the ego on moral grounds’ (MM, 248). Furthermore, it
exemplifies the mechanism of unconscious incorporation; by incorporat-
ing the lost object, transferring an impoverishment in the world to an
impoverishment in the ego, the melancholic unconsciously enacts a ver-
sion of narcissistic self-attachment. The libido released by the lost object
gets drawn back into the ego and binds the ego in identification with
what is missing.
Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could hence-
forth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the for-
saken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss
and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage
between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identifica-
tion. (MM, 249)
The shadow of the object falling upon the ego is a typically Freudian
refrain, insofar as it does not console us with a single meaning. From one
perspective, melancholia constitutes a denial of loss—I keep the other alive
inside myself. This, Freud warns us, has delightfully punitive consequences
due to the force of ambivalence—I hate loving you because you’ve aban-
doned me; I love hating you because you’re still here. A love object that can-
not be given up becomes the occasion for an ‘enjoyable’ self-hatred once
it imaginatively inhabits the confines of a single breast.
From another perspective, however, the same melancholic praxis of

self-berating reveals more than it denies. Instead of only being a disavowal
of loss, melancholia also connects us to the psychoanalytic rudiments of
ego-formation. This is indicated by another of Freud’s refrains: the mel-
ancholic ‘knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him’ (245).
Whereas so-called healthy mourning entails a conscious absorption in the
work of separating the lost object from the self, by finding reparative,
substitutive objects, melancholia persists in a state of confusion; (though
at this point we might want to soften the conceptual distinction in Freud’s
paper on the grounds that all meaningful losses trouble what we think we
know). Whether it is an actual death, the end of a love affair, the secession
of a country from a political union or a more enigmatic shift in circum-
stance, the lost object is difficult to define—it is never simply itself. To
take a commonplace example: when a man dies, it is not simply the man
who is lost; rather, we might have lost a greater, symbolic value that the
man has come to represent (fatherhood or authority, for example), or
instead a more minor characteristic that the man has been considered to
possess (the way he laughed for example, or his uneven gait). In this way,
because the contours of the lost object are not fixed, ordinary loss is
always ambiguously defined. In melancholia, this ordinary ambiguity is
exacerbated by the operation of incorporation, in which the double elu-
siveness of the lost object (not only missing but also ambiguously delin-
eated) is translated back into the terms of self-definition.
The melancholic ‘knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in
him’ (245); in other words, not only does he suffer the epistemological
uncertainty of not knowing the limits of the lost object, but he suffers,
additionally, the inconvenience of having to make room, in some sense to
become, this ill-defined other. Here we glimpse the becoming of oneself
through irregular imbrication with others. And we find a complementary
process at work in the ‘On Narcissism’ paper when Freud offers us the
imprecise formulation of a ‘new psychical action’ to be added to the auto-
erotic instincts, ‘in order to bring about narcissism’. (ON, 77). Although
it is clear that the self can only conceive of itself through the supplement
of the outside (where the ‘new’ resides), it remains fundamentally unclear
what form this self will take.
It will become apparent across this volume that both of Freud’s papers
return us to the intricacies and insecurities of ego-formation, but there is
no easy consensus regarding their implications for clinical practice or for
culture more broadly. That said, all the chapters in this volume return to
metapsychology to interrogate its value for social thought. In the century
since the papers were composed, narcissism and melancholia have crossed
the psycho-social divide in a variety of ways. To begin with narcissism:
whereas psychoanalysis has always been equipped (though not necessarily
inclined) to appreciate the normalcy of narcissistic fantasy and to speak
of the necessity of healthy narcissism, within the sociological landscape
this has not always been the case. When we look to the sociological litera-
ture, we don’t find many positive appraisals of the narcissist. Finding a
high point—more probably a low point—in Christopher Lasch’s damn-
ing attack on the New (American) Narcissist of the 1970s, narcissism
became, for a while, the prevalent metaphor for the crisis in contempo-
rary Western culture, and a place-holder for all manner of malaise:
impoverished social relations, a weak public culture, permissive or con-
fessional politics and the triumph of the therapeutic (Lasch 1991 [1979]).
It is fair to say that narcissism’s currency became so embroiled with the
lamentations of this mid-to-late twentieth-century cultural criticism that
the pleasures of narcissistic seduction, and the possibilities of narcissistic
sociability acknowledged by Freud, were almost entirely overlooked.4
Commentaries on this discursive history have tended to identify nar-
cissism as the dominant cultural diagnosis of Western society from the
period of the 1970s to the 1990s, following which there was a discern-
ible turn to melancholia (Frosh 2016; Jacobsen 2016; Walsh 2015). As
Frosh narrates it, ‘narcissism was perhaps the term of choice for examin-
ing the problem of forging relationships that feel meaningful in the con-
text of rapid change and neo-liberal expansions; then melancholia was
(and is) drawn on to conceptualize the challenge of confronting loss and
colonial theft […]’ (2016, 1). Acknowledging that the mourning and
melancholia framework was deployed as a category of social analysis as
early as 1967 in the Mitscherliches’ seminal text The Inability to
Mourn (1975), it is true to say that the new millennium brought with it
a renewed appetite for melancholia. As Frosh suggests, this often took
place within the context of decolonizing critique; for example, Paul
Gilroy’s writing on postcolonial melancholia, which redirected the work

of the Mitscherliches by positing the melancholic’s disavowal of loss and
resulting self-hatred as a structural model for thinking about the British
response to the end of empire (2005, 87–88). It is further notable that
in the year 2000, David L. Eng could observe that, Fanon aside, ‘little
[had] been written on the question of racial difference and melancholia’
until the emergence of work by Ann Anlin Cheng and José Esteban
Muñoz—today it is fairly stated that racial melancholia studies com-
prises an academic field in its own right.5
This important shift from the almost-default Americanism of mid-
century critiques of narcissism to the more recent use of melancholy
within critical-postcolonial and race studies, has been accompanied by a
further discursive rehabilitation of melancholia through feminist and
queer scholarship (notably Judith Butler 1997, 2004, 2005; and Douglas
Crimp 2002). Significantly, the use of the mourning and melancholia
framework here has been less concerned to diagnose as pathological cul-
tural disavowals of loss (e.g., the British denial of a changing world order),
than to detect the operation of melancholia within the formation of criti-
cal subjects. If narcissism and melancholia have both conventionally been
taken to signify rigidity, symptomatic of a closed economy of desire, then
queer melancholia is more readily associated with modes of openness and
not-knowing that correlate to expressions of ambivalence. The melan-
cholic turn, suggests Butler, returning our eye to the metapsychological
level, is the process by which ‘one makes of oneself an object for reflec-
tion; in the course of producing one’s alterity, one becomes established as
a reflexive being’ (1997, 22). Through this reflexivity all cultural diagnos-
tic practices are called into question, most tellingly those patrician cri-
tiques that would seek to denounce so-called identity politics on the
grounds of narcissism, whilst at the same time disavowing their own pro-
cesses of identification (i.e., those critics—mostly men—who uphold the
faith in the impersonality of the social order while refusing to interrogate
the privilege of their own subject positions within it). The recent ascen-
dency of melancholia is of a piece with the need for a political language
that addresses the themes of displacement and dispossession. The ques-
tion that the melancholic subject never directly asks herself, but that she
carries around with her at all times, what have I incorporated in order
to be? (or, what amorphous lost object occupies the space of myself?) is none-
theless posed through the reflexivity of her actions and expressions. Even
if she doesn’t resolve upon fixed critical positions (the diagnosis of all
society), the queer melancholic generates critical practices.
Moving away from the generality of negative critique, then, recent
attempts to think metapsychologically about such terms as hospitality,
exile, border control, and parasitism—including those collected in the
essays here—have tended to draw from art, literature and other cultural
forms to describe the intimate politics of inclusion and exclusion. This is
not to discount broad structural analyses of melancholic (or narcissistic)
societies undertaken in the mode of the Mitscherliches and Gilroy, but it
is to admit a different point of emphasis. Butler’s focus is on melancholia
as the ‘mechanism by which the distinction between internal and external
worlds is instituted’: it creates a ‘variable boundary between the psychic
and the social […]’ (171). Though this ‘variable boundary’ is described
here in spatial terms, it must also be considered temporally in recognition
of the shifting relations between the past, the present and the future.
These shifting horizons will have further implications for our understand-
ing of community. Often consigned to the past within modern social
critique (and reduced to a fantasy object of nostalgia), it is our ambition
in this volume to recover community’s character as both interstitial and
intermittent. By attempting to address these characteristics, one inevita-
bly finds oneself occupying the ‘variable boundary’ in often-uncomfortable
ways. As we’ve already suggested, we prefer to view this uncertain occupa-
tion as both melancholic and narcissistic, insisting that, minimally, these
terms can be productively confused. The ‘new psychical mechanism’,
which for Freud makes narcissism possible, might also be conceived as
the means by which the embodied query of melancholia—what have we
lost?—will be productively reprised as: what will we become?
Identifying Community
‘If a community is based on agreement upon a few cardinal points’, Freud
once wrote, ‘it is obvious that people who have abandoned that common
ground will cease to belong to it’ (1925, 53). When we’re informed, in
this fashion, that something is ‘obvious’, it’s good practice to pause for
thought. For now then, let’s bracket any desire to know the context of
Freud’s common-sense statement, and simply put it to work as a provoca-
tion for our ongoing discussion. In doing so, we will approach a series of
questions to be borne in mind over the course of the volume: for exam-
ple, what types of community are imaginable when the cardinal points of
agreement are put under strain? How do non-consensual dynamics—
antagonism and dissent—shape the formation of a community’s self-
image such that belonging can be negotiated across uncommon ground?
And, how is the relationship between the (isolable) figure and (common)
ground unsettled and resettled by acts of ‘abandonment’?
We can note that Freud’s casual formulation positions the individual,
through her action of abandoning the common ground, as turning her
back on the community; in a mode of self-imposed excommunication, it
is the one who abandons the many. More resonant to readers of contem-
porary critical theory, however, might be an inversion of this dynamic
wherein the common ground is pulled out from under the feet of par-
ticular (isolable) figures, displacing them from a state of prior belonging,
or barring a priori their access to a given site of community. If to hold
something in common is also to be held by it, then the risk prevails of
being mishandled, dropped, shunted aside, or let fall through the prover-
bial net. The themes of precarity, dispossession and exilic subjectivities,
having been brought to the fore in much recent critical discourse, focus
our attention on the edges of community—frontier-sites where the con-
tingencies of the ‘always already’ contested claims of identity and belong-
ing are heightened.
Axiomatic to any psychosocially oriented analysis of community is an
appreciation of how the identity of the ‘in-group’ is achieved through the
position of the ‘outsider’, how, in other words, that which is located
beyond a given site of belonging is nonetheless vital as the ‘constitutive
outside’ to the positive term of reference. The familiarity of this logic
should not blind us to the multiplicity of its operations—operations that,
one way or another, return us to the question of identification. If, as
Stuart Hall reminds us, identification ‘turns out to be one of the least
well-understood concepts’, it is perhaps because of the disarming readi-
ness with which we are inclined to understand it: ‘In common sense lan-
guage, identification is constructed on the back of a recognition of some

common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or
with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity and allegiance
established on this foundation’. Hall argues against the ‘natural’ stability
of group identity: identification, he writes, is ‘a construction, […]—
always ‘in process’ […] the total meaning it suggests is, in fact, a fantasy
of incorporation’. In language that reminds us of the Lorde poem with
which we began, Hall tells us that identification necessarily entails ‘too
much’ or ‘too little’, [there is] ‘never a proper fit, a totality’ (1996, 2–3).
As with Lorde’s act of poesis—‘I want to make you/more and less/a part/
from my self ’—acts of identification produce unstable boundaries.
A psychoanalytic appreciation of identification as a process, then, opens
up the ‘natural closure of solidarity’ by demonstrating how even the most
foundational of identifications (or rather, especially the most founda-
tional—think Oedipus) are rifted by ambivalence, the force of which
becomes a ‘precondition of the institution of any identification’ (Laplanche
and Pontalis 1988, 207). Psychoanalysis postulates a human subject con-
stituted through identifications formed in response to the simultaneous
and at times inseparable coexistence of opposing emotional attitudes—
primarily, love and hate. These arche-antonyms, however, require scrutiny
lest the famous ‘conflict due to ambivalence’ they provoke be taken as the
resting point of an analysis rather than its beginning.6
In her highly influential project of refiguring psychoanalytic ideas and
terminology, Sara Ahmed encourages her readers to consider identifica-
tions as ‘forms of alignment’: ‘thinking of identification as a form of
alignment’ she says ‘shows us how identifications involve dis-identifications
or an active “giving up” of other possible identifications’ (2014, 52). The
orienting strategy here, invaluable for underscoring the translatability of
psychoanalytic theory into a contemporary cultural politics, is to analyze
the means through which bodies are constructed in (and against) contin-
gent, historical discourses such that they come to be (dis)aligned with
certain other bodies. Following Freud in considering the ‘relationship
between ego formation and community’, Ahmed writes:
The ego is established by intimating the lost object of love; it is based on a

principle of a likeness or resemblance or of becoming alike. However, I
would argue that love does not pre-exist identification (just as hate does
not pre-exist dis-identification); so it is not a question of identifying with

those we love and dis-identifying with those we hate. Rather, it is through
forms of identification that align this subject with this other, that the char-
acter of the loved is produced as ‘likeness’ in the first place. […] (2014, 52)
We are being asked to scrutinize how liking and likeness are linked. There
is no inevitable order of play that aligns degrees of emotion (on a spectrum
of love to hate) with the characteristics of resemblance (on a spectrum of
sameness to difference). Rather, the force of the emotion does the work
of producing the object it is regarded as being a response to: ‘What is at
stake in the emotional intensities of love and hate’ writes Ahmed, ‘is the
production of the effect of likeness and unlikeness as characteristics that
are assumed to belong to the bodies of individuals’ (Ibid.). Or, as she puts
it elsewhere, ‘likeness is an effect of proximity or contact, which is then
“taken up” as a sign of inheritance’ (2006, 123). This duly troubles com-
monsensical or naïve psychologistic accounts that posit a ‘natural’ causa-
tion between non-resemblance and antagonistic emotion—in other
words, accounts that leave un-interrogated the discursive techniques that
produce the homology between ‘stranger’ and ‘danger’.
In our view, it is a staple of psychoanalytic enquiry to wonder at what
point, and under what conditions, we might get to know what we are like.
The language of psychoanalysis, extrapolated from the clinic, permits a
detailed examination of the boundaries that construct and challenge like-
nesses. Specifically, this takes place though careful reading of the complex
practices of (dis)identification at the heart of ego-formation (at both indi-
vidual and group levels), and the associated mechanisms of defence, for
example: introjection, incorporation, projective-identification and split-
ting. Of importance to the title terms of this volume is an appreciation
for how these various mechanisms allow us to describe the operation of
two related fantasies: fantasies of distinction (or separation), and fantasies
of unboundedness (or merging). It is a familiar analytic strategy to diag-
nose within the melancholic’s nostalgia for a lost golden age, as well as the
narcissist’s self-aggrandizing fantasy of coherence, the dangerous illusion
of internal homogeneity. Well-worn critiques of such imaginary identifi-
cations or cultural fantasies provoke another question, however: namely,
is every expression of commonality reducible to a mechanism of defence?
Although ‘community’ might sound old- fashioned or unredeemably
localist in an age of state politics and the formations of mass-society, the

term remains useful, nonetheless, for how it registers the indefiniteness of
identification: the everyday spatial practices that produce ruptures or
apertures within any given enclosure, signaling the potential for move-
ment of members ‘in’ and ‘out’ of community, as well as the temporal
intermittencies that necessarily structure the way different people come to
hold something, or nothing, in common.
It is perhaps worth stressing, then, that in exposing the fantasy element
involved in the conception of a commonality around which solidarities
and allegiances are declared, the intention is not to dismiss the need
(or simply the circumstance) for its construction; rather, it is precisely to
focus attention on how such identifications get made—both the motiva-
tions for them (historical, social, psychological) and the mechanisms of
their production (historical, social, psychological). It is an assumption of
this work that a psychoanalytic lens does not only lend itself to the third
of these parenthetical terms. Highlighting the requirement to conceive
the interplay of the psychic with the social as a profoundly relational
affair, Diana Fuss states that ‘identification names the entry of history
and culture into the subject’ (1995, 3). To speak of narcissistic or melan-
cholic identifications is thus to use the tools of psychoanalysis to detail
the why and the how of identificatory processes and practices—that is, to
discern the motivations and mechanisms through which history and cul-
ture come to enter the subject from the so-called outside. The psychoso-
cial tenor of enquiry represented across the chapters in the volume
foregrounds the need for sophisticated thinking about the valence of
‘inside’/‘outside’ terminology as both necessary-impossible conceptual
schemas relating to the theorization of the unconscious, and as utterances
that enact the truth of lived experiences, such as being cast out of, impris-
oned within, or living on the edge of society.
Now that we’ve begun to outline some of the formative concerns that
accompany our title terms, we can look further into Freud’s comment
regarding the obviousness of the rules of community: ‘If a community is
based on agreement upon a few cardinal points, it is obvious that people
who have abandoned that common ground will cease to belong to it’
(1925, 53). To be fair, Freud’s unusually straightforward statement, does
not come from one of his explicit theorisations on group psychology, or
the nature of the social bond, rather the occasion is autobiographical—at

least, as autobiographical as Freud was prepared to be.7 He is reflecting on
psychoanalysis’ strength as an international movement to withstand the
secession of some of its most eminent members, including Alfred Adler
and C. G. Jung, in the adolescent years of the new century (1911–1913).
The cardinal point abandoned by both men was the importance of sexu-
ality (infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex for Jung; sexuality per
se for Adler). That the dissenters could not hold to a belief in the force of
a formative psychosexual life signaled the undoing of their ties with the
psychoanalytic community. On Freud’s direction, the separation settle-
ment permitted neither to use the name ‘psycho-analysis’ to refer to their
work. Here is Freud, writing in its direct aftermath about the case of
Adler:
Then Adler took a step for which we are thankful; he severed all connection
with psycho-analysis, and gave his theory the name of ‘Individual
Psychology’. There is room enough on God’s earth, and anyone who can
has a perfect right to potter about on it without being prevented; but it is
not a desirable thing for people who have ceased to understand one another
and have grown incompatible with one another to remain under the same
roof. Adler’s ‘Individual Psychology’ is now one of the many schools of
psychology which are adverse to psycho-analysis and its further develop-
ment is no concern of ours. (1914a, 52)
With Freud’s blessing, then, Adler (and the Adlerians) were left to ‘potter
about’ [herumtummle8] with matters more trifling, we infer, than ‘psycho-
analysis’. The extent to which the severing that Freud speaks of here was
more bloody than benign has been thoroughly addressed by the many
chroniclers of the field. For one, the Adlerians did not immediately
renounce the subject-designation psycho-analysis, rather the establish-
ment of Adler’s ‘Society for Free Psychoanalytic Investigation’ was so
named in response to the unfreedom he experienced in attempting to
challenge the cardinal points of the Freudian science (Makari 2008, 281).
When writing the official autobiographical account of these formative
divisions, Freud is compelled to defend himself against the charge of
intolerance; as he lists the men whose enduring loyalty and friendship he
(and his science) have enjoyed, the numbers stack up in his favour. He
ventures that ‘an intolerant man, dominated by an arrogant belief in his
own infallibility, would never have been able to maintain his hold upon so
large a number of intellectually eminent people, especially if he had at his
command as few practical attractions as I [Freud] had’ (1925, 53).9 This
is a delicate statement indeed: part bashful (I have few practical attrac-
tions), part boastful (I have few practical attractions, and yet…). It keeps us
wondering as to the quality of Freud’s ‘hold’ on the members of the sur-
rounding community, and the means through which it was maintained.
Precisely because Freud’s character remains on trial here, his defence
against the charge of intolerance is made from a personal perspective (I’m
not an intolerant man). However, the point he wishes to stress is that
Adler and Jung lost their place at the psychoanalytic table due to irrecon-
cilable disagreements of a scientific nature: the supposition being that
questions of character are superfluous to the work of a science whose job
is not to extend a tolerant inclusivity to research programmes that are
incompatible with the ‘cardinal points’ of the field. This suggests that
whilst accusations of intolerance on the part of the man may be hard for
the scientist to stomach, the idea of an intolerant science is less trouble-
some because it indicates that the field in question is sufficiently secure in
its identity to pronounce with certitude what belongs outside of it.
But of course, psychoanalysis itself undermines this very logic with its
persistent reminders that questions of character can never be left aside!
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the boundary disputes that defined
psychoanalysis’s early institutionalization—who’s in, who’s out; accord-
ing to what theoretical and methodological principles were the lines of
exclusion to be drawn; and what forms of community policing were to be
deployed to safeguard the ‘homogeneity of the core’?10 The developmen-
tal tale of psychoanalysis, which we can hardly do more than allude to
here, is wonderfully intricate, with the play and counter-play of transfer-
ences restaging rivalries and opening old wounds. That the discipline’s
identity is impossible to separate from the identity of its founder, accounts
for why so many of the so-called scientific critiques of psychoanalysis
continue to take a profoundly ad-hominem turn.
It cannot escape anyone’s attention here that we are once more attend-
ing to the ground of narcissism. If narcissism marks the point at which
the distinction between subject and object fails to hold, then perhaps it is
legitimate to call psychoanalysis a narcissistic science. Similarly, psycho-
analysis has often been conceived as a melancholic science due to its
enduring concern with the lost object, the misplaced affect, and its theo-
rization of belatedness—all elements reinforced by the discipline’s own
apparent cultural belatedness as a European bourgeois science at the end
of the age of the European bourgeoisie (Baraitser 2012, 224). The point
of most enduring interest though, is whether such a double designation
can only be a slur against both the science and the scientist(s), or whether
it can stand as a general and insurmountable truth about scientific dis-
course as such.
In addition to naming infantile sexuality, Freud would go on to adduce
several other cardinal points as being foundational to his discipline: the
‘assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition
of the theory of resistance and repression’ as well as the facticity of the
transference. ‘No one who cannot accept them all should count himself a
psycho-analyst’, he states (1923, 247). Who gets to count (zählen) as a
community member is determined by allegiance to the founding princi-
ples of the science, which, in turn, become the principles that safeguard
the Freudian body-politic. We might note that this business of counting
is not altogether incidental, for when an association has grown from one
to several, then on to a known number of bodies that can still meet
around a committee table, the task of counting seems to be manageable.
But once the numbers exceed the boardroom, the lecture hall, the town
square or indeed the boundaried polis, counting becomes more problem-
atic. There is of course the difficult exercise of tallying up the numbers,
finding reliable measures to ensure that votes get counted such that some-
thing like the general will can be given form. Additionally, there is the
question of who is count-worthy: whose vote matters, or, indeed, who is
even eligible to vote? Fundamentally, however, if number remains of sig-
nificance to Freud, and the persistence of quantity poses a problem worth
considering, it is never simply a matter of political representation, of cast-
ing votes to establish an arithmetic majority. The fact that others count,
doesn’t tell us how they count. Counting matters for psychoanalysis
because ‘one’ is always ‘more and less’ (Lorde) than itself, a confusion
between self and other which makes adding up a difficult business.
The negotiation of psychoanalytic authority likewise, and despite Freud’s

retrospective claim to the contrary, is based upon acts of identification
that don’t resolve wholly on cardinal points. Indeed, at an historical
moment of scientific schism (precipitated by the breaking of ties with
Adler and Jung), and when the European world was about to descend
into a catastrophic war, Freud withdrew to write two papers about how
every ego arrives on the world stage with a misaligned account of its own
value.
Not-Knowing Community
In his 1967 book The Sociological Tradition, Robert Nisbet pointed out
that from Auguste Comte on, the ‘social’ in the sociological was firmly
wedded to the moral component of the concept ‘community’. ‘[T]he
referent of the “social”’, he wrote, ‘was almost invariably the communal.
Communitas, not societas with its more impersonal connotations, is the
real etymological source of the sociologist’s use of the word “social” in his
studies. […].’. For Comte, according to Nisbet, ‘the ghost of traditional
community hovers over […] sociology’ (1967, 56).
We can find an equally definitive articulation of sociology’s haunting
by community in Ferdinand Tönnies’ 1887 account of the move from
Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (civil society). Tonnies’s narra-
tive is often designated a scriptural moment in the history of sociological
thinking, announcing an abiding anxiety with the transformation of
public space and related modes of association. Of course, anxiety and the
lost object of community go hand in hand; and, we might quip, that the
former is all the more obstinate when the latter was never present in the
first place. However, we are not concerned in this work to re-diagnose a
structural nostalgia at the heart of the sociological discipline (Stauth and
Turner 1988; Walsh 2015), or to rehearse the relation between elitist
critiques of mass society and the melancholic disposition of the critic (see
Wendy Brown 1999). The idea that sociological thinking has been pro-
pelled by the impulse to mourn the social bonds of community is well
established, as is the myth of premodern coherence and stability that such
a mourning requires.
Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983]) has shown, for example, in his

account of the emergence of modern nations as ‘imagined communities’,
that such myths continue to operate in powerful ways. Anderson’s famous
illustration of the tomb of the unknown soldier points to the founda-
tional melancholia of national communities, which owe their persistence,
in the face of Marxist or liberal critique, to both their strong feeling for
death, and strategic ignorance about what has died (the soldier should not
be identified). Anderson points us towards a deep social structure of elegy,
always mediated through changing technologies (new print media in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Internet today), which helps inaugu-
rate a group-ego among people who have never met in person—whose
proximity is imaginary. Needless to say, such national formations are not
always benign. History is littered with quasi-religious national move-
ments—from European fascism to the proliferation of protectionisms
around the globe today—that demonstrate the violence of identification
by securing borders against immigration, suppressing internal dissent and
annexing ‘foreign’ space. The value of Anderson’s analysis, however, and
the kernel of his soft defence of nationalism as a diffuse political force, is
that the general form of any given national imaginary might contain a
multiplicity of identifications. In other words, because the tomb is anony-
mous (though rarely ungendered), its specific contents are supposed to
remain undefined, and therefore open to historical change.
At the risk of rehearsing the obvious, it is worth adding here that neo-
liberal critiques of nationalism do not circumvent the dangers of repro-
ducing securitized and exclusionary forms of identity—globalization
produces a wealth of gated ‘communities’. Furthermore, following
Zygmunt Bauman (2001), instead of regarding the multiple minoritar-
ian communities that emerge within supra-national and neo-imperial
space as the avatars for a Habermasian conversation in the public sphere,
they can be read symptomatically. Whilst the organization of cultural
difference within a ‘progressive’ liberal politics might be seen as straight-
forwardly positive, Bauman suggests (as do many critics of the neolib-
eral economy) that such apparent diversity disguises systemic assimilation
and exclusion. The failed promise of multiculturalism is that the terms
of universal citizenship that it infers, and that are necessary in order to
open the possibility of contest and consent between ‘equals’, are
fatally beset by economic unevenness, unacknowledged and unknown

historical exclusions, and unpredictable cultural fragmentations. In this
way, the delineation of different communities, imagined as being some-
how in conversation, can also, paradoxically, mark a profound failure of
social communication.
Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jean Luc Nancy, among
others, we can allow that this failure of communication—the failure to
arrive properly at inter-subjective recognition—is bound up with the limi-
tations of enacting politics in a representational mode. Community under-
stood according to the rule of all of its members possessing, and being
represented by, an essential or definitive characteristic (a named ethnicity,
a skin colour, an avowed creed, a shared myth of origin) misses, according
to both these writers, the true precarity of what it is to be in common.
Agamben in The Coming Community, envisages community unbound by
any common property, identity, or essence, holding out the possibility of
‘co-belong[ing] without any representable condition of belonging’. What
he calls the ‘whatever [qualunque] singularites’ of community ‘cannot form
a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any
bond of belonging for which to seek recognition’ (Agamben 2013 [1990],
86). He points us here towards a politics of dispossession—a dispossession
that can somehow be shared, or identified with. To be in common is not
to belong to a predefined enclosure, but rather to enact the possibilities of
an irreducible singularity coming to be itself. This repeats some familiar
notes from the Freudian metapsychology discussed earlier, where the
unconscious incorporation of loss and the ‘new psychical action’ of ego
formation can militate against a closed representation of the subject. It also
returns our attention to the matter of counting: Agamben’s ‘whatever sin-
gularity’ can never be simply ‘one’, where one is the abstracted and count-
able quality that determines the political representation only of those
subjects who are already seen to count.
Nancy uses an equally apposite terminology in his study The Inoperative
Community when he writes that ‘Being in common means […] no longer
having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, […] a substantial identity,
and sharing this (narcissistic) “lack of identity” (Nancy 2015, xxxviii). This
shared ‘narcissistic lack’ might also be termed an unconsciously common
melancholia; and it is significant that at the same time as extolling such a
melancholic structure, Nancy is also concerned to challenge the melancho-

lia of the sociological script. Community does not designate a premodern
Gemeinschaft intimacy, he argues, but rather gestures to an intimacy yet to
come.
[S]ociety was not built on the ruins of a community. It emerged from the
disappearance or the conservation of something—tribes or empires—per-
haps just as unrelated to what we call ‘community’ as to what we call ‘soci-
ety’. So that community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is
what happens to us—question, waiting, event, imperative—in the wake of
society. (Nancy, 11)
The re-temporalisation of community implicit in both Nancy and

Agamben’s works signals a break with representational historical narra-
tives in favour of a politics of process and co-presence-ing, as well as of
contingency. For both writers, the prepositional inflections are highly
important (more important that the subject itself ): being in and being
with indicate the acts of being placed that produce community. These
communities are not ideal enclosures, but rather, through the operations
of division (being in) and relation (being with), they converge always
upon the question of borders. Which is to say, community takes place in
temporally and spatially unsecured circumstances.
This is a good point at which to return to Freud, and specifically to his
1921 text ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, wherein he
explicitly connects narcissistic identification to the politics of being with
others (Gemeingeist). Freud’s paper aims, in the most general terms, to
explain the fluctuating feelings of omnipotence and self-divestiture
within the narcissistic dynamics of homosocial identification: an institu-
tion of fellow-feeling mediated through the idealized figure of a leader.
By Freud’s account, the politics of any given community implies a form
of seduction between the leader and the led: horizontal relations are only
made possible through the social bond tied on the vertical axis. In other
words, investment in the authority ‘above’ permits the forging of bonds
between subjects positioned laterally (it’s through my father that I may
come to love my brother). The authority to which the group is libidinally
tied is given form through a particular figure; as Philip Rieff puts it,
‘authority’, for Freud, ‘is always personified’ (1965, 235).
At face value, this positions Freud at some distance from contempo-

rary demands to develop an ethics of community, not least because of his
insistence that it requires a hierarchical structure to develop a fraternal
bond. Not only is Freud’s notional ‘band of brothers’ secured on a quasi-
war footing, aligning themselves in tribal terms under the banner of the
father, who is both alive and dead, but also, as Freud tells us explicitly in
Totem and Taboo, the brothers’ task comprises the theft and exchange of
other bodies—specifically women (1913).11 We can detect, then, that for
Freud the anthropological structure persists symbolically in modern
group formation (i.e., the mythic production of fraternity is isomorphic
to the production of modern esprit de corps). Accordingly, we might join
with Jacques Derrida and ask, ‘why privilege the brother over the sister,
the female cousin, the daughter, the wife or the stranger, or the figure of
anyone or whoever’ (see Matthews 2016, 80). The common man, it may
be said, is a dangerous reduction of community: though a reduction
which may well be embedded in the word ‘community’ itself.12
Our suspicion is that Freud’s group psychology, secured through
identification with the leader, does not pay sufficient attention to the
specificity of different historical identifications. However, it is worth
remaining with Freud’s text a little while longer, paying particular atten-
tion to the mechanisms of social attachment it details—not least because
this theme will be returned to in several of the chapters in this volume.
The crucial figure here is ‘the ego-ideal’, which, most straightforwardly,
we are told, fulfills the role of ‘self-observation, moral conscience, the
censorship of dreams, and the chief influence in repression’ (1921, 110).
This entity is representative of ‘the ego divided, fallen apart into two
pieces’ as a result of the melancholic incorporation of a lost object (109).
As with many of Freud’s concepts, however, the ego-ideal is a piece of
theory-in-motion, pointing both to the social and the metapsychologi-
cal spheres.13 First, as a critical agency set up within the ego (the mani-
festation of the melancholic split within the ego between ‘native’ and
‘foreign’ components) the ego-ideal is transferred into the social through
identification with the leader. Second, and moving back towards indi-
vidual ego-formation, we find something slightly different—namely
what Freud calls the ‘ideal-ego’, defined in ‘On Narcissism’ as the ‘target
of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. […]
[In appearance it is] possessed of every perfection that is of value’ (94).

The distinction between ideal ego (narcissistic admiration) and ego ideal
(melancholic ambivalence) may seem an insignificant one, but, once
perceived, it permits alternate readings of Freud’s paper (see also Wright;
Bonnigal-Katz; and Watt below).
In the more conventional reading, Freud’s group psychology depends
on difference: the lost object/other, once incorporated, creates an ego
divided, an ego that has to make room for the other within it. This con-
flict underwrites the ego-ideal whose punitive function can only be con-
soled through an identification with an external figure: an identification
in the world which imaginatively re-separates the self from the other. This
results in a narcissistic politics of minor differences, in which a common
identification—having certain qualities in common—is organized on the
basis of an unconscious hostility to the other.
On a second reading however, reading through the idea of the ‘ideal-
ego’, we can apply narcissism much more radically to the phenomenon of
group psychology. If the lost object unconsciously incorporated into the
ego is the very image of the ego itself, then the predicament which results
is not that of difference (the conflict between ego and incorporated object
within the same psychic space) but of sameness (the enigma of having (re)
incorporated my imagined self-perfection). Leo Bersani has probably
pushed this second reading the furthest, dissolving any fundamental dis-
tinction between narcissistic and object-libidinal attachments; taking
seriously in other words, the thought that it is an original mourning for
ourselves that motivates all of our identifications. Disputing the necessity
for a punitive ego-ideal, or the inevitability of a tragic psycho-sexual con-
flict resolved through social splitting, Bersani proposes an alternative spa-
tialization of community, modeled upon the activity of cruising for sex.14
Defining cruising as ‘a nameless, identity-free contact—contact with an
object I don’t know and certainly don’t love’—he provocatively insists
that ‘contact’ should not ‘degenerate’ into an inter-subjective relation-
ship. In other words, it is important that the object is not delineated in
terms of identifiable difference, but rather is infiltrated by the enigma of
sameness. Thus, in cruising, we move impersonally and anonymously
through space, identifying our missing selves in the bodies of strangers.
Sexual excitement, Bersani has written in The Culture of Redemption, is
‘both a turning away from others and a dying to the self,’ a paradox which
establishes the terms of narcissistic sociability: a withdrawal into the self
which is yet a shattering of self-coherence through acts of sexual identifi-
cation with others (1990, 45). Here what is in common is narcissism itself:
the shared task of finding in others the self that will never be possessed.
Bersani’s is one especially ingenious example of post-Freudian com-
munity, which disputes the hierarchical and boundaried nature of Freud’s
conception of group psychology (demonstrating a Freudian metapsy-
chology that is more radical than many of its cultural applications would
suggest). Of course we can acknowledge the limitations of his model of
cruising, specifically through the questions of scale (is the affective power
of cruising determined by its status as minority pursuit?), and opportu-
nity (is cruising for sex open to all?). It provides us, nonetheless, with a
compelling notion of community as an itinerant ‘counter public’.
Indeed, this modern tradition of proposing counter publics, in order to
contest and deliberately fragment dominant ‘public sphere’ discourse,
has been led by feminist and queer theorists, including Nancy Fraser
(1992) and Michael Warner (2002), and has often explicitly drawn from
Michel Foucault’s (1984 [1967]) influential idea of the ‘heterotopia’.
Heterotopias, according to Foucault, are ‘real’ sites of emplacement (e.g.,
boarding schools, cemeteries, ships), reserved for crises or transitions
(e.g., adolescence, illness, old age, travel) which connect disparate ‘ordi-
nary’ spaces, and which are connected to the public sphere without ever
being only public. For Foucault, a heterotopia ‘presupposes a system of
opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetra-
ble,’ a characteristic he deems to be under threat as sites of ‘transition’ are
further transformed by modern institutions into states of ‘deviation’; as
the privatization (and increasing uniformity) of modern ‘public’ space
reduces the possibilities for heterotopic crises (7, 5). With this cultural
transformation in mind, and its corresponding politicization, much
recent writing on counter publics has emphasized the ‘agitational’
quality of group formation, and the shifting terms of difference and
sameness which determine the lines of inclusion. As Nancy Fraser
puts it ‘on the one hand, [counter publics] function as spaces of with-
drawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases
and training grounds for agtitational activities directed toward wider
publics’ (124). The terms of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘regroupment’ suggest a

necessary narcissistic investment of libido into the ego: a community
grows its practices through turning its back on the dominant discourse.
At the same time, however, this ego-investiture calls into question its
own boundaries: the community’s ‘agitational’ activities ensure that its
self-identifications are never fulfilled.
The summoning of everyday practices is particularly important in this
context, especially if we want to understand why counter publics are not
reducible to advocacy groups, directly representing the interests of one
marginal identity to the political centre. Indeed, it is the activism of ‘tak-
ing place’, and using things in common, that is stressed in most contem-
porary revivals of ‘commons’ discourse (Harvey 2011; Tyler 2013). For
example, writing about the eviction of Gypsies and Travellers from the
Dale Farm site in Essex, in the United Kingdom in 2011, as well the
forms of resistance that emerged at the same time, Imogen Tyler connects
the question of the common land to the practice of commoning. ‘Many
[such] social and political movements draw inspiration from the philoso-
phy of the commons and explicitly understand their politics as a politics of
occupation and their activism as forms of commoning against (capitalist)
forms of enclosure’ (Tyler 2013, 151). The ecological tenor of this lan-
guage is not adventitious, returning us, as it does, to the prepositional
logic encountered above, of being ‘in’ and being ‘with’, and the inescap-
able question of resources: how will scarcity or lack get distributed? The
implication is that political resistance is also, inevitably, a precarious
community-building endeavor. In fact, it seems that one of the impossi-
ble, though compelling challenges of thinking community today is the
requirement that we both find a way to withdraw from ‘society’ in order
to register and resist its structure of exploitation, and at the same time
learn how to take place in social space with others.
Ours would not be a psychoanalytic account of community if we failed
to notice that we’re gesturing here towards a formula for paranoid socia-
bility: at once fantasizing retreat or disappearance from the established
social-symbolic network and actively engaging with the messy entangle-
ments of the social scene. Engin Isin (2004) has offered ‘the neurotic
citizen’ as the dominant character type of the post–9/11 era, suggesting
that ‘anxiety about the Other […] has been articulating itself [for several
decades] through various discourses on the border […] their disappear-

ance, fluidity, malleability, porousness, penetrability and smartness’. His
suggestion is that the border itself has become ‘neuroticized’ as ‘part of a
larger domain of practices through which the neurotic citizen has formed’
(231–232). The words ‘porousness’ and ‘penetrability’ evoke Freud’s
exemplary narcissist, paranoiac, and psychotic, Judge Schreber. But as
well as being reminded that narcissism itself sits as a border-concept
between neurosis and psychosis within Freudian nosology, Isin’s thesis on
border-anxiety invites us to think about the unique challenges of the con-
temporary situation. Whilst the American President Donald Trump’s
threat to ‘build a wall’ between the United States and Mexico is an exag-
gerated (and exaggeratedly narcissistic) iteration of old geo-political fan-
tasies, the rise of the Internet has surely exacerbated questions of scale
and ontological distinction—pertaining to ego formation and permeabil-
ity—such that these can appear as brand new problems. Resisting incor-
poration by the other, and learning to cooperate with others, can take
place today, simultaneously, in both the virtual and physical worlds, and
therefore has to be negotiated on two vastly different scales, with two
vastly different notions of propinquity at play.15 There is no doubt that
the contemporary question of community is haunted by the idea of the
virtual world: millennial ‘narcissism’, ad hominem politics, the phenom-
enon of the echo chamber effect on social media—all undersigned, of
course, by the melancholia of patrician critiques of new media.
Allowing for these new and complex ways in which we have to think
about being in and being with, and how community gets made, we can
gather that much of the recent literature on counter publics, the com-
mons and community, opposes representational politics with an affective
politics of proximity (even if this means proximity through screens).16
Another way of putting this is to say that political community as it is
often expressed today is not confined to the attempt to take hold of and
reorganize state power. The fundamental problem of being in common is
not resolved by having, and representing to oneself and others, certain
essential qualities or values; just as the awkward interpositions of ego
formation will not resolve upon the idealism of an inter-subjective rela-
tionship. Accordingly, we can see community taking place, temporally
and spatially, at unsecured borders where the operations of interpellation
and ambivalence, and the facticity of contingency, cut across any blandly
utopic notion of the commons. Lauren Berlant has warned us against the
undue ‘positivizing’ of commons discourse:
Politics is also about redistributing insecurity, after all. So whatever else it

is, the commons concept has become a way of positivizing the ambivalence
that saturates social life about the irregular conditions of fairness. I’m not
arguing against the desire for a smooth plane of likeness, but arguing that
the attachment to this concept is too often a way of talking about politics
as the resolution of ambivalence and the vanquishing of the very contin-
gency of nonsovereign standing that is at the heart of true equality, where
status is not worked out in advance or outside of relation. (2016, 395)
What must be worked out through, and within ‘relation’, is the density
of its affective life, replete with feelings of awkwardness, inconvenience,
shame as well as pride, and even disgust. The attainment of ‘likeness’ is
work, suggests Berlant, necessitating negotiations and acknowledgements
which are negative as well as positive; identifications which collapse dis-
tances too soon to the point of merging, as well as preserve them too long
to the point of indifference. This is the struggle of community: the work
it takes to not assume that we are one; to aim at the ‘true equality’ Berlant
speaks of, rather than at the presumptive equality among those we already
know are going to count.
Chapters
Though by no means representing one intellectual outlook, the chapters
that follow all attest to the ways in which the capaciousness of the terms
narcissism and melancholia—connoting psychic structure, developmen-
tal stage, syndrome or disorder, cultural mood, political mode and the
possibility of strategic refusal—permit us to think rigorously, and in
complex ways, about modern community.
Chapter 2 begins with an explicit ‘rejection of Freud’s original theory
of primary narcissism’. Licensed by a reading of Melanie Klein and the
object relations school of psychoanalysis, Michael Rustin argues for the
‘innate object-relatedness’ of the self, with narcissism acting only as a

secondary defence mechanism against a hostile environment. Rustin
allows that defining the point at which the infant is able to determine
between itself and others is profoundly ideological; and, consequently, he
proposes a distinction between the hedonistic-utilitarian (an ultimately
capitalist) characterization of self-development, to which social relations
are mere additions, and a welfare-state model of essential relatedness. By
no means exempting psychoanalysis from the operations of capitalist sys-
tems of representation, neither does Rustin reduce the Freudian or
Lacanian traditions to individualist philosophies—both, he concedes, are
philosophies of relation. Yet he does see an importance difference between
what he terms the ‘pessimism’ of Lacan, focusing always on the cultural
and the linguistic, and the optimism of Klein, working to cultivate rela-
tions that nurture and support. Ranging broadly in his social examples
through the Mitscherliches and Gilroy, to contemporary social phenom-
ena, Rustin presents the damaged states of narcissism and melancholia as
general symptoms, which demand close, context-specific treatments.
Jay Watts’s chapter, ‘Narcissism Through the Digital Looking Glass’,
while not a riposte to Rustin’s perspective does offer a compelling version
of Lacanian optimism with respect to our understanding of the digital
world and ‘new media’. Watts pointedly revises ‘neo-Laschian’ critiques of
digital space as determinate of pathological narcissism (symptomized by
feelings of disembodiment and insecurity). By taking Lacan’s mirror
phase where ‘the specular I turns into the social I’ and adapting it into the
‘Millennial’ culture of the selfie, Watts advises that we resist the tempta-
tion of the underdetermined narrative that sees narcissistic fantasy give
way to mature object choice. We might focus instead, she suggests, on the
productive and responsible conditions of play made possible by the
Internet. The Internet provides new models for enjoying ourselves
together, unsecured by the patrician fantasy of ‘a stable, situated, superior
relational self ’. Here, the clinical case study of Mohammed, a young
Muslim immigrant to London, whose selfie-taking and online cruising
(vaguely reminiscent of Bersani’s model mentioned earlier), models what
she calls a ‘radical narcissism’. Radical narcissism is the means by which
Mohammed can transition out of a traditional set of cultural norms and
into a different world.
In Chap. 4, Lynne Layton continues to apply psychoanalytic thought

to media, specifically to the forms of identification the media permits,
through a reading of David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club. Writing back
to the moment of the late ’70s, wherein the then ‘new’ Narcissist received
his most forceful treatment from Lasch, Layton demonstrates how the
seemingly constitutive link between capitalism and narcissism remains in
need of further critical analysis today: Fincher’s film, and cultural pro-
ductions like it, are read as symptomatic of ‘a social structure that splits
autonomous from relational capacities and does so in support of a neolib-
eral, global order of consumer and finance capitalism’. Key to Layton’s
analysis is an appreciation of the gendering of narcissism’s fundamental
dialectic, with the ‘grandiose’ masculine pole connoting a ‘devaluation of
the other […] with isolating defenses against merger’, and the ‘self-
deprecating’ feminine pole connoting ‘idealization of the other, and a
defensive longing to merge and lose oneself in the other’. With this
framework in mind, Layton surmises that neo-liberalism’s hallmark repu-
diation of dependency (the putatively feminine) is of a piece with the
cultural denigration of particular gendered, classed, and racialized subject
positions: if Fight Club stages the violence of white heterosexual mascu-
linity, it ultimately proposes that its subjects’ ‘narcissistic wounds are best
treated by shoring up male narcissism.’
We suggested earlier that the conceptual distinction between mourn-
ing and melancholia, as drawn by Freud, has been considered somewhat
overdrawn by critics wishing to stress either the ‘madness’ of so-called
normal mourning or, indeed, the ‘normalcy’ of melancholia. However, in
his chapter ‘Melancholia, the Death Drive and Into the Wild’, Derek
Hook makes the case for strengthening the distinction between the two
psychical schemas. Hook is not alone amongst the writers in this volume
in making plain the value of narcissism and melancholia for enriching
both clinical and cultural thought around the phenomenon of psychosis,
where the experienced security of psyche-soma borders is imperiled by
the over-proximity of the object. Deploying a rereading of melancholia
advanced by the Lacanian theorist Russel Grigg, Hook asks us to question
whether we can think of melancholia otherwise than ‘within the param-
eters of the lost, resented and subsequently internalised object’. Central
to this shift in focus, from the lostness of the object to the too muchness of
the object, is Hook’s appreciation of the death drive. The drive to remove
oneself from life, not through active suicidality, but rather by ‘going off
grid’—endeavoring to exempt oneself from the network of symbolic rela-
tions through which we are named and placed—characterizes the clinical
and cultural material examined in this chapter. In addition to outlining
key features of a case from his own practice, Hook offers a reading of
Christopher McCandless, the American graduate in his early twenties
who, as told by Jon Krakauer in his book Into the Wild, ‘dropped out of
sight’, pursuing an itinerant life on the edge of society. In both instances
considered, Hook identifies features of a melancholic subjectivity, includ-
ing: ‘difficulties in processing symbolic exchanges [and] a yearning for
anonymity and disappearance’. With appropriate caution, we are directed
to a consideration of the psychosocial dimensions of this melancholic por-
trait, and their implications for an understanding of community. Might
the longing for self-sufficiency to the point of self-erasure that the two
male subjects of Hook’s account share be adequate grounds for a com-
munity? A community of narcissists, perhaps—eschewing the echoes of
the social, as did the eponymous mythic hero. To successfully disappear
oneself no doubt has a formative function (the Freudian ‘Fort-Da!’ game
supports this), but might it also have a cultural urgency when the omni-
science eyes of a surveillance society and the interminable memory of the
Internet are just two social symptoms of a world in which the ‘lost object’
insists on its re-presentation?
In Chap. 6, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz also features the role of the death
drive as central to her analysis of primary narcissism and melancholia.
Proving the importance of metapsychological thinking for clinical work,
Bonnigal-Katz offers the figure of ‘the monster in the mirror’ to capture
the complex operations of the melancholic ego, which tend towards the
seemingly ceaseless production and destruction of an impossible self-
image. Following Freud, she reminds us that the nurturing object of the
(m)other comprises a primary and conflictual border zone through which
the marking of a bodily limit also entails an ‘unamendable loss’. Key to
her argument is the resurrection of infanticide as a necessary psychoana-
lytic coordinate (‘infanticide is as structural as incest in the making of the
human subject’), as well as its coupling with fantasies of maternal omnip-
otence: ‘like the gaze of the Medusa, the maternal gaze […] endows the
budding subject with petrifying omnipotence, inscribing death, from the

outset, as an inherent constituent of primary love’. Through a fascinating
discussion of the Medusa myth, we are taken directly into the intensities
of the clinical scene, wherein the eyes of the analyst and the patient meet
to play a game of waiting. With an astute clinical focus, this chapter
affirms Freud’s conviction that the clinical picture of melancholia is both
‘so interesting—and so dangerous’ (MM, 252).
The next two chapters are both explicitly concerned with the constitu-
tional violence of colonialism. Juliet B. Rogers in Chap. 7 develops a ver-
sion of the Mitscherliches’ thesis concerning the cultural ‘inability to
mourn’, applying it to the case of ‘Australia’, specifically to the constructed
feeling of ‘white’ Australia today. According to Rogers, white Australia
continues to protect itself from the shame of its racist constitution
through two related displacements: the first, that of fantasizing a nostal-
gic object of Australia as it used to be when it was more ‘authentically’
white, before more recent waves of immigration (from Southern Europe,
South America and East Asia); and the second, that of apologizing to the
Indigenous Peoples for an historical act of expropriation. As Rogers sug-
gests, liberal white Australia finds it easier to apologize to the Indigenous
Peoples than to directly address the terms of the Australian Constitution,
and the question of indigeneity it covers over. The constitutional docu-
ment secures the essential ‘goodness’ of Australia: what it once was when
it was more ‘white’; or what it is now as it apologizes for an historical
crime. To challenge this document, then, is to disrupt the imaginary
goodness of the Australian community, as well as the structural melan-
cholia that underwrites it. Detailing what is known as the ‘Black Process’,
and the current move towards non-indigenous ‘readiness’ to recognize the
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Peoples, Rogers argues that the consti-
tution must be re-written, and, moreover, be seen to be re-writable. Only
then can white Australia come to mourn, and move on from its self-image
as a unitary community possessing essentially virtuous qualities.
In ‘Dr Fanon on Colonial Narcissism and Anti-Colonial Melancholia’,
Colin Wright reconnects Fanon the psychiatrist to Fanon the anti-
colonial revolutionary. He does so by detecting the mutations of narcis-
sism and melancholia from Fanon’s early, Lacan-inspired text Black Skins
White Masks (1986 [1952]), to the late writings on Algeria, specifically
the essay ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ (2001 [1961]). Wright
reminds us of Fanon’s debt to Lacan—the importance of the mirror
phase for deducing ‘the effects of internalized racist stereotypes’—as well
of Fanon’s critique of psychoanalytic universalism: ‘like it or not, the
Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes’. ‘The
catastrophic failure of narcissism’ designated in Black Skin White Masks
remains operative in Fanon’s later works as a politicized melancholia.
But this is a melancholia which, in Wright’s view, remains unsusceptible
to the ‘multicultural conviviality’ proposed as a possible solution to post-
colonial melancholia by Gilroy. In the Gilroy model (as in the
Mitscherliches’, and the one proposed by Rogers in Chap. 6) the struc-
tural splitting and cultural stagnation caused by an inability to acknowl-
edge the loss of a good self-image describes the predicament of the
colonizer. The psychopathology of the colonized subject is a different
matter, however. Lacking narcissistic resources, according to Fanon, the
colonized African subject transforms the more common auto-destructive
impulses of melancholia into a hetero-destructive mania. This is a mania,
however, which may sometimes, in Wright’s view, following Fanon, take
revolutionary form.
The final three chapters of the volume present us with very different
takes on the fundamental question of what it means to act. The ‘with-
drawal of interest [or investment] from the outside world’, which we
have seen to be a key narcissistic component of melancholia, of course
translates politically: and, there’s no shortage of opportunities today to be
politically depressed. But it is by no means self-evident how the relation-
ship between psychoanalytic and political forms of action (including
active resistance) should be conceived, or how withdrawal from certain
social structures might itself comprise a politics. The dilemmas of how to
participate in and partake of political-community life are addressed
directly by Barry Watt in Chap. 9, who brings his experience as a thera-
pist and a community activist to bear on his development of a theory of
activism beyond the ‘community of one’. With clear stakes in the ques-
tion ‘how to collectivise amidst the cult of the individual?’, Watt’s ambi-
tion is to find within the grounds of Freudian metapsychology scope for
affirming key tenets of an anarchist philosophy, especially with respect to
the question of possession of private property. Engaging with political
commentary of the post-capitalist/neoliberal era (Nick Srnicek and Alex

Williams; Jeremy Gilbert), as well as contemporary philosophies of com-
munity (Roberto Esposito), he argues for the need to ‘negativise’ com-
munity, ‘away from reifying, narcissistic notions of the communal
towards an emphasis on a melancholic foundation […], as that which is
not held in common.’
In Chap. 10, Stephen Frosh presents us with a consideration of the
politics of indifference via the classic statement of Herman Melville’s
Bartleby; I would prefer not to. Recounting how Bartleby’s flat refrain,
which ultimately resists definitive interpretation, has been held as ‘an
ideal in the context of neoliberalism’s massive pressure towards action’,
Frosh offers a counter tale: the story of Bontsha the Silent, by Yiddish
writer Isaac Leib Peretz (1894). With this story, Frosh asks how the psy-
choanalytic and political configurations of silence come to be so cultur-
ally overdetermined. From one perspective, silence today is a possible
response to the neurotic anxieties impelled by global capitalism: the con-
stant goading of desire that will never be fulfilled. Frosh sees two comple-
mentary character types emerging from this contemporary milieu: the
hysteric moving endlessly towards the ‘big Other without a lack’, and the
paranoid willing to stand in for the big Other as long as he is bolstered
‘more and more by a community of followers’. ‘The number of hysterical
subjects who are on the run, looking for a new master, keeps on increas-
ing’ writes Frosh, characterizing the psychic disturbances of modern life
to which silence might be one answer. His reading of Bontsha, however,
deflates any default notion that silence is dignified, or apparent passivity
underwritten by a superior political faith. Bontsha’s fate in the afterlife,
able to summon only the weakest, most comfortable and self-serving
desire (a hot roll with fresh butter for breakfast) when anything is possi-
ble, serves as a counter-weight to the enigmatic subversion of Bartleby.
Withdrawal is understandable, but it might also replicate the structures it
retreats from; above all, it might replicate paranoia. The cost of Bontsha’s
silence, suggests Frosh, is closure and the incapacitation of a political
community founded on ‘speaking out’.
In the final chapter of the volume, Anastasios Gaitanidis connects
Freud’s conception of the ego as ‘the precipitate of abandoned object
cathexes’ to the motif of the journeying subject who returns home. The
sense of mobility is important to Gaitanidis, as much as the sense that the

subject always returns home different from when he left, because it allows
him to foreground the value of transience in any community-building
endeavor. Gaitanidis’s argument is at odds with what he sees as the valo-
rization of melancholia in Judith Butler’s work; although we may concede
the virtues of a ‘collectivity which prioritises our ethical responsibility to
each other generated by our common experience of loss’, Gaitanidis
warns us to be wary of replicating in inverted or negative terms the nar-
cissistic illusion of permanence and stability. Butler, he argues, through
her kinship of the precarious, has neglected to focus enough on the inter-
ruptive or transient nature of journeying, migrant subjects, and the unre-
liable pleasures to be had in letting go, or moving on. In the place of
melancholia, Gaitanidis places the figure of exhaustion. The exhausted
subject who fails to arrive back home, and whose attachments are tran-
sient and un-recuperated through time, carries with her the important
realization that as much as communities must be made, they will also end.
Notes
1. Freud wrote the following to Karl Abraham: ‘Tomorrow I am sending
you the narcissism, which was a difficult birth and bears all the marks of
it. Naturally, I do not like it particularly, but I cannot give anything else
at the moment. It is still very much in need of retouching’ (ON, 222).
2. To say that ‘On Narcissism’ lacks a principal organizing binary, is not to say
that there aren’t binary conventions operating throughout the paper (e.g.,
ego-libido/object libido; and variants of narcissistic/anaclitic attachment).
3. In addition to Walsh (2015), see also Chap. 2 of Reuben Fine’s work
Narcissism, The Self and Society (1986) for a discussion of these themes.
4. Freud’s identifies numerous narcissistic figures that embody a positive
social attraction for the other: children in a state of self-contentment;
‘certain animals […] such as cats and the large beasts of prey’; literary
representations of ‘criminals and humorists’; and charming narcissistic
women (ON, 89).
5. Eng is citing Cheng’s (1997) article ‘The Melancholy of Race’, and Muñoz’s
article of the same year (1997) ‘Photographies of Mourning: Melancholia
and Ambivalence in Van Der Zee, Mapplethorpe, and Looking for Langston’.
In addition to Cheng’s subsequent monograph The Melancholy of Race
(2001), we might now add to this roster of names: David Eng and Shinhee
Han (2000), Ranjana Khanna (2003), Paul Gilroy (2005), Derek Hook
(2014), Jermaine Singleton (2015).
6. Identified as a foundational psychical conflict that can inspire a vast
range of defensive responses, ‘conflict due to ambivalence’ is a favored
coinage across Freud’s work.
7. It has been well noted that the only autobiography Freud willingly
offered up to history was the biography of his association (1914b).
8. It is possible that James Strachey’s rendering of herumtummle as ‘to pot-
ter about’ misses the dig in Freud’s language; alternative translations such
as ‘to romp’ or ‘to mess about’ perhaps give a better sense of the sexual
component that Freud sneakily attributes to Adler’s new freedom. [Es ist
soviel Platz auf Gottes Erde und es ist gewiß berechtigt, daß sich jeder,
der es vermag, ungehemmt auf ihr herumtummle, aber es ist nicht wün-
schenswert, daß man unter einem Dach zusammenwohnen bleibe, wenn
man sich nicht mehr versteht und nicht mehr verträgt.] (GW, X: 95–96).
9. Strachey has translated the German verb fesseln, which connotes both
captivation and tying up as ‘to hold’. Perhaps there is a stronger sense of
the charismatic, or at least libidinally charged, quality of the hold in
question in Freud’s original expression. [Aber ich darf wohl für mich
geltend machen, daß ein intoleranter und vom Unfehlbarkeitsdünkel
beherrschter Mensch niemals eine so große Schar geistig bedeutender
Personen an sich hätte fesseln können, zumal wenn er über nicht mehr
praktische Verlockungen verfügte als ich] (GW, XVI: 80).
10. In a letter to his trusted ally Lou Andreas-Salomé, Freud resolved to
‘hold onto the homogeneity of the core’ of his scientific discipline lest it
become ‘something else’ (Gay 1989, 216; Freud 1914d)—this after hav-
ing frankly admitted his personal opinion of Adler ‘he is a loathsome
individual’ (Freud 1914c, 19).
11. The condensed narrative that Freud offers in Totem and Taboo runs as
follows: ‘Sexual desires do not unite men but divide them. Though the
brothers had banded together in order to overcome their father, they
were all one another’s rivals in regard to the women. Each of them would
have wished, like his father, to have all the women to himself. The new
organization would have collapsed in a struggle of all against all, for none
of them was of such overmastering strength as to be able to take on his
father’s part with success. Thus the brothers had no alternative, if they
were to live together, but—not, perhaps, until they had passed through
many dangerous crises—to institute the law against incest, by which they
all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been
their chief motive for despatching [sic] their father. In this way they res-
cued the organization which had made them strong—and which may
have been based on homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps
during the period of their expulsion from the horde’ (144).
12. Though this is an obvious critique of Freud, Derrida is in fact interrogat-
ing the work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Nancy. Indeed
Nancy concedes, responding to Derrida’s query, that ‘community’ does
indeed resonate with Christian references to spiritual and brotherly love,
which threaten to idealize and thereby cover over the prepositional fra-
gility of the ‘with’. A community of priestly brothers in transcendent
identification with the father attain their ‘proximity and intimacy’ sym-
bolically, without suffering what Nancy calls ‘removal’—which is to say,
the immanent, embodied discomfiture of sharing space. (For a fuller
discussion of this debate, see Matthews 2016, 80–81).
13. Most obviously, within Freud’s corpus, the theorisation of the ego-ideal
was set to receive further redefinition with the introduction of the super-
ego in 1923.
14. Bersani takes his lead from Freud’s Group Psychology text: ‘It seems cer-
tain, writes Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, “that
homosexual love is far more compatible (than heterosexual love) with
group ties, even when it takes the shape of uninhibited sexual impul-
sions—a remarkable fact, the explanation of which might carry us far”’
(Bersani 2010, 49).
15. See Calhoun (1998) for a pre-Millennium appraisal of ‘community
without propinquity’ that warns against exaggerating the novelty of the
Internet.
16. Nancy speaks of community as ‘literary communism’, the interruption
of the myth of the one, which is not necessarily communicable—‘no
form of intelligibility or transmissibility is required of it’—but which
nonetheless constitutes a ‘work’ offered up for communication (73).
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On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and
Other Works (pp. 67–102). London: The Hogarth Press.
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XIV (1914–16): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on
Metapsychology and Other Works (pp. 1–66). London: The Hogarth Press.
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Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922):
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (pp. 1–64).
London: The Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII:
(1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other
Works (pp. 65–144). London: The Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1923). Two Encyclopedia Articles. In The Standard Edition of the
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Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (pp. 233–260).
London: The Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1925 [1924]). An Autobiographical Study. In The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX (1925–1926):
An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of

Lay Analysis and Other Works (pp. 1–74). London: The Hogarth Press.
Frosh, S. (2013). Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Melancholia, Paranoia. Subjectivity, 9(1), 1–16.
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Apartheid Archive. Rozenberg Quarterly.
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New York: W.W. Norton.
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Harvard University Press.
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Harper Perennial.
Matthews, D. (2016). A Spirit of the Common: Reimagining ‘The Common
Law’ with Jean-Luc Nancy. In S. Kirwan, L. Dawney, & J. Brigstocke (Eds.),
Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alternative Futures (pp. 75–90).
London & New York: Routledge.
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in Van Der Zee, Mapplethorpe, and Looking for Langston. In H. Stecopoulous
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Barry Sheils is Assistant Professor in twentieth- and twenty-first-century litera-

ture at Durham University, where he is also an Associate Director of the Centre
for Cultural Ecologies. He is the author of W.B. Yeats and World Literature: The
Subject of Poetry (Routledge), and co-editor of Shame and Modern Writing
(Routledge).
Julie Walsh is Lecturer in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the

University of Essex, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the author of
Narcissism and Its Discontents (Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor of Shame and
Modern Writing (Routledge). She is also a member of The Site for Contemporary
Psychoanalysis.
2
Narcissism and Melancholia
from the Psychoanalytical Perspective
of Object Relations
Michael Rustin
The argument I am going to put forward in this chapter is for a view of

narcissism and melancholia rooted essentially in the psychoanalytic
theories of Melanie Klein and her associates and successors.1 It is based
on a rejection of Freud’s original theory of ‘primary narcissism’, on the
grounds that Klein put forward in one of her most important disagree-
ments with Freud, namely that infants first enter the world with an
expectation and need to find an object or objects—she meant those
that love and can be loved—and that it is upon an innate belief that
there are such objects that infants’ survival and development depends.
Indeed, there are reasons to suppose that infants ‘learn’ this expectation
whilst still in the womb, since we now know2 that babies express prefer-
ence for the sound of their mother’s voice over other voices soon after
birth, and that they also learn to preferentially recognise mother’s smell
very early on in their lives. Bion wrote (1962b) of preconceptions in the
M. Rustin (*)
School of Social Sciences, University of East London, London, UK

42 M. Rustin
neonate awaiting their realisation—among these preconceptions were

the idea of the feeding nipple, which the baby’s mouth is primed from
birth to look for and find.
There is a counter-theory that in these early stages of life, infants imag-
ine or hallucinate these essential elements of their environment, believing
when they are born that there is nothing but baby. On this view, the
recognition that in fact the infant shares its world with others only comes
as a later phase of development. But while it is obvious that the infant’s
capacity to distinguish the various elements of its environment from one
another grows as it develops, and that its initial capacity to do this is very
limited, this is different from the belief that the baby is in essence alone
in the world, until it discovers, as it were, that it isn’t.
One sees this gradual differentiation happening when one observes
babies in their first year of life. This is in part a matter of understanding
their own body, and how it can be made to work. One sees a baby manag-
ing to get a hand or thumb into its mouth, controlling the movements of
its two feet, and later, a first great triumph, learning to roll over, and then
again, until it can do this at will. And of course babies also pay great
attention from early on to those around them, and especially their moth-
ers, learning to understand what their expressions, gestures, movements
and tones of voice signify. The infant is confronted with a great array and
bombardment of sensations, of many kinds from its first hours, and over
time learns to give meaning to these, for many of them long before it is
possible to represent them in words.
Bion’s (1963) great contribution to the understanding of infant mental
life was his idea that one of the primary functions of a mother in relation
to her infant was what he called her ‘containing’ function, and we now in
another idiom term ‘affect regulation’ (Schore 1994). Just as in the physi-
cal care of infants, the maintenance of an equilibrium is essential to sur-
vival—babies must be fed, kept warm, kept clean, protected from
excessive disturbance—so there is an equivalent kind of equilibrium
essential to development in the emotional and psychological spheres. It is
the task of primary carers to take in, recognise and modulate the extreme
passions and terrors of infants, lessening their intensity. This happens
both through attending to the physical needs (hunger for example) that
assail the infant, but also, so Bion argued, by recognising and absorbing
2 Narcissism and Melancholia from the Psychoanalytical... 43
its violence projections of emotion—terror, greed, hatred, love—so that

they become gradually manageable to the baby. This happens through a
constant process of projection, identification and introjection. In Bion’s
writing, this is explained through the theory of projective identification.
He argued that this intense interactive relationship between mother and
baby, prior to the development of language and continuing once words
become available, is the precondition for the development of the infant’s
mind, or of what he called the ‘mental apparatus’ (Bion 1962a). Perhaps
Bion’s most fundamental addition to the structure of psychoanalytic the-
ory was his idea that there were three primary elements, drives or instincts
in the human psyche. Not only, that is, the passions of love and hate, the
life and death instincts as Freud named them, but also the desire for
understanding or knowledge. He denoted this as ‘K’ creating a notation
of three fundamental terms for the understanding of the psyche, L, H
and K, corresponding to the impulses for love, hate and knowledge
(O’Shaughnessy 1981). The relevance of this for our current discussion is
that relations with ‘objects’ are held to be the precondition for the devel-
opment of the mind itself.
Where then does narcissism come in; and what does, or should this
term mean? From these presuppositions, drawn from Klein and Bion,
narcissism is to be understood as a form of defence against relations with
objects that are felt to have failed or be in danger of failing (Symington
1993). Narcissism is the protective shell constructed by the psyche when
the self decides that its best recourse for psychic survival is to manage
without objects, or with objects allotted only a diminished or merely
instrumental role. Esther Bick’s (1968) famous paper, based on her expe-
rience of infant observation, called ‘The experience of the skin in early
object relations’, describes a structure of defence (a ‘second skin’), which
she observed in infants and toddlers (it could develop as a lasting disposi-
tion of character) in which, in the absence of a sufficiently receptive form
of ‘containment’ by primary objects, young children learn to reduce their
sensitivity, dependence on and vulnerability to their experience of others.
They do this by developing an additional layer or shell of robustness,
which can be manifested physically in their toughness and physicality.
Such children can bash about in a day nursery, knocking over objects and
nursery companions, seemingly without recognition of what they are
44 M. Rustin
doing, and are harder to reach emotionally than other children, having
less trust that they will find an ‘object’ that is capable of understanding
them or responding to their needs.
Post-Kleinian psychoanalysts, such as Herbert Rosenfeld (1971),
Donald Meltzer (1968), Henri Rey (1994), John Steiner (1993) and
Ronald Britton (1998, 2003) became interested in the investigation of
the complexities of narcissism, always understood in this tradition as an
organisation of the personality devised to protect the self from the risk
and pain of relationships with objects. A crucial step in this theoretical
development was the recognition, initially in Rosenfeld’s work, that nar-
cissism could take two substantially different forms. On the one hand,
‘libidinal narcissism’—the condition of love directed away from others
and towards the self. And on the other hand, ‘destructive narcissism’, in
which the self becomes identified with a destructive part of itself, domi-
nated by hatred, and maintains itself not only in a state of self-sufficiency
or indifference towards objects, but rather in a state of covert hostility or
contempt towards them. The theory of ‘borderline personality organisa-
tion’ developed within this school of thought describes a system of
defence in which objects and desires (whether libidinal or destructive) are
essentially shut out of mind, allowing some equilibrium of the personal-
ity to be maintained, even to a degree that preserves a person’s capacity to
function with instrumental effectiveness in the world, although his or her
emotional capacities are stunted or starved. One could perhaps say that
in the libidinal form of narcissism, what is being held at bay are depres-
sive anxieties, anxieties about unconscious damage that has been caused
to internal objects and thus to the self, which depends on them. Whereas
in the destructive form of narcissism, the anxiety being defended against
is paranoid-schizoid anxiety, the dread that if it were recognised and
expressed, the hatred felt towards objects would be returned by them in
forms of retaliation and attack.3
Rosenfeld (1971) came to recognise the phenomenon of destructive
narcissism through his experiences as a psychoanalyst in the consulting
room. He found that his attempts through interpretation to enable his
patients to recognise their own narcissistic dispositions with some of
them repeatedly failed. Puzzling over why this was, he came to realise that
it was because his interpretations and his analytic work were unconsciously
regarded by the patient with contempt, as of no significance or worth.

Consequently, the analytic process could arrive at what he called an
impasse, that is, become stuck. Yet these patients would seemingly con-
tinue to be committed to their analysis, thus expressing some need or
desire to understand their predicaments in life. Rosenfeld discovered that
when he was able himself to recognise and draw attention to the way that
disparagement and implicit contempt of the analyst’s work lay behind
these states of impasse, some recognition of this psychic reality, and
thereby some change, could take place.
It is interesting to see, in terms of the evolutionary development of
psychoanalytic theory within this sub-tradition of Klein–Bion, how this
elaboration follows the logic of some of Freud’s most important original
insights. It can be seen retrospectively that these two varieties of narcis-
sism are perverse embodiments of the life and death instincts, the impulses
to love and to hate, and thus map on to Freud’s of the mind.
Now there is a widespread and in its own way understandable view
that narcissism is not, as it were, all bad. Even those who do not hold that
human begins begin their lives in a state of primary narcissism, may still
hold that there needs to be an element of ‘healthy narcissism’ to sustain
the capacity to survive and flourish in the world, which is after all
unavoidably one in which competition and conflict is present in many
different ways, concerning, for example, reputation, material resources
and love. There is some sense in this idea. Individuals who have extremely
deficient or damaged beliefs about their own value or capacity can bring
good neither to themselves nor to others. But can one endorse the neces-
sity for the valuing of the self and of its desires, in an environment that is
shared with others, without equating this with the idea of ‘healthy narcis-
sism’? And if so, how?
The argument I wish to make is that the self, which is entitled to
believe in its own value, and to make its own claims in the world, is
always, necessarily and unavoidably, a self related to objects, both ‘exter-
nal’, in the world, and internally, in regard to its ‘internal objects’ or its
inner world.4 There never can be a question of a self existing without
objects. To describe or imagine a personality in this state is to describe a
pathology—some versions of this we call megalomania, others, perhaps,
catatonia. The question for the self is always: in what relationship to what
46 M. Rustin
objects am I? Plainly, these possible relations to objects take an almost

infinite variety of forms, though a psychoanalytical grammar or taxon-
omy cannot name all their differentiating attributes—for example, in
regard to the balance between love and hate in the dispositions towards
objects, or beliefs about them, and in regard to a mind’s openness to
reflection. But the point is that the self always imagines itself in some
such relationships, and the crucial question, in regard to values or con-
ceptions of life and well-being, is not whether there are such relation-
ships, but of what kind are they imagined to be.
One might ask, why would anyone think about this differently? What
if anything is at stake in this argument, more than a merely terminologi-
cal dispute about how and when the emerging self is able to discriminate
between itself and other phenomena of its experience? Perhaps what is at
stake in this argument is, and always has been, in a sense ideological.
Even Freud’s conception of human nature was derived, early on, from an
assimilation of a model of the mind based on the hedonistic psychology
of English utilitarianism whose origin lie, however indirectly, in the phi-
losophy of Thomas Hobbes. If one begins with the idea that human
beings are motivated by appetites and aversions, by the motivational
effects of sensations of pleasure and pain, then there is indeed a problem
of understanding the significance of relations with others—of object rela-
tions—for the psyche, and indeed for society.
The theoretical presuppositions of utilitarianism—what C.B. MacPherson
(1962) described in his commentary on Hobbes as ‘possessive individual-
ism’—are among the principal ideological foundations of capitalism as a
social system. They underpin, in particular, its assumptions about the econ-
omy, and economic life and behaviour. For all of its history, including in
the lifelong work of Freud himself, the field of psychoanalysis has been
conducting its own debate with and within this ideological system and its
accompanying theory of personality and society. Psychoanalysis has
explored and held more than one position within this prolonged argument,
sometimes elaborating within its own thought positions that qualify and
even challenge its foundational presuppositions, whilst usually remaining
to a degree contained within them. Freud sought to escape from the dismal
logic of innate individual self-aggrandisement through his idea that the
‘sublimation’ of libidinal and aggressive drives and desires, through the
other-regarding activities of the arts and sciences, represented a less self-

destructive mode of being. This idea seems to tacitly reflect John Stuart
Mill’s own revision of utilitarianism (Wollheim 1993) in his postulate of
‘higher pleasures’, and belief in education as a form of emancipation. One
mentions J.S. Mill here, because Freud’s involvement in this literature
extended to his having translated Mill’s The Enfranchisement of Women into
German.
Freud also came to recognise, especially from Mourning and Melancholia
(1917) onwards, the significance of relations with external and internal
objects for the well-being and capacities of the self. Freud’s commitment
to the significance of self-understanding, bringing unconscious desires
and beliefs under the rule of comprehension, as a means of enhancing
human freedom, draws implicitly on idealist philosophical traditions that
are different from those of the materialist, deterministic biologism of
Hobbes. A principal source of this idealist tradition, contemporary with
Hobbes, was Spinoza’s philosophy, which developed the view that through
the exercise of reason human beings could understand the chains of cause
and effect that shaped their existence, including those causes constituted
by their own emotions. Through such understanding, they could enhance
their freedom and gain the serenity of mind that follows from the experi-
ence of understanding itself. Broadly speaking, one can see the hedonistic
and the idealistic as the dual philosophical origins of the psychoanalytic
tradition, one focused on the operation of instincts and appetites, the
other on the operations of the mind, which can bring these within the
sphere of rational comprehension.5
From a sociological perspective, one can say that capitalism in its devel-
opment engendered both an ideology of possessive individualism and, as its
own counter-culture, an extended ethical, aesthetic and relational idea of
the individual subject. This more expressive view of human nature was
evolved both through imaginative literature and art, and through philo-
sophical theorists in the idealist tradition. Writers such as Coleridge, Goethe
and Schiller developed these ways of thinking in across these boundaries.
Margot Waddell and Meg Harris Williams (1991) have set out a contempo-
rary version of this connection, arguing that that Bion’s theory of the devel-
opment of the mind as about reflection on experience has as its direct parallel
the idea of the mind, which is implicit in the poetry of, for example, Keats.
48 M. Rustin
My argument is that the idea that narcissism is in some way the origi-
nal state, on which the recognition of others and relationships with oth-
ers are later grafted as a consequence of development, embodies the
‘hedonistic’ version of the psychoanalytic theory of development. The
idea of innate object-relatedness accords with a view of human nature
that allots a larger place to reason.
Psychoanalytic traditions that draw on continental philosophical tradi-
tions, such as that of Lacan, are in my opinion also caught up in these
deep-seated differences, although in a different way. The idea of originary
‘lack’ in Lacan’s writing, as the primary driver of the personality’s relation
to the world, postulates another version of narcissism as the primordial
condition. Lack of what, is the question. In the Kleinian tradition, the
primary desire is for relations to an object or objects, and following Bion,
for the understanding of the nature of those objects. ‘Lack’ in the Lacanian
tradition seems to amount to a vortex of passions, which are shaped into
some kind of survivable coherence, and are given a ‘name’ only through
the introjection of an essentially partial or false version of the self. This
process is conceived as the reproduction of a repressive or alienating social
order. One can see these different psychoanalytic sub-traditions as each
representing a different hypothetical relationship between the self and
society within capitalism. (Where, incidentally, except that it is by no
means incidental, has psychoanalysis so far flourished except in capitalist
societies?6) Freud accepted the limitations of a world of individuals in
innate competition and conflict with one another, but saw some possibil-
ity of alleviating its most damaging features through recognition, in both
individual and in cultural terms, of the harmfulness of excessive repression,
and through discerning some scope for making possible the satisfaction of
desires through their symbolic or sublimated representation the under-
standings of the arts, sciences—and, indeed, through psychoanalysis itself.
Lacan provided a vocabulary that was rich in its capacity to disclose the
misrepresentations by subjects of their desires and their objects, and that
offered the satisfactions and freedoms that could be obtained from such
disclosure and recognition. ‘The impossible’, however, is a term that fre-
quently appears in this discourse. The socio-political version of this per-
spective involves the disclosure of the entire social and cultural system as
the embodiment of systematic, repressive misrepresentations, which may
achieve sudden illumination in those moments of revolutionary challenge

or disruption that have been a recurrent feature of French political life.7
There has been a continuing powerful current of anti-bourgeois opinion in
that culture, which, however, has always found it difficult to escape from
the assumptions of individualism, except through totalising but unstable
kinds of group identification.8 Lacan notoriously rebuffed the demonstra-
tors of May 1968 in Paris when they appealed to him to provide a kind of
symbolic leadership. ‘You are looking for a leader—you will find one soon
enough,’ he is reported to have said. We should perhaps take this discour-
aging response seriously as an indication of the innate pessimism and fatal-
ism of this psychoanalytic view of the unalterability of social repression.
The object relations tradition of the Kleinian tradition offers a some-
what different view of the relations between individuals and society,
influenced also by the particular society in which it emerged. Its commit-
ment to the idea of relations between the self and its objects as primary to
the constitution of the self rejects the very idea of the individual as an
entity intelligible outside of its social relationships. Norbert Elias (1991)
himself influenced by the perspectives of group analysis, made this intrin-
sic and indissoluble connection between the individual and the social the
foundation of his ‘figurational sociology’. The Kleinian conception of
primary relational needs, which are in principle capable of being met,
and of emotional and intellectual development, which normally will take
place within a nurturing environment, disputes the idea that the relation
between individual desires and needs and the demands of societies is an
‘impossible’ one, condemned to a necessarily tragic conflict or contradic-
tion. It is important to note that this object relations approach developed
in a political context in which the ideology of capitalism and individual-
ism was under sustained political pressure, as the values of the ‘social’
were asserted,9 within the social democratic post war settlement in
Britain, and its equivalents in Europe, and even in the United States.10
This psychoanalytic tradition embodies a compromise between two
different facets of the ideology of individualism. While the original
assumptions about individuals primarily motivated by self-gratifying
desires remain constitutive for psychoanalysis in its Freudian forms, it has
evolved in different directions within different post-Freudian traditions.
These include, in Britain, the development of ideas of an innate relation-
50 M. Rustin
ality, and a deepening of conception of self-development in both moral

and aesthetic directions following the influence, for example, of Segal,
Bion and Meltzer (Glover 2009). In France, the most important addition
was a heightened attention to the formative powers of culture and lan-
guage. These ideas give expression, in the field of psychoanalysis, to the
competing culturally specific conceptions of value that characterise con-
temporary capitalist societies.
Melancholia
In Freud’s view, and in that of Klein, who extended and deepened it,
melancholia is a narcissistic illness or disorder of the personality. Mourning
and Melancholia (Freud 1917) is the work in which Freud first fully rec-
ognised the importance of the self ’s relations to its loved objects, as he
explored the different developments that could take place when the loss
of an object had to be suffered. The ‘normal’ or more favourable develop-
ment, which Freud termed mourning, differentiating it from melancho-
lia, involved the psyche’s working through its experience of loss, gradually
detaching ‘cathexis’ from its lost object, and seeking new objects of
attachment in the external world that might partially replace it. His idea
was that in favourable conditions what had been lost nevertheless
remained present in the mind as a remembered and loved internal object.
In some circumstances, however, this process of mourning and letting
go of the lost object fails to take place, or does not take place sufficiently.
Freud and Klein believed that this was primarily the case when relations
with the lost object had been too suffused with unconscious hatred or
guilt. Always for Klein it is the balance between love and hate that is cru-
cial for the quality of development. In the state of melancholia, the self ’s
unconscious hostility towards its object (one reason in phantasy for the
self having been abandoned by it) is turned towards the self, and then
experienced as persecuting guilt. The inner world becomes dominated by
the continuing presence of a dead object, towards which reparation (both
actual and internal) is felt to have failed. Depression and self-torment is
one response to this situation, although the hatred embodied in this state
of mind may also be projected outwards in the form of blame and
r esentment of others, in a defensive formation intended to limit the pain

of self-blame. Thus, situations of difficult or failed mourning may be
accompanied by bitter recriminations against those held to have respon-
sibility for harm to, or the death of, the loved object. Where there has
been external culpability, for example, through medical negligence, such
states of mind can be reinforced by animosity towards accused wrongdo-
ers. Such a situation where there has been a failure to protect objects of
concern also signifies retrospectively the isolation and weakness of the self
and its good internal objects, rendering it even more vulnerable to self-
doubt and depression. Family quarrels over inheritances can be fueled by
this same dynamic. Hatred of the lost object (for what she or he is felt not
to have provided when they were alive) and self-hatred among the survi-
vors for their failures of love and care for the lost object, may also be
directed outwards towards surviving family members.11
Melancholia is a narcissistic disorder in the sense that it is the self that
becomes the primary object of emotional attention. At depth, it is the
damaged internal objects within the self that become this focus. It is the
presence of introjected, ‘alive’, good objects within the self that makes it
possible to establish relations with new objects outside the self. Through a
process of worked-through mourning, such a capacity becomes restored.
Thus, love that can no longer be directed in external reality towards a
partner who has died, may continue to be focused on children or siblings,
and can be sustained within the self by the memory of the lost partner’s
earlier shared involvement in and identification with them. Such identifi-
cations with lost objects can be located in shared ‘objects’ other than fam-
ily members or other loved persons. It is for this reason that mourners are
often invited to make gifts to causes dear to the person who has been lost.
Narcissism, Melancholia and Society

How far do these concepts have an explanatory value in explaining not
only individual but also shared social states of mind? I will suggest that
they do, although it needs to be acknowledged that it is methodologically
more difficult to be confident of the validity of applications of psycho-
analytical ideas at broader levels of society than at an individual or
52 M. Rustin
institutional level. This difference is because settings for clinical work or

organisational consultancy more easily provide bounded, laboratory-like
conditions in which hypotheses can be empirically explored and tested
than is possible in ‘open-field’ settings (Rustin 2001, pp. 30–51).
For example, it seems to me that one can identify, from observation
and self-reflection, the consequences for personality formation of some of
the typical routines and disciplines of neoliberal social organisation, even
in universities. The instituting of regimes that insist on the inspection,
testing, measurement and grading of the performance of individuals,
work-groups and their organisations, has the consequence of demanding
attention to the self as a prime object of value, thus displacing it from
what should be the primary objects of the work of the self. In the case of
university teachers, this might be students and their learning, as well as a
chosen field of study and its development through research or scholar-
ship. A perverse diversion of aim arises from the excesses of grading, with
the anxieties that this is prone to induce. Indeed one way of putting this
is to say that in these circumstances a relationship to objects dominated
by depressive states of mind (concern for their well-being) becomes
invaded by persecutory anxieties (how well am I, or those with whom I
am identified, doing?).
It is interesting to reflect on the roles of performing artists in this con-
nection. On the one hand, performers such as actors are subject to a
never-ending exposure to external assessment and judgement, in audi-
tions and performances alike. This milieu is often held to be associated
with, to engender or even to attract narcissistic personalities. But on the
other hand, the actual work that actors do requires of them the deepest
identification with the imagined lives of others,. Likewise, for a musician,
the task is to interpret the ‘mind’—the musical imagination—of a com-
poser, and to relate sensitively to the interpretative efforts of fellow per-
formers. These occupations seem to demand at the same time extremes
both of internal relatedness and of self-preoccupation and exposure.
I would not wish to generalise further than this about the prevalence of
narcissistic personality formations in contemporary society as Christopher
Lasch did thirty years ago in his influential The Culture of Narcissism
(1979). His central argument concerned what he perceived to be the
weakening of the primary nurturing structures of family relationships,
which he ascribed to the public appropriation of caring functions that

had previously been assigned to families, and to the displacement of the
roles of fathers, in part attributed by him to the influence of feminism.
Narcissistic personality formations (narcissistic defences, in Kleinian
terms) may sometimes be the effect of the social conditions that Lasch
described. However, it seems to me that analysis of such connections
between society and personality needs to be highly context-specific if it is
to do justice to the complexity and differentiation of contemporary soci-
eties. In Social Defences against Anxiety: Explorations in a Paradigm
(Armstrong and Rustin 2014), various contributors aimed to do just this
by demonstrating the way that different kinds of unconscious anxiety and
defence are evoked by different kinds of work.
There are some convincing instances of the use of the psychoanalytic
concept of melancholia to explain states of mind that have had the power
to shape an entire society. The foremost of these is the Mitscherlichs’
analysis of the psychosocial condition, or ‘structure of feeling’ to use
Raymond Williams’s term, of post-war Germany, in their book The
Inability to Mourn (1973). In the title essay of this work, the authors
describe what can be called a shared manic defence against the virtual
impossibility of mourning the catastrophe of the Third Reich and its col-
lapse, so catastrophic would such a mourning process have been. (At least
if it were attempted at a time too close to the catastrophe. After a passage
of nearly thirty years, different responses seemed to have become possi-
ble.) The Mitscherlichs’ essay describes the almost total identification of
the German people with their Führer, and the loss of individual identity
and powers of discrimination that this involved. They argue (consistently
with Adorno and Horkheimer’s authoritarian personality thesis) that the
ingrained habit of obedience of members of German society conditioned
them to accept with little demur an authority structure that could both
claim, and through its military triumphs, then prove’ its total legitimacy.
The collapse in humiliating defeat of this system threatened those who
had subscribed to it with breakdown into a state of melancholia. What
would, from the perspective of the reality principle, have been revealed in
a process of mourning was that those ‘objects’ (the leaders, their consum-
ing hatreds, their atrocities, their lies and their doctrines), with which
Germans had identified or been complicit, were at root evil, and that
54 M. Rustin
nothing but suffering, both to Germany’s victims and to Germany, had

come from their domination and from the people’s unwavering support
for them. This recognition was a virtually impossible psychological bur-
den to take on, in part because there had been so little dissent or resis-
tance to the Nazis among the German people.
The alternative to melancholia, the Mitscherlichs argued, was denial,
amnesia and a manic flight into economic recovery, the Wirtschafwunder
or German economic miracle. Ancillary to this was the transmutation of
the paranoid-schizoid fears and loathings of the Nazi period into the
antagonistic sentiments of anti-communism and the Cold War, with the
Soviet Union cast once again in the role of the enemy. West Germany had
the parallel world of East Germany—a convenient alter ego—on to
which blame and contempt could be dumped. In Klein’s view, contempt
is an important aspect of mania.12
The Mitscherlichs’ book was first published in 1967. The authors were
able to take note in a later edition in 1975 of what they saw as the trans-
formative moment of Willy Brandt’s public act of remorse—his falling to
his knees at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970. Brandt had
lived in Norway and Sweden during the war, and had openly rejected and
opposed the cause of Nazi Germany—he had been in the Norwegian
army. Yet he was to became Chancellor of the Federal Republic, holding
that position from 1969 to 1974 (he was leader of the West German
Social Democrat Party, the SPD, from 1964 to 1987). Anyone who has
visited Berlin can hardly have failed to notice from encounters with the
public art of that city how substantial has become its acknowledgement
of the guilt and suffering of the Nazi period.13 Not everything is what it
was when the Mitscherlichs wrote their best-selling book; indeed their
writing surely contributed significantly, just as one hopes that a psycho-
analytic interpretation would do, to such ‘ability to mourn’ as developed
subsequent to their work. Indeed, their writing provides a powerful
example of how the psychoanalytic category of mourning can be found
an exact application at a specific moment of history.
The second example, with which I will conclude, is of the use by Paul
Gilroy of the concept of melancholia to explain post-colonial states of
mind in contemporary British society (2004). These two applications are
linked, since Gilroy sources his concept of melancholia not in the original
psychoanalytic texts but in the Mitscherlichs’ exemplary work. Gilroy’s

argument is that the loss of empire has been experienced by many British
people as one that cannot be mourned. Perhaps this state of mind—a
kind of melancholia—was most powerfully expressed in the 1960s and
1970s by Enoch Powell, who experienced the achieved independence of
former colonies, such as India, and the ongoing rejection by Irish
Nationalists of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as intol-
erable rejections of the British nation, and acts of base ingratitude.14 This
seems to have been a state of mind based on a delusion of collective pater-
nity, an idea of betrayal by ungrateful children. If they won’t value or want
us any more as their benign protectors and rulers, then we want nothing
more to do with them, was the gist of Powell’s idea. Migrants from the
former empire became for him a tide of aliens, whose presence threatened
to dilute and overwhelm what remained of value in the native culture.
The lost objects, in this instance, were both the empire itself, as an
imagined scene of good government and gradual emancipation into the
norms of British civilisation, and Britain’s own imperial identity and mis-
sion. One can see how Powell’s classicist identification between the British
and Roman Empires contributed to this state of mind: ‘I see the Tiber
foaming with much blood’, was one of his most inflammatory pro-
nouncements about immigration and race. Almost entirely disavowed
and split off in Powell’s conscious and unconscious recollections were the
more hate-filled aspects of this imperial relationship—the contempt for
the “uncivilised” state of colonial subjects, its endemic racism, its self-
interested failures to bring about economic or social development (for
example, the empire ruined rather than developed the economy of
India),15 the contamination of the supposed civilising mission by misrep-
resentations, cruelty and lies.
In the post-colonial condition of melancholia, these feelings of hatred
were displaced away from the self, in/through identification with the
British nation, which is felt to have been gravely damaged and humiliated
by the loss of imperial possessions and by the supposed failure of the mis-
sion of the colonisers. The hatred always present within the colonial rela-
tionship (although this was not its only state of mind) reappeared in a
more direct form, directed towards the immigrants from the former colo-
nies (or their British-born descendants) who are perceived in fantasy
56 M. Rustin
to have come to take back what the British took from them, or even to
reverse the relationship of exploitation and theft that previously consti-
tuted the empire. They are felt to take over our spaces, ironically just as
we once took over theirs. At the time of the general election of 2015, even
the Scots following their Independence Referendum were sometimes
thought of in this fearful and resentful way. It proved a potent electoral
weapon to suggest that the Scottish Nationalists, in a possible coalition
with Labour, might soon be ruling over us! The arguments from colonial
obligation—the idea that we should now be fulfilling through our gener-
osity and hospitality the promises of equal citizenship we once made—
cut little ice with this resentful opinion. Indeed, such reminders of former
attachments may make matters psychologically even more unbearable,
since what then has to be forcefully split off is the reality that the newly
proximate arrivals in our streets actually have quite a lot in common with
‘us’. In many ways, ‘they’ already know ‘us’, and ‘we’ know ‘them’. After
the 2015 general election, and during the Referendum on membership
or withdrawal from the European Union, hostility towards a threatening
other has become redirected towards fellow Europeans. However, while
the object of hatred may have (temporarily) changed, the dominant states
of mind, of antagonism, persecution and splitting are the same.
Gilroy dwells largely on the many negative forms of ambivalence and
hostility towards the former colonies that he perceives in contemporary
British culture. He evokes many manifestations of this, from institutional
racism to nostalgic evocations of an ‘unspoiled’ but also imaginary rural
England, to national histories that gloss over the realities of colonial rule.
But although it is not difficult to find numerous instances that substanti-
ate his argument, it seems to me that the reality is not quite as monochro-
matically melancholic as he suggests. The multicultural conviviality,
which he sees as the desirable alternative to this state of resentment, seems
to me to have a more established presence in British society than his
account allows.16 There have also been, in parallel with melancholic
response to the loss of empire, serious attempts at mourning the losses of
the imperial past; that is, to work through the positive and negative
dimensions of the earlier colonial relationships, and to locate in these
internal objects some elements of esteem, interest and appreciation from
which new relationships can be built. The project of a ‘commonwealth’,
which could replace according to norms of equality and respect the for-
mer ties of domination, although deeply flawed, did represent a less
destructive project than the motivations of resentful, injured pride or
narcissism that characterised Powell, or before him, Churchill.
Multicultural society in Britain is a continuing site of conflict between
contending conceptions of ‘Britishness’, and thus of Britain’s relationship
to its past—to its residual internal objects. One position in this argument
is that since we cannot be an empire, we will be Little Britain, as little
contaminated by foreign-ness (Europe) or racial otherness as possible.
The heroic moments of the Second World War are a powerful icon of this
structure of feeling, all the more so because at that moment a paranoid-
schizoid division of the world between the good and the evil seemed to
have a rare correspondence with reality.
This more inclusive and optimistic version of national identity, by no
means negligible in its influence, no longer has much attachment to the
imperial past, and is capable of attachments to signs of the new, including
some that have come from the formerly colonised world. There are other
elements of a past sense of national identity with which this more open-
minded part of the national psyche can identify—for example,
commitments to universality and social justice. Where states of mind are
more positive and hopeful (less internally sabotaged by hatred and self-
blame), practices of fairness and civility can have positive and creative
outcomes. One can not only get along with people who have different
origins but can even create new goods through interaction with them. (It
is significant that soon the largest ‘ethnic minority’ in Britain will be
people designating themselves ‘mixed race’.)
Generally speaking, experiences of declining opportunities and low-
ered status are liable to be associated with the more melancholic side of
this psychological spectrum. If the sense of worth of individuals or com-
munities has been undermined by the loss of employment (the collapse
of industries in which people earned decent livings and had pride in what
they did), dis-esteem is internalised, and internal objects suffer damage.
‘Something that matters has been lost—who is to blame for this?’ becomes
the question. Nigel Farage is a persuasive interpreter of this state of mind.
Because he appears genial, his appeal reaches wider than it might do if he
seemed exclusively to embody hatred and resentment as some thuggish
58 M. Rustin
figures of the radical right have done in the past. Thus he offers a more
acceptable model of identification—someone people would not mind
having a drink with—even while he is extremely definite about who does
and who does not belong to ‘our’ community, and about who ‘we’ are.
One could say that Farage himself embodies a kind of manic defence17
against the loss of an imagined lost world of Great Britain.
Conclusion
I have argued that narcissism is to be understood as a form of defence
against the anxieties that occur within relationships with loved objects
that fail or disappoint. It is not, therefore, the starting point of human
existence from which we subsequently emerge into knowledge of and
relationships with others. The view of narcissism set out here is located
firmly within the Kleinian and post-Kleinian object relations perspective
in the mainly British psychoanalytic tradition. I have argued further that
the phenomena of mourning and melancholia also need to be under-
stood within an object relations perspective, each representing a different
response to the loss of significant objects. What chiefly determines
whether states of mourning are creatively overcome, or whether they per-
sist into melancholia, is the relative strength of love and hate in regard
both to a lost object and to the imagined self to which, in unconscious
phantasy, it is (and has been) related.
I have suggested that the concepts of narcissism and melancholia
can, within the psychoanalytic perspective I have adopted, be used to
analyse and understand social as well as individual states of mind. I
have also suggested some examples of such applications. My argument
is that narcissistic states of mind, which include pathological personal-
ity organisations including melancholia, should be understood as
regressions from, or defences against, those dominated by relationships
with loved objects, and with the capacities for thought and feeling that
these relationships nurture and support. I believe that such analyses
need always to be context-specific. It would be desirable to develop
methods of research for such work that have some of the rigour,
iterability and accountability of the clinical use of psychoanalytic con-

cepts and theories. The writings of the Mitscherlichs and Paul Gilroy
demonstrate how this can be achieved.
Notes
1. For an earlier version of the view developed here, which includes some
clinical illustration, see Rustin and Rustin (2010). Further political
dimensions related to neoliberalism are explored in Rustin (2014).
2. There is a large research literature on this—for an introduction see
Bullowa (1979).
3. Britton (1998, 2003) describes narcissistic defences as reactions to the
unconscious encounter with the Oedipal situation, signifying deep dif-
ficulties in tolerating or coming to terms with it. He identifies, with
reference to clinical work but also to several literary texts, many sub-
varieties of these defences. The capacity to enter the depressive posi-
tion—to bear depressive anxiety—is in his view the precondition for
tolerating the Oedipal situation and accepting the reality of triangular
relationships, which is the precondition of thought.
4. There is a link between this argument and Wittgenstein’s argument con-
cerning the impossibility of a private language.
5. The attraction of Freud for a circle of philosophers in England—includ-
ing Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim—was
related to the recognition that Freud’s idea of the unconscious added a
further dimension to the idea that rational understanding conferred the
possibility of enhanced freedom. Hampshire drew attention to a deep
affinity between Freud and Spinoza’s philosophy. At the end of a passage
about this in his book on Spinoza, he concludes: ‘In reading Spinoza, it
must not be forgotten that he was before all things concerned to point
the way to human freedom through understanding and natural knowl-
edge’ (Hampshire 1951, pp. 141–143). Freud rather elliptically acknowl-
edges this connection too, in his paper on Leonardo da Vinci.
6. Psychoanalytic writing has admittedly sometimes been part of a critique
of capitalism from within, such as in the work of Marie Langer and the
Frankfurt School.
7. The influence of this perspective on radical culture and politics is by means
confined to France, as the success of Zizek’s writings demonstrates.
60 M. Rustin
8. De Tocqueville described the conditions of existence of this state of

mind, in the erosion of social solidarities by individualism; Rousseau
showed what followed from it in his theory of the merger of all rational
individual wills in a ‘general will’.
9. Drawing on both precapitalist and aspirationally post-capitalist—social-
ist—ideas to do so, at times evoked by the same writers, as Raymond
Williams (1958) described.
10. I have written elsewhere about the differences between Lacan and the
British object relations tradition (Rustin 1995, 2016).
11. Perhaps such a melancholic response to loss is an explanation of the
dominant structure of feeling of Israel’s political identity. It is found
impossible to ‘let go’ of the ‘dead objects’ of the Holocaust, and the
hatred from which catastrophe arose is, in an endless repetition compul-
sion, relocated within and projected onto new enemies.
12. ‘This disparagement of the object’s importance and the contempt for it is, I
think, a specific characteristic of mania, and enables the ego to effect that
partial detachment which we observe side by side with its hunger for
objects’ (Klein 1935, pp. 278–289).
13. Robert McNamara’s retrospective examination of the catastrophe of the
Vietnam War, and his own active role in the misjudgments that brought
it about, is perhaps another instance of a work of mourning. Books by
McNamara, and Errol Morris’s documentary film about McNamara, The
Fog of War, document this. Morris’s later film about another U.S. Secretary
of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, starkly displays an opposite state of mind.
14. Paul Foot (1969) put this view of Powell very perceptively.
15. In a book that set out a triumphalist view of the British Empire, Niall
Fergusson (2003) admitted that only its white subjects gained any sub-
stantial economic benefit from it.
16. The large response to the Legacies of British Slave-ownership website
www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/, which reports what happened to the compensation
paid to slave owners at the time of abolition, is an instance of positive
and inquiring attitudes.
17. Even the melancholic Powell, and the possibly manic-depressive
Churchill, kept hold of some more positive identifications, which to
some degree offset their bitterness at what they believed had been rejected
and lost. Part of Powell’s version of Englishness involved his attachment
to a much earlier tradition of classical education, and the love and com-
mand of language of both these figures won them respect from some
who detested their reactionary views.
References
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Explorations in a Paradigm. London: Karnac.
Bick, E. (1968). The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 484–486.
Bion, W. R. (1962a). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Bion, W. R. (1962b). A Theory of Thinking. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 43, 306. Reprinted in Bion, W. R. (1967). Second Thoughts.
London: Heinemann. pp. 110–111.
Bion, W. R. (1963). Elements of Psychoanalysis. London: Heinemann.
Britton, R. (1998). Belief and Imagination. London: Routledge.
Britton, R. (2003). Sex, Death and the Superego. London: Karnac.
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Communication. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Elias, N. (1991). The Society of Individuals. Reissued. London: Continuuum
(2001).
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Allen Lane.
Foot, P. (1969). The Rise of Enoch Powell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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London: Hogarth Press.
Gilroy, P. (2004). After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London:
Routledge.
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London: Karnac.
Hampshire, S. (1951). Spinoza. London: Faber and Faber.
Harris Williams, M., & Waddell, M. (1991). The Chamber of Maiden Thought:
Literary Origins of the Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind. London: Routledge.
Klein, M. (1935). Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States. In
M. Klein (Ed.), Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–45.
London: Virago (1988).
Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton.
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Mitscherlich, A., & Mitscherlich, M. (1975 [1967]). The Inability to Mourn:

Principles of Collective Behaviour. New York: Grove Press.
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Thinking. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 7(2). Reprinted in O’Shaughnessy,
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Borderline States. London: Free Associations Books.
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Life and Death Instincts: An Investigation into the Aggressive Aspects of
Narcissism. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 52, l69–l78.
Rustin, M. J. (1995). Lacan, Klein and Politics: The Positive and Negative in
Psychoanalytic Thought. In S. Frosh & A. Elliott (Eds.), Psychoanalysis in
Contexts (pp. 223–245). London: Routledge.
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Psychoanalytical Knowledge. In M. J. Rustin (Ed.), Reason and Unreason:
Psychoanalysis, Science and Politics (pp. 30–51). London: Continuum Books.
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Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 19, 145–160.
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C. Bronstein, & C. Pajaczkowska (Eds.), The New Klein Lacan Dialogues
(pp. 273–292). London: Karnac.
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A. Varchkever (Eds.), Enduring Loss: Mourning, Depression and Narcissism,
Through the Life Cycle (pp. 209–234). London: Karnac.
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(pp. 22–38). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, a

visiting professor at the Tavistock Clinic, and an associate of the British
Psychoanalytical Society. He has written widely on psychoanalytic approaches to

culture, society and politics, and on clinical and observational research methods
in psychoanalysis. His many works include The Good Society and the Inner World
(Verso, 1991); Mirror to Nature, co-authored with Margaret Rustin (Karnac,
2002); Social Defences Against Anxiety: Explorations in a Paradigm, edited with
David Armstrong (Karnac, 2014); and After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn
Manifesto, edited with Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey (Lawrence and Wishart,
2015).
3
Narcissism Through the Digital
Looking Glass
Jay Watts
Every couple of weeks, newspapers announce that the digital revolution

has heralded a new era of narcissism (e.g., Keen 2007; Quenqua 2013;
Fishwick 2016). Digital culture and smart phones, we are told, have cre-
ated the most self-absorbed generation in history likely to divorce or
break down due to their inability to handle real relationships (e.g.,
Carpenter 2012; Szoka 2011). A narcissistic turn in culture has been
being routinely announced since the 1970s (e.g., Lasch 1979). Has the
digital revolution really provoked a new culture of narcissism that is
‘dividing, disorienting and diminishing us’ (Keen 2006)? Can the notion
of narcissism be rescued from those who associate it with developmental-
arrest and pathology (e.g., Lunbeck 2014; Walsh 2015)? Or, can narcis-
sism be rescued as a form of attempted solution, a radical confrontation
to oppression in society?
To explore these questions, we need to examine what people mean
when they speak of narcissism, in psychoanalysis, cultural criticism and
journalism, and whether it can meaningfully be applied to digital
J. Watts (*)
Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, London, UK

66 J. Watts
subjectivities. Let us start with a brief history of narcissism within psy-

choanalysis, for it is this background that is used to legitimise cultural
criticism.
Narcissism in Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic accounts of narcissism tend to start with an account of the
myth of Narcissus. In Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we are intro-
duced to Narcissus, a man so gorgeous that all the nymphs were in love
with him, especially one called Echo. Narcissus spurned Echo’s advances;
in anguish, she faded to nothing, leaving only her voice to linger, to echo.
The Goddess Nemesis heard Echo’s lament, and, as revenge, made
Narcissus fall in love with his own image in a pool. Narcissus became
entranced by his own reflection, never quite able to obtain what he
desired, until, foodless and sleepless, he died when he was turned into the
Narcissus flower. The myth has such cultural resonance that many of us
can draw up a mental image of the Roman poet Ovid’s Narcissus, staring
eternally at his reflection in a pool. A parallel can be drawn, perhaps, to
the modern individual staring, rapt, at the iPhone, a modern iPool with
the echo of one’s reflection always present in the screen alongside what-
ever one is looking at (e.g., Watts 2014). A mirror image, self-absorption
and image are indexed to Narcissus here, to self-love at the expense of
reality; Echo to the capacity for words and speech, the capacity to love
others, and the mourning this can provoke.
Freud (1914) is often read as having described narcissism as a develop-
mental process. In his conceptualisation of the case of Judge Schreber, he
wrote: ‘There comes a time in the development of the individual at which
he unifies his sexual instinct (which have hitherto been engaged in auto-
erotic activities) in order to obtain a love object; and he begins by taking
himself, his own body’ (Freud 1911, p. 60). Freud saw this ‘primary nar-
cissism’ as occurring around the age of six months. Narcissism here is seen
as a defence to protect the baby against psychic pain during the formation
of the self, which will later be rejected in favour of object relations (Freud
1914). Pathological ‘secondary narcissism’ can be trigger in adolescence
or early adulthood when the drive, separation anxieties and issues with
selfhood—ipseity disturbances—are reactivated. Narcissistic libido is ‘the

great reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which
they are withdrawn once more’ (Freud 1905, p. 218). The capacity to
relate to objects is associated with individual factors, but also, as per the
reservoir metaphor, through the relational context that is constituted
within psychocultural space. Though this summary of Freud’s ideas is
pretty typical, as is often the case with Freud, counter-narratives are avail-
able. In fact, Freud had remarkably little to say on primary narcissism. In
the 1914 essay, he referred to both ‘a primary narcissism in everyone,
which may in some cases manifest itself in a dominating fashion in his
object-choice’ (SE XIV, 88), and a significant gap between auto-eroticism
and narcissism that he cannot yet articulate, a ‘new psychical action—in
order to bring about narcissism’ (SE XIV, 77). Freud’s delineation of pri-
mary and secondary narcissism is thus more problematic than most sec-
ondary texts would imply, with something missing, untheorised.
It is remarkable how few theorists took up Freud’s challenge in the
notoriously difficult ‘On Narcissism’. It is only, perhaps, Lacan who tried
to answer the question of what Freud’s missing ‘psychical operation’might
be. Lacan situated this operation as occurring when ‘the specular I turns
into the social I’ (Lacan 1996, p. 98), that is, when a child becomes cap-
tured in the imagined wholeness of a mirror image or the image embod-
ied in a counterpart. The ego is thus constituted in a process of specular
identification. This early ‘mirror phase’ is structurally linked to jealousy
and aggressivity, as the child’s image is imported from outside, and hence
a field of aggressive tension is established: I want what the other has as I
identify with the other. The structurally alienating function of the ego is
indexed to narcissistic libido and present thereafter.
Whilst the mirror stage unifies the body image, it introduces ’the
notion of an aggressiveness linked to the narcissistic relationship and to
the structures of systematic misrecognition and objectification that char-
acterises ego formation’ (Lacan 1966, pp. 115–125). The infant tries to
evade the fact of its own bodily fragmentation via an appeal to a unifying
image, and so ’the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes
precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation’ (Ecrits, 97), an anticipa-
tion of wholeness and completeness that promises but fundamentally
misses. It is only when ‘the specular I turns into the social I’ that human
68 J. Watts
experience ’mediated by the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in an

abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the
I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a dan-
ger’ (Lacan 1996, p. 98).
Lacan’s focus on the missing ’psychical action’ links with Balint’s
(1960) argument that Freud actually only points to a ‘secondary narcis-
sism’ which comes into play on frustration with the environment.
Schizophrenia, for Balint, is not based on fixation to a primary narcis-
sism, but rather a primary undifferentiated environment. There is, for
Balint, a ‘primary love’, a state of primary fusion, which becomes dis-
turbed in processes secondary to primary object relations. The posited
distinction between self-cathexis (primary narcissism) and object-love is
thus, for Balint, senseless.
By the mid- to late twentieth century, narcissism became a highly com-
plicated and contested construct with psychoanalysis culminating in a
divisive debate in the 1970s between two psychoanalysts, Otto Kernberg
and Heinz Kohut (e.g., Campbell and Miller 2011). For Kernberg
(1975), narcissism is malignant, a character trait giving a ‘God Complex’
with the narcissist self-absorbed, an exhibitionist, overconfident, cut off
from the emotional needs of others and convinced of their own special-
ness and entitlement. This reading of the narcissistic character as funda-
mentally aggressive became crystallised in the diagnostic category of
narcissistic ‘personality disorder’ in the diagnostic manual DSM-5 (APA
2013). In contrast, Kohut (1971) celebrated the healthy narcissist, who
needs some self-love as a resource to do anything useful in the world,
such as be creative or ambitious. For Kohut, satisfaction with the self and
some inner resources were seen as essential for full mutuality in object
relations, rather than as an impediment to growth. Kernberg and Kohut’s
texts show both recognised malignant and benign possibilities within
narcissism, and features of developmental-arrest, a subtlety missing from
the polarisation that they both invited and ridiculed. Lunbeck (2014) has
linked some of the confusion in this debate to mistranslations of Freud’s
term Selbstgefühl. This term has been translated both as ‘self-regard’ and
‘self-esteem’ eliciting a different range of associations.
Both Kernberg and Kohut’s accounts tend to locate narcissism within
the individual. However, for the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott
narcissism—loathe as he was to use that term—is always relational. Why?
For Winnicott, ‘there is no such thing as an infant’ (Winnicott 1960,

p. 39). Rather, ‘the infant and maternal care together form a unit’
(Winnicott 1960, p. 39). When mother is not present Winnicott thought,
leaning on Freud, babies come to create the missing object—principally
the breast—by imaging or hallucinating that which would satisfy their
desire. Winnicott’s mother must first provide the real object of the breast
as and when desired, but, over time, get this slightly wrong, be ‘good
enough’ not perfect in her provision such as to disillusion the baby to the
idea it can create reality. This gradual disillusionment orients the baby to
a first chink of space, a nascent symbolisation of ‘me’ and ‘not me’
(Winnicott 1971). Over time, there is a gradual displacement of self and
other onto objects such as the mouth and the ‘transitional object’. If, how-
ever, disillusionment is too sudden, primitive annihilation fears can pro-
voke a defensive reaction (Winnicott 1960). In such cases, ‘the process
that leads to the capacity for symbol-usage does not get started (or else it
becomes broken up, with a corresponding withdrawal on the part of the
infant from advantages gained)… in practice the infant lives, but lives
falsely’ (Winnicott 1960, p. 146). Through ‘this False Self the infant builds
up a false set of relationships, and… even attains a show of being real’
(Winnicott 1960, p. 146), but the ‘true self ’ is hidden and feelings of lack
of connection, and alienation, predominate throughout life. Such narcis-
sistic individuals may achieve great success—not least as he or she may
invest more heavily in aspects of ‘show’ rather than relationships—but will
tend to feel ‘phoney’ (Winnicott 1960, p. 144) and ‘lacks something’
(Winnicott 1960, p. 152) without the spontaneous, authentic, relational
contacts necessary for ‘all-out personal aliveness’ (Akhtar 2009, p. 128).
Winnicott’s theories matter because he recognised the importance of
space not just in early development but as a lifelong source of potential
growth. Psychoanalysis heals, Winnicott argued, because ‘the psychoana-
lytic space [can] act as a “potential space” for play and exploration, and that
this was one of the healing, enriching aspects of a psychoanalysis’ (Winnicott
1971). For Winnicott, spaces other than psychoanalysis can similarly help
serve a similar reorganisational function. Whilst Winnicott was thinking of
religion, art and the creative sciences, digital space could serve a similar
function, with certain characteristics of space encouraging the underlining
and solidifying of a false persona, whilst other characteristics provoke play,
exploration and the possible reconfiguration of psychic structure.
70 J. Watts
Whilst the construct of narcissism is complex and contested within

psychoanalysis, only certain points from particular theorists are present
in cultural studies, chosen given the vested interests of commentators.
Narcissism in the Cultural Imagination

Though psychoanalysis was preoccupied with the idea of narcissism in
the mid-twentieth century, the term only began to be used widely in the
1960s. This simmering of interest exploded with Tom Wolfe’s 1976
TIME feature ‘the me generation’, and the 1979 publication of a ground-
breaking book ‘The Culture of Narcissism’ (Lasch 1979). Lasch’s book is
especially relevant for us as it combined cultural criticism, sociology and
psychoanalysis to argue American society had become highly individual-
istic, and fractured. Lasch’s work was picked up by the mass media includ-
ing the New York Times, People Magazine and every chat show going
(see, for example, Twenge 2011, 2014; Twenge and Campbell 2009).
There have been many such declarations of a cultural shift in cultural
narcissism, but space dictates I register just a few here. In 1980, the
Washington Post tried to argue society should attempt to produce a ‘not
me’ generation, given the narcissistic obsession of youngsters: ‘Since no
lover can rival in grandeur the upper-case Self, what is to be gained from
giving one’s affection? But me-mania is a fashion, not a level of spirit.’ By
1990, Generation X were labelled as ‘having trouble making decisions.
They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate lad-
der… They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as
one zap of a TV dial… They postpone marriage because they dread
divorce.’ (Gross and Scott 1990). Current headlines focus on millennials
(those born between 1982 and 1999) being the ‘ME, ME, ME genera-
tion’ as Joel Stein pronounced on the front page of TIME (Stein 2013).
In 2007, TIME informed us that even for the Chinese it’s now ‘all about
me’ (Inc 2007).
There are hundreds of cultural theory texts and tens of thousands of
journal articles on what Keen (2007) calls ‘digital narcissism’. Digital
technology has been used to justify new accusations of a cultural narcis-
sism, with headlines such as ‘I, narcissist—vanity, social media, and the
human condition’ (Fishwick 2016), ‘Generation selfie: Has posing, pout-

ing and posting turned us all into narcissists?’ (Hart 2014) and ‘Sharing
the (self ) love: the rise of the selfie and digital narcissism’ (Chamorro-
Premuzi 2016) commonplace. I will refer to authors, journalists, com-
mentators and academics who use narcissism as a form of insult,
developmental-arrest and false personhood as neo-Laschians.
Neo-Laschians justify their headlines through a number of discursive
moves (e.g., Watts 2012). The most salient mechanism is using what Stein
calls ‘cold hard facts’. However, the data used is deeply problematic. To
take one example, there is evidence that people are living for a longer time
with their parents, yes, but this can be explained by the economic situa-
tion (e.g., Stein 2013). The most reliable data is supposed to come from
epidemiological studies of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (e.g., Twenge
2011). However, as Roberts, Edmons and Grijalva have pointed out
(2010) ‘It is Developmental me, not Generation me’—that it, older com-
mentators often attribute differences in younger generations as due to a
worrying shift in society, in so doing neglecting their own preoccupation
with the self in their youth, and pathologising a developmental stage they
have just grown out of. Put simply, if one collapses new data into meta-
analyses, there has been no increase in narcissism in college students, the
most studied group, since the ’70s. What is reliable is evidence that rates
of narcissism change as we age. Life chips away at our self-obsession—a
phenomena that is often misrecognised by older generations who forget
their own self-absorbed youth (e.g., Prensky 2001), and thus attribute dif-
ference to narcissism rather than generational changes and the specific
tasks of ‘emerging adulthood’ (after Arnett 2000). Pathlogising the young
is no new phenomena of course, but societal changes from rock ‘n’ roll to
rave culture to SNS (Social Networking Sites) give something to hook this
discontent on. The term narcissism is also so powerful that it obscures
other narratives about a generation. For example, millennials have also
been seen as ‘Generation We’ due to their interests in social change move-
ments such as Occupy, Anonymous and fourth-wave feminist communi-
ties such as ‘Everyday Sexism’ (e.g., Greenberg and Weber 2008). Such
activism is in stark contrast to the greed and individualism of the
‘loadsamoney’ 1980s, but does not garner sensationalist headlines about
personality changes across the generations.
72 J. Watts
Common to Lasch and all the Neo-Laschian accounts is a condensation

of narcissism with wider cultural shifts from production to consumption,
renunciation to gratification, dependency to independent, object-love to
self-love, and modesty to vanity. This is not only a misuse of Freud’s con-
cept of narcissism, but a morally loaded exercise celebrating virtues deemed
to fit with an imagined puritanical, pre-industrial relatedness and pathlo-
gising other traits. This moralism is most evident in the implicit choice of
whether to label self-love traits as self-esteem (good), or as narcissism (bad).
Whilst self-esteem is situated as a separate concept, it has poor construct
validity, that is, it is unclear whether it is meaningful construct that can be
reliably distinguished from narcissism (e.g., Leitner and Forbes 2014).
This splitting cannot be justified on the basis of functionality, for many
narcissistic traits are supremely useful in establishing high-status relation-
ships and employment (e.g., Maccoby 2003) though its construct validity
is constantly linked with the capacity to have good relationships.
Traits that are dystonic to an Anglo-Saxon puritanical ideal are pathol-
ogised under the signifier ‘narcissism’, which is legitimised under the
rubric of psychoanalysis, and in the invisible interests of the status quo
(e.g., Watts 2012). A classic example of this is vanity, traditionally seen as
a female vice and thus inferior, and placed under the banner of narcissism
(bad) rather than self-esteem (good). These associations have not gone
unnoticed within psychoanalysis. For example, the early twentieth-
century psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s considered herself a narcissist (Butler
1990). She aimed to capture something of her experience as a patient and
analyst in her writings on ‘womanliness as masquerade’, which situated
vanity as an attempted solution to disorganisation and potential decom-
pensation (Butler 1990).
Such counter-narratives have often not been picked up because of dis-
trust in the psychoanalytic community by marginalised communities,
such as LGBTQ communities. Simple readings of Freud have been used
to pathologise homosexuality until very recently, with the construct of
narcissism (mis)used to imply an immature, pathological subjectivity
(e.g., Rosenfeld 1949). Distrust of psychoanalysis by communities who
have been hurt by its misuse and prejudices mean that the rich internal
and external critiques of psychoanalysis as a normalising, phallocentric
enterprise tend to circulate only in analytic, academic and intellectual
circles not in the public imagination. This allows the continued splitting
of self-esteem and narcissism so narcissism can to be used as an insult.
With positive self-regard placed under the rubric of self-esteem, practi-
cally the only place once can find positive accounts of narcissism is in
management studies where the ‘productive narcissistic’ is praised, the key
being to cultivate just the right amount of narcissism (e.g., Maccoby
2003). In contrast, the more negative conception of narcissism—built
from ideas of malignancy, developmental-arrest and false personhood—
are almost unavoidable in newspaper stories, books and TV programmes
(e.g., Reeve 2013). Neo-Laschians use the construct of narcissism to
attempt to evidence a cultural downshift to more selfish, vain, entitled,
self-obsessed subjectivities.
As we have seen, successive generations have been accused of being
narcissistic. The shift from the ‘me generation’ to the ‘me, me, me genera-
tion’ and now the ‘ME, ME, ME generation’ has partially become possi-
ble because SNS have been framed as producing increased rates of
narcissism. Are there qualities of digital space that invite narcissism? To
explore this, we will look at digital space as framed by neo-Laschians and
sociologists.
Narcissism and the Digital Looking Glass

Most of the accounts we have discussed so far have located narcissism as
something that occurs within individuals (Kernberg, Kohut), though
mediated by particular characteristics of potential space (Winnicott).
However, like Lacan, sociologists have long argued that our sense of self
lies in the ‘looking glass’ (Cooley 1902) in which we see ourselves. As con-
ceptualised by theories of symbolic interactionism (e.g., Goffman 1959),
our sense of self emerges through interactions; we come to see ourselves
through others’ reactions to us, just as Lacan’s mirror stage produces an
emergent moi. In Goffman’s dramaturgical symbolic-interaction model
(1959), individuals relate to each other both through a ‘face’, a mask that
varies across social situations. This face, these masks, indicate a successful
staging of selves-hood, not a false persona associated with narcissism.
Social interaction is thus ‘put together by the exchange of dramatically
74 J. Watts
inflated actions, counteractions and terminating replies’ (Goffman 1959,

p. 78). The ‘impression management’ of everyday life we engage in is
countered by the forces of ‘roleplaying’ in which society imposes particular
scripts on certain roles, such as that of the psychiatric patient. When what
is sent out and what is expected tally ‘only the sociologist or the socially
disgruntled will have any doubts about the “realness” of what is presented’
(Goffman 1959, p. 28). For symbolic interactionists, the self is fundamen-
tally inauthentic and a ‘confidence trick’. Within this framework, digital
selves are seen as less dystopian, more fundamentally exterior, than in
many neo-Laschian accounts.
For neo-Laschians, corporeal relations are ideologically framed as
superior, more ‘real’, more authentic and with access to a variety of non-
verbal cues such as voice, cadence, posture and gesture (e.g., Schore
2012). Though others stage-manage their responses to us, corporeal com-
munication is seen as ‘ungovernable’, meaning that our experience is
mediated by the presumed authenticity of other’s responses (e.g., Berger
and Luckmann 1967). This corporeal presence gives us ‘a maximum of
symptoms’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966) producing a more transparent
looking glass than the ‘opaque’ one Zhao (2005) projects onto digital
space. In contrast, the telecopresent self relates to the other through elec-
tronic rather than physical links, with emphasis placed on the capacity to
be ‘present’ in several places at once (‘tele’) producing a hyper-reality, a
transitional space that is neither quite reality nor fantasy (e.g., Turkle
2009; Whitty and Carr 2006).
Of course, distance communication is no new thing, from the tele-
gram to the telephone. However, the digital revolution means we have a
different type of access to the other who will use ‘handles’, ‘screen names’
or ‘cyber-personas’ to both conceal and reveal their identities (e.g., Zizek
2004). We spend an inordinate amount of time online, with Britons
spending 62 million hours per day on SNS—an average of an hour each
(Hurst 2013). SNS have become central to daily life, with female
Facebook users checking their account at least ten times per day, and
users tweeting whilst giving birth (Daily Mail 2010) and having sex (Page
2012). The Web has moved from the passive consumption of expert
knowledge in Web 1.0, to an ever-increasing focus on user-driven con-
tent in Web 2.0. Web 3.0 promises to revolve content around the nexus
‘I’, finishing our sentences, and proffering only information personalised

algorithms indicate we are likely to enjoy (e.g., Mitra 2009). The space is
definitely narcissistic, but in the broadest self-regard- and self-esteem-
encompassing sense of the word.
Most sociological studies of digital selves have used a Goffmanian per-
spective to focus on the presentation of the digital self (e.g., Waskul
2003). Here, the lack of embodied feedback is not seen as stopping us
from picking up clues of what we are for the other, but rather producing
a different type of space with different forms of feedback (Zizek 2004).
Though the in-between nature of digital space may invite the phantas-
mal, the sheer number of connections may counter the lack of verbal
cues, as will the fact most people relate to people they know in the
embodied world. The digital self here is seen by symbolic interactionists
as an additional way of playing with the self, whilst neo-Laschians tend
to focus on ‘disembodiment’ (Dreyfus 2001) to emphasise what is miss-
ing. Whilst neo-Laschians assume telecopresent relations are more ‘gov-
ernable’ than corporeal relations, and can thus be curated to meet the
narcissistic needs of the self (e.g., Hough 2013), telecopresent encounters
can also be seen as giving an even more immediate form of self-creating
feedback in the brutal ‘likes’, ‘retweets’ and ‘follows’ SNS such as Twitter,
Instagram and Facebook provide. These ungovernable aspects of digital
space have their own rhythm of responses that shape the self (e.g., Watts
2014). For example, someone one is interacting with can suddenly disap-
pear (‘ghosting’) or increase and decrease their response rate suggesting
varying levels of interest. People can become narcissistically preoccupied
with this validation just as they can in the corporeal world, but it can also
create a missing sense of an ‘I’ for those experiencing selfhood distur-
bances such as psychotics (Watts 2014).
For theorists such as Zhao (2005), the capacity for the digital other to
disappear abruptly can produce an existential horror, without the nor-
mal etiquette found in corporeal interactions. However, Zhao (2005)
also recognises that digital space forces us, invites us, to make more of
an attempt to tell stories of ourselves than offline and that this may be
useful. Zhao considers digital space, after Thompson (1995, p. 210), to
be a ‘symbolic project’ of ‘narrative self-identity’. These choices are per-
haps not so different from the less visible choices of corporeal life, from
76 J. Watts
choosing a particular style of dress to choosing to use make-up and hair

dye, which both conceal and reveal.
Whatever one’s ideology, it is clear that SNS increases the potential for
writing oneself as there are less impressions on offer than in corporeal
interaction—one can place oneself in scenes one might not have access to
in an embodied context, and play with one’s image in hithero unimag-
ined ways, such as choosing one’s gender designation (e.g., Berger and
Luckmann 1967). Symbolic interactionists and Lacanians see this play
with the self-as-project as a core, continuing task that digital space height-
ens rather than produces. Neo-Laschian ideology, in contrast, situates
this play as obsessive, self-important, vain and narcissistic (e.g., Quenqua
2013). This neo-Laschian gaze is based on a particular fantasy of a stable,
situated, superior relational self. The ideological frame chosen is contin-
gent on whether one views a healthy subject as something static, stable
and authentic, or as phenomena that is constantly being rewritten.
The ideological framework chosen may be partially based on one’s own
place in society. For psychiatric patients, subject to psychiatric discourse,
which frames all behaviours, emotions and thoughts through a particular
lens, an increased opportunity to write oneself into being, to shred off
un-useful identities as part of this project, may be life-saving (see Watts
2014, 2015). For professionals or parents, such activities are more likely
to be a threat to authority, and thus read through a neo-Laschian ideol-
ogy. Thus the power and flexibility of the positions one holds in corporeal
space will influence how one views digital space where we are less struc-
turally situated, less limited by the roles we have been given and the limi-
tations of our bodies (e.g., Leadbeater 2009). These locations give certain
ideas and expectations, which can be iatrogenic, by which I mean that
they can actually cause illness (for example, the idea schizophrenia makes
one lose insight into reality, which can itself be maddening, making rea-
soned communications difficult). The Goffmian ‘peg’ of the body
(Goffman 1959) can be containing or crushing; without it, digital space
can allow something other to be created. The ease with which these
nascent cyber-identities can be deleted or deactivated can elicit fears of
annihilation and uncertainty, but also a new capacity to weave together
our contradictoriness as a precursor, sometimes yes, sometimes no, to
enacting new subjectivities in corporeal space. Poster’s (1990, p. 6)
‘decentred, dispersed and multiplied’ digital self is thus a dystopian fan-

tasy, based on a particular ideology that frames stability as morally, and
psychologically, better.
The charge of instability neglects the fact that very few people actually
run between multiple identities on SNS (Prensky 2001). Rather, people
tend to create an other they cannot have offline, and then connect with
communities, often retreating into private chat rooms once membership
has been established (Mitra 2009). Trust and safety here are often more
explicitly negotiated than in corporeal social structures. For example, in
psychiatric survivor forums there are nearly always moderators who
explicitly and publicly represent the law of who can say what to whom.
There also tends to be a hierarchy with founders privileged, and a ‘getting
to know you’ period before new members are allowed into more heated
discussions. Carefully tended, these cyber-identities tend not to be
thrown away despite the disposability critiques of neo-Laschians. Rather,
cyber-communities can be sources of stabilisation—the only place of
consistency for those cut off from society, or unable to leave the house
like many with social, anxiety, agoraphobia and psychosis (e.g., Watts
2012). Of course, there are brutal examples of trolling and ‘flaming’ in
cyberspace,1 an emergence of id impulses unsanctioned by the corporeal
gaze of the other, but this is overemphasised. Many of the fears rest on
older generations ideas of who should matter (e.g., Stein 2013).
The Workings of Cyber-Communities

In traditional societies, Goffman’s ‘significant others’ (1959) are family,
friends and colleagues within a local area. However, SNS are radically
changing our delineation between significant other and stranger. The
intimacy of the digital realm can be difficult for neo-Laschians to gather.
Friendships, flirtations and romances are accrued quickly, often having
an intensity lacking in real life (Asai 2016). In contrast to the neo-
Laschian’s dystopian fantasies of the narcissistic individual staring only at
themselves in the digital iMirror, digital space is deeply social and rela-
tional. People often go online to feel more connected, to tell their secrets,
be truer to themselves than they can dare to be offline (e.g., Žižek 1996).
78 J. Watts
As Zizek notes, digital space allows us to ‘stage-externalise my repressed

content which I am otherwise unable to confront’ (Žižek 1996, p. 107),
allowing ourselves a mirror through which to know ourselves better. The
digital looking-glass self may show back our true desires more purely than
elsewhere.
The digital looking glass is also unlikely to be just one stranger, but an
‘expansive cyber-based generalised other’ (Altheide 2000, p. 9) such as
peer groups (e.g., Rosenberg 1986) who reflect back to create ‘me’.
Altheide’s expanded other is an expanded form of Mead’s (1934) ‘gener-
alised other’, the larger community a teenager comes to take in after ear-
lier influence, which tend to be limited to immediate caregivers. Though
we know that the person and indeed cyber-community we are relating to
may not be quite what we can see in terms of choice of name or image,
these choices reveal something and allow digital space to be situated in
the potential space between reality and fantasy (e.g., Whitty and Carr
2006). The phantasmal nature of the space means that secrets can be
shared more quickly, meaning that what Zhao (2005) calls ‘intimate
strangers’ or ‘anonymous friends’ are Goffman’s new significant others.
‘Digital immigrants’ born before the digital revolution, and those
invested in seeing corporeal relations as superior (e.g., therapists,2
Hinchliffe 2016) use the Neo-Laschian construct of narcissism to attack
the new stranger who is often the key ‘significant other’ for digital
migrants. One particular discursive move is to situate these relations as
less authentic than corporeal ones. We have seen how the idea of authen-
ticity is indexed to certain ways of viewing the self, not others. We can
trouble this association by looking to literature. Authors have often relied
on the figure of the wanderer, the person outside the structurally embed-
ded community who offers a new way of thinking, adventure and some-
times danger to a protagonist. This wanderer is often told secrets and
insights about the structurally trapping situation of the protagonist,
allowing them to claim new subject positions, agency and trajectory. The
wanderer is the one who really gets to see the protagonist, as opposed to
the identity they enact based on suffocating social structures. This experi-
ence of a powerful encounter with a stranger is now not contingent on
the passing salesman/madman/wizard of literature but available online,
expanding the frame of ‘special others’ (e.g., Galbo and Demetrulias

1996) who help to shape possible selves.
Neo-Laschians often pathologise cyber-wanderings, seeing the multi-
ple windows open, the number of acquaintances, the near-starts as dem-
onstrating a lack of maturity, a flightiness. Yet these are perhaps just new
forms of searching expanded beyond the teenage years. People are not
necessarily avoiding the social world in their obsession with the digital
looking glass; they are looking for a wider network for growth. Long
Facebook friendship lists may be storied as narcissistic and self-absorbed,
but they also represent a desire to keep and not lose potentially significant
others, be that someone once met at a gig, or a potential new friend for
identity reflection. An ideology of normal development insists such play
and expansion should stop at a certain age (e.g., Erikson 1959), with
adult protean play situated as a narcissistic refusal to accept loss (e.g.,
Reeve 2013). Traditionally, we are supposed to have a period of develop-
ment at adolescence where we integrate a self-concept based on ‘internal-
ising the expectations significant others in the form of self-guides’ (Harter
1999, p. 144). This period of growth and play about the self is supposed
to drop off in adulthood (e.g., Erikson 1959). However, (one of ) the
great threat(s) of the digital revolution is that this protean play continues,
with the internet allowing new opportunities to ‘play with yourself ’
(Waskul 2003, p. 49) forever at the cost of the social fabric. Yet we know
that what appears normal now, the invisible standard, was itself novel
once. For example, the idea of the teenager only became culturally estab-
lished in Western society at a particular point in history, the 1950s as a
result of a perfect storm of influences (e.g., Mead and Boas 1973). The
normalcy for teenage rebellion and protean play was not uncovered but
socially constituted, just as we are currently constituting new forms of
normality (and thus abnormality) in consequence of the digital revolu-
tion. The neo-Laschian fear we are enjoying ourselves for too long is thus
problematic. Increased divorce rates linked to SNS (e.g., Grossman
2010), for example, can be read as a positive change with people able to
free themselves from oppressive relations just as in the ’60s women
became able to leave unhappy marriages rather than suffer the valium-
managed housewifery of the ’50s (e.g., Zapała-Kraj 2014).
80 J. Watts
Just as young adults became able to be teenagers for the first time in
the 1950s, so social media is allowing current generations to explore the
world and their identity as never before. The presentation of a cyber ideal
self here may be to pull in followers, yes, but it is also a way to play in a
space away from the embarrassment and awkwardness of the body, an
especial problem for teenagers and those whose look does not fit the soci-
etal ideal (for example, of being young, thin, white and beautiful). We
need to bear these different understandings of the important function of
masks in mind when reading this quote from a sixteen-year-old boy:
‘Online we have the mask of the computer screen. We don’t have to worry
about what we look like or what other people think of us. Imagine’
(Lenhart et al. 2001, p. 17).
The idea that digital play leaves individuals stuck in a certain develop-
mental state can also be troubled by exploring the relatively new phe-
nomena of blogger communities. The new stars with millions of followers
are vloggers (e.g., Griffith and Papacharissi 2009) who tend to discuss
things like make-up and dress. These activities are construed by neo-
Laschians as malignantly narcissistic, and a sign of an increasing (narcis-
sistic) self-obsession (e.g., Cliff 2015). However, if we look at the
trajectories of bloggers we find something quite different to be the case.
More and more vloggers are coming to reveal more of themselves, and
their inner world, such as panic attacks (e.g., Daily Mail 2010) or
domestic violence (e.g., Stein 2013). This shift in the vlogger as ego-ide-
al’s self-presentation from branded ‘best self ’ to a leaking, flawed, realistic
self has powerful effects on the subjectivities of their millions of followers,
who use this turn to become more than their image, who use this turn to
come to speak (e.g., Stein 2013).
Blogs, tweets and posts have contributed to the explosion in data now
readily available to the masses, in addition to the digitisation of informa-
tion previously only available in books, museums and other archives one
would have to access in person. Ninety percent of the world’s data has
been accrued in the past two years (Science Daily 2013). Access to this
information is often used to push back discourse that has historically
silenced certain groups. For example, digital expression for psychiatric
patients is facilitated by being able to hyperlink to books, clinicians and
other survivors who question diagnoses such as schizophrenia, allowing a
critical opinion to be heard. The fundamental change in society and sub-

jectivities it represents is a deep, potentially profound change to the status
quo whose advocates then use a pathological term, narcissism, to appeal
to a fantasised, better early time.
We have seen that Neo-Laschians frame certain ways of being—
authenticity, stability, consistency, realness, embodiment—as superior,
with difference situated as narcissistic pathology. In contrast, certain soci-
ologists and Lacanians have troubled the assumption such traits are pos-
sible let alone desirable. Here, human subjectivity is associated far more
with a fundamental exteriority, a fundamental misrecognition, with digi-
tal space often affording a protean play with identity that can expand
modes of being. Here, it is crucial to emphasise the historical and cultural
specificity of any reading (e.g., Gergen 2001). Narcissism can be a useful
construct for thinking, but one which is taken up in specific ways less
because of an objective rightness, but more because of the vested interests
of any commentator. Understanding of the multiple, conflicted ways in
which narcissism is understood psychoanalytically, therefore, allows us to
see the choices commentators make, consciously and unconsciously, to
frame any particular argument. A clinical example may help illustrate
how narcissistic processes, which Neo-Laschians see as pathological,
might in fact be productive.
Radical Narcissism
A young Muslim man came to see me. Mohammed felt nothing, he said,
dead, a walking vessel who must puff up his image through exercise,
beautiful clothes, ‘pea-cocking’ and ‘witty nothings’. This was impossible
though, he told me, he ‘must die’. It took some time for Mohammed to
begin to trust me, reluctant as he was to talk of his childhood. ‘I did not
exist before I came to London,’ he said, ‘I hated before, I was fat’. He had
worked and saved crazily for years to get to London, overcoming many
cultural and immigratory obstacles. Now he was in London, the prom-
ised land. So why had he collapsed? Mohammed had spent his early years
as a gamer, rather a successful one, with an international network of
friends he would never meet. He had tended to binge eat when playing,
82 J. Watts
but now in London, he had begun to explore his body, losing stones in
weight to meet an imagined gay boyish, hairless ideal. Mohammed was
gay, yes he admitted it now, and he had to become ‘what gay men are’ for
him—feminised, speechless figures to be fucked. He was unable to go
out, though, to go to clubs or socialise. Mohammed began instead to take
hundreds, thousands of selfies in provocative positions, which he first
kept to himself, then posted to porn sites. How many hits would his
photos get? he wondered. And could he begin to write of his body aes-
theticism so others could follow suit? Mohammed gave this cyber-persona
a hyper-sexualised inviting name, and gained a certain notoriety. He was
no longer a gamer shooting down villains; he was an ‘internet star’ whose
Muslim faith was increasingly being used for fetishistic glory!
Over time, as our relationship developed, his compulsive selfie-taking
became less a matter of life and death but something different. A source of
play and delight, replete with explicit mockery of psychoanalytic ideas that
homosexuality is narcissistic. Mohammed’s selfies became a work, more
artistic now, more performative. His exhibitionism became a direct politi-
cal subjugation of what a gay man, a Muslim man, a ‘bottom’ is supposed
to be. And this move from a deadly repetition to a performative play
allowed him to emerge in the space in between—to go out to clubs, to
mess around on Tinder, to eventually find a boyfriend who could love him.
After a couple of years, Mohammed made the very brave decision to
return home to take all these skinned multiple selves back to his home
country and present them to his parents. He couldn’t pretend to be what
they imagined him to be in London. Mohammed’s dad responded to his
outing with horror—he must be ostracised, no one in the village could
ever know, he had put all their lives and his sister’s marriage possibilities
in jeopardy; he must leave now! A disaster. But then, a month or two
later, a surprise to us both, Mohammed’s father phoned in tears. His dad
had been up all night reading on the Internet letters from gay sons to
their fathers, letters he had found of his own accord and been able to read
using Google Translate. He realised Mohammed could love him, be a
good person and be gay. He realised how much pain Mohammed must
have been in when he locked himself away into a fantasy gaming world
for so many years. Mohammed’s bravery had been almost matched by his
dad’s who had managed to use the Internet as a space of exploration
despite manifesting absolute certitude his son would be damned to hell.
Mohammed identified as a narcissist, and certainly the amount of self-

ies he took and the fame he received would make him a core target of the
attacks on the narcissistic digital self we find in the press. He lacked
object-love, indeed basic social relations, and was vain and arrogant
whilst feeling ‘dead and hollow’ to use his words, inside. Yet pathologis-
ing these behaviours would be stupid, for narcissistic activities are value-
neutral, only having a clinical sense if we look at their function. For
Mohammed, the taking of selfies on first arrival in London was a form of
trying to establish an imaginary existence, to tie his body to the mirror
image just as the psychoanalyst Lacan argues we must do in our early
years. Selfies were a way to try to establish an ‘I’, to establish some coor-
dinates using the iMirror to try to negotiate his multiplicity as a young,
gay, immigrant, Muslim. His self-obsession was crucial for his outer and
inner worlds clashed to such an extent he fragmented, having to create an
image from shards of glass.
Mohammed did something rather brilliant. He developed a radical
narcissism through shifting his selfie-taking from mere image to some-
thing more performative, deconstructing the seeming naturalism of vari-
ous poles: masculine-feminine, top-bottom, straight-queer, subject-object,
white-Muslim. Here, we find a kind of double-taking of sexual authorship,
so that he represented the oppressor in the taking of the photos and the
oppressed as the photographee, suddenly knowing and choosing and sub-
verting and playing in his selfie images. Mohammed styled his own inter-
nalised subjugation through selfie-taking; he made accusations of
exhibitionism work for him in terms of giving him social (and financial)
recognition. This self-doubling created a space for his self-emergence—
his masquerading became his cure. This kind of radical narcissism can
thus be seen as a political tool, disturbing normative matrixes through a
refusal and the creation of radically other spaces.
Final Thoughts
Neo-Laschians have used the notion of narcissism to denigrate certain
types of behaviours and idealise others. Yet judgments of normality and
deviance are socially embedded; they are constituted through cherry-
picking certain ideas and ignoring others. This may produce an easier
84 J. Watts
dystopian narrative to sell to publishers and editors, but it undermines

the rich, multifaceted functions of narcissism. Digital space does have
certain characteristics that invite narcissistic activities that may be malig-
nant (Kernberg), healthy (Kohut), a play with our structurally essential
masks (Goffman, Lacan) or a form of radical difference. Returning to
the broad category of narcissism allows us to see how narcissistic activi-
ties can radically shift power relations for those oppressed; those most
subject to being written by a small number of local significant others.
The digital looking glass gives us a wider range of potential others than
ever in history to reflect back parts of ourselves that are obscured by
convention. Reflection in the iMirror may allow us to view ourselves
more clearly.
Notes
1. ‘Flaming’ refers to a hostile and insulting interaction between Internet
users, a dynamic often made worse by characteristics of digital space like
anonymity.
2. Counselling and psychotherapy is often seen to work because of the inter-
nalisation of the good, embodied relationship between patient and thera-
pist, which allows the patient to see themselves in a more positive way,
explore the world afresh (e.g., Schore 2012) and gain more functional
relations. Such ideas, literally, pay the bills and obscurate other ways peo-
ple can change and heal.
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Jay Watts is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist practicing in inner

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Society. Jay has held numerous senior roles in the NHS and academia, including
leading an Early Intervention in Psychosis Service and Family Therapy pilot. She
is on the editorial board of the European Journal for Counselling and Psychotherapy
and Self & Society. Jay is Foreign Correspondent for Robert Whitaker’s activist
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a frankly unhealthy amount of time tweeting as @Shrink_at_Large.
4
Something to Do with a Girl Named
Marla Singer: Capitalism, Narcissism,
and Therapeutic Discourse in David
Fincher’s Fight Club
Lynne Layton
Arguing that the ‘dilemmas of the traumatized male subject are a recurring
theme of contemporary cinema’, Bainbridge and Yates capture in their
film analyses a sense of masculinity in crisis (2005, 304). Set within a con-
temporary social context, the analyses reveal twin tendencies toward the
emotionalization and ‘feminization’ of Western culture, tendencies that
seem to produce a ‘hysterical defense against the perceived trauma of loss
and difference’ (304). Drawing on media theories that suggest that domi-
nant discourses are always contested by subordinate discourses that circu-
late in culture, Bainbridge and Yates theorize that although there has been
a general shift toward filmic representations of men who express their emo-
tions, representations of masculinity exist on a continuum. At one pole of
this continuum lie what they call fetishistic or rigid masculine representa-
tions and at the other pole lie transitional spaces that allow for various
renegotiations of masculinity. The authors suggest that films of the ’90s
This chapter was first published in Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups,
Politics. Number 62, September 2011: 111–133.
L. Layton (*)
Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

92 L. Layton
perhaps offered male spectators more possibility for such renegotiations

than do recent films; discussing Fight Club (1999), for example, they write
that because the two male protagonists turn out to be two sides of the same
person, the spectator is alerted to ‘the schizoid status of masculinity’, which
forces the spectator ‘to imagine the originary moment of trauma and then
to contemplate more radical alternatives’ (307).
In what follows, I look more closely at the nature of the trauma repre-
sented in Fight Club, a trauma I shall root in cultural conditions that offer
increasing opportunities for individualization (in fact, they demand it;
see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim on the ‘multi-option’ society, 2002) while
simultaneously encouraging a narcissistic individualism. After a discus-
sion of the relation between narcissism and capitalism, I suggest that
Fight Club offers a particularly compelling example of filmic attempts to
solve problems posed by the cultural contradictions of neoliberalism and
late modernity (Giddens 1991). Fight Club is noteworthy not only
because it addresses the crisis of masculinity/autonomy in a free market
consumer culture, but also because it invokes therapeutic discourses as
possible solutions to cultural crisis.
Capitalism and Narcissism
From the late ’70s to the mid-’80s, several left-wing historians, sociolo-
gists, and psychoanalysts took as their object of study the relation
between capitalism and narcissistic personality disorder. Christopher
Lasch’s (1979) The Culture of Narcissism, which drew on contemporary
writings on clinical narcissism by Kernberg (1975) and Kohut (1971,
1977), influenced authors such as Kovel (1980), Livesay (1985), Holland
(1986), and myself to explore a ‘social character’ that seemed peculiar to
our times.1 The sociological aspect of my own writings on capitalism and
narcissism (Layton 1986, 1998, 2010) is influenced by Frankfurt School
critiques of capitalism, particularly their focus on the pervasive domi-
nance of instrumental reason, but my psychoanalytic understanding of
narcissism is based on Kohut’s (1971, 1977) and Fairbairn’s (1954) defi-
nition (with some additional ideas drawn from Kernberg 1975). Thus, I
see as central to the syndrome a fragility of self-structure that
4 Something to Do with a Girl Named Marla Singer... 93
results in an oscillation between grandiosity and self-deprecation, and

between devaluation and idealization of the other, between longings to
merge and isolating defenses against merger. The state shift from grandi-
osity to self-deprecation, from idealization to devaluation, from merger
to isolation, from elation to depression depends in part on differences in
power relations and relational context—a bully in one relational matrix
can be submissive in another (a classic example is the man who is sub-
missive with his boss but domineering with his wife and children).
Emotionally, the shift is notably set off by an empathic break, a slight to
the fragile self whose needs for recognition, connection and care have
consistently not been met.
Slights evoke what Kohut called narcissistic rage, a punitive, annihilat-
ing anger that issues from an archaic harsh and punishing superego.
Kernberg’s (1975) Kleinian perspective on narcissism, in which rage and
hostility are central to the syndrome, adds to this picture an emphasis on
the primary defense mechanisms of narcissism: splitting and projective
identification. In his explanation of etiology, Kernberg highlights a fail-
ure to integrate good and bad representations, self-states, and affects, a
failure caused either by traumatic treatment by the environment or by an
excessive amount of constitutional aggression. Because of this difficulty
integrating good and bad, that is, the difficulty achieving, in Klein’s
(1946) terms, a somewhat stable depressive position, narcissistic disorder
is marked by an inability to tolerate ambivalence and ambiguity. The use
of defenses such as splitting and projective identification produces the
oscillation between polarized states that is endemic to the disorder.
People suffering from narcissistic personality disorder do not experience
themselves as what Kohut described as ‘separate centers’ of initiative and
what Frankfurt School heirs call autonomous selves. This is due to their
difficulty differentiating themselves from others. There are at least two
relational sequelae of this failure: in one, merger with an other stabilizes
the fragile self; in the second, a repudiation of the need for the other issues
in a pseudo-separation. In either case, those who suffer from a narcissistic
psychic structure have difficulty setting their own agenda, as their sense of
self-worth is overly dependent on how they are thought of by others.
Indeed, they use others, ideas and ideologies, and things—for example,
food or consumer goods—as necessary props to shore up what Kohut
94 L. Layton
called ‘empty’ selves (because so many of his patients spoke of feeling

empty, of having an empty depression).2
Psychoanalytic theorists of narcissism tend not to connect narcissistic
personality disorder with capitalism (although Kohut does link ‘Guilty
Man’s’ eclipse by ‘Tragic Man’ to certain socio-historical conditions). The
Frankfurt School and their heirs have done most of the work that links
the two. Like his Frankfurt School influences, Lasch (1977, 1979) located
the origins of narcissistic personality disorder in the decline of the patri-
archal family and the supposedly firm ego and superego that developed
from its oedipal dynamics. He argued that this decline emerged from the
entrenchment of bureaucracy, the eclipse of entrepreneurial by monopoly
and consumer capitalism, and the rise of a reliance on experts. It is espe-
cially the latter, according to Lasch, that increasingly weakens the auton-
omy of the individual. As many feminists were to point out, the villains
of Lasch’s piece were not just capitalism and bureaucracy, but female-
dominated families and a ‘feminized’ culture (see, for example, Engel
1980). Refuting Lasch and the Frankfurt School on this point, feminist
theorists such as Jessica Benjamin (1977, 1988) charged that the very
oedipal dynamics they idealize in fact create the version of autonomy that
defensively devalues emotionality, vulnerability, and dependency, a kind
of autonomy marked by pseudo-differentiation and pseudo-rationality.
Autonomy, in Western culture, has been understood to rest not on mutual
interdependence but on radical alone-ness. And it is this narcissistic
autonomy that has been associated with traditional ideal versions of white
heterosexual masculinity.
Kovel (1980, 1988) and Livesay (1985) focused their understanding of
narcissism not only on the decline of autonomous selves but also on the
decline of any sense of collectivity or social selfhood. Agreeing with Lasch
that what produces narcissism are the core features of late capitalism—a
massive state apparatus, experts that delegitimize parents, especially when
both parents have to work, mass media, and consumerism—Kovel (1988)
argued that the late capitalist bourgeois family, cut off from any direct
influence on politics or production, is an increasingly isolated unit whose
functions have been reduced over time to the raising of children and to
consuming goods. A ‘de-sociated’ entity of intense and contradictory
kinds of relating, the middle-class family’s children are simultaneously
made to feel special and omnipotent, and they are infused with the anxi-
eties of the parents’ unfulfilled dreams. Narcissistic rage, Kovel argues,
arises from the awareness of being loved not just for who they are but for
the return they can bring on their parents’ investment in them. These
children of contemporary middle-class families might not suffer gross
trauma, but nonetheless they become hostilely dependent on and enraged
at their parents because, at some level, they are aware that their parents’
relation to them has ‘the quality of capital invested for a future yield’
(1988, 197). Narcissism, then, is a disorder of differentiation and depen-
dency, which best explains a paradox frequently noted by commentators
on US social character: the odd co-existence of defiant self-reliance and
anxious dependence on what experts tell you to do and what the Joneses
tell you to buy.3
Both Livesay and Sloan (1996) draw attention to the fact that in late
capitalist society, bureaucracy, markets, the media, and other cultural
apparatuses undermine at every juncture the necessary preconditions for
autonomy and intersubjectivity: the capacity to differentiate from the
other without repudiating the other, the capacity to tolerate ambivalence,
the capacity for mature dependence (Fairbairn 1954), and the recogni-
tion of mutual interdependence. As Frankfurt School theorists have
always warned (e.g., Horkheimer and Adorno 1944), the fantasmatic
drive to predict, calculate, and standardize contingency out of existence
leads also to the standardization of internal life, which quashes spontane-
ity and so issues in automatic responses and defenses that impede the
possibility to reflect on the self—another pre-requisite of autonomy.
Masculinity, Femininity, and Narcissism

While writing about narcissism was popular in the late ’70s to the mid- to
late ’80s, the whole notion of social character was somewhat eclipsed by the
academic focus on aspects of identity such as gender, sexuality, and race. In
part, the eclipse had to do with the fact that class dropped out of these analy-
ses as well as to the tendency, from the ’70s to late ’80s, to study one identity
element at a time rather than their intersection—and to claim that the one
element under examination, for example, gender oppression, could explain
96 L. Layton
all other types of oppression. Feminist psychoanalytic film studies of the ’70s
and ’80s did indeed, however, describe a narcissistic male psychic structure,
even if the term narcissism was not used. Mulvey’s (1975) version of the
Lacanian imaginary, for example, overlaps in significant ways with the
Kohutian definition of narcissism (although not at all with its etiology).
Extending Chodorow’s (1978) object-relational gender theory and
Benjamin’s (1988) work on gendered versions of domination and sub-
mission, I argued in Who’s That Girl? (Layton 1998) that capitalist and
patriarchal formations have together promoted dominant ‘ideal’ versions
of masculinity and femininity that split and render mutually exclusive
human longings for both agency and connection. In traditional domi-
nant forms of masculinity, so-called masculine attributes crystallize
around a kind of autonomy that arises when one receives recognition and
esteem from the repudiation of connections and the dependency needs
that go along with them; this version of subjectivity remains a cultural
ideal in the United States and is increasingly inhabited as well by middle-
class women (Layton 2004a, b). Traditionally feminine attributes crystal-
lize around a kind of connection or relatedness that arises when one is
consistently not recognized and/or humiliated for asserting one’s own
agenda. These split masculine and feminine subject positions incarnate
two different versions of narcissism. Although all who suffer from narcis-
sistic disorder show both sides of these splits, generally people lead with
one set of defenses and hide the other side. Thus, one dominant mascu-
line version of narcissism articulates grandiosity with devaluation of the
other and with isolating defenses against merger, while a traditionally
dominant female version articulates self-deprecation, idealization of the
other, and a defensive longing to merge and lose oneself in the other
(Layton 1988). Because it is a dialectical disorder, the two types tend to
seek out one another to couple, generally causing lifelong misery as each
tries to heal the split in ways that simply fortify it. To fully understand the
narcissistic injury brought about by the demand to split off longings such
as dependency or agency is to recognize that such longings do not disap-
pear from the psyche. Indeed, those who repudiate dependency keep
their distance from connection precisely because they are extremely vul-
nerable to any kind of rejection. Ashamed of and full of self-loathing for
continuing to have dependency longings, any stirring of them produces
defensive enactments and narcissistic rage.
What definitively got lost in filmic gender studies of the ’70s and ’80s
was the connection between gender theory and capitalism or class (an
exception is Walkerdine 1986). Now that social class is back on the aca-
demic radar screen and there is agreement on the necessity of analyzing
the way identity elements intersect, it seems a good time to return to the
relation between gender, race, class, narcissism, and capitalism; this time
with the advantage of the more sophisticated analyses of the way ideology
works that we find in the theories of Hall (1982), Laclau and Mouffe
(1985), Stavrakakis (2007), Glynos (2008), and Žižek (1989). What
those who write about capitalism and narcissism tell us is that key to the
production of narcissism is the radical separation of the individual from
the social that marks US culture, and the fact that capitalism’s instrumen-
tal forms of domination find their way into the very heart of the family.
And what feminist theory suggests is that the repudiation of dependency,
demanded by both that radical separation and by disavowal, finds its way
also into split, narcissistic gender/race/class/sexual identities. Those theo-
rists, like myself, who feel that psychoanalysis can most fruitfully be used
to understand social character, generally believe that a given era engen-
ders particular collective psychological responses to its social
contradictions, particular kinds of transferences and particular repetition
compulsions.
Popular Culture and Therapeutic Culture

Fantasy productions symbolize and seek solutions to the psychic problems
that a culture of narcissism creates. So-called chick flicks, for example, wres-
tle with the seeming impossibility to integrate relatedness and agency. And
the ‘crisis of masculinity’ films analyzed by Bainbridge and Yates reflect,
among other things, the longing to find a way out of the paradoxical com-
mand to be both self-reliant and emotionally sensitive and connected. But
what we often find in ‘crisis of masculinity’ texts is that the threats to male
autonomy are located not in the contradictions of capitalism and class
domination from which they originate, but rather in women, blacks, the
poor, and other subjects onto whom the despised dependency and need
have been ragefully projected. Narrative incoherencies that signal the
98 L. Layton
unconscious of these works often simultaneously reveal and conceal the

dread of dependency and vulnerability that ever more starkly marks the US
culture in which they were produced (especially after 9/11 and the eco-
nomic crisis of 2008).
In following the Frankfurt School and its heirs, my cultural analysis
thus far has not been as dialectical as it needs to be to understand the
complexity of contemporary subjectivity. Like Beck and Beck-Gernsheim
(2002) as well as Giddens (1991), I do believe that the disembedding
from all traditional anchors of selfhood that has rapidly increased since
the end of World War II has both progressive and anti-progressive
moments. Individualization, the opportunity and the demand to create a
life of one’s own exists in tension with narcissistic individualism (or what
I and others have called neoliberal versions of subjectivity, see Layton 2009,
2010). As Giddens (1991) writes, the do-it-yourself biography teeters on
the edge of an ever-present possibility that it will become a breakdown
biography. There is no question that, as Bainbridge and Yates (2005) sug-
gest, contemporary popular representations of masculinity ‘open up
spaces in which alternative modes of masculinity can be imagined through
the affectively-nuanced process of spectatorship that they demand’
(306–307). And their notion of a continuum well captures the reality
that a ‘masculinity in crisis’ narrative sometimes resolves in a rigid narcis-
sism and sometimes in the opening of transitional space.
Affects such as anger can, in fact, put one more deeply in touch with
the self and others—or they can defensively function to tear down self
and others. To account for what they understand to be a fairly recent shift
in Western culture toward valuing emotional expression, Richards and
Brown (2002) have argued that we live in a ‘therapeutic culture’, the key
features of which are expressivity (id), knowledge (ego), and compassion
(superego). To be authentically therapeutic, however, they argue that
such a cultural constellation must also include a reparative impulse (101).
Without such an impulse an ‘id-type emotionality’ substitutes for what
they call ‘thoughtful feeling.’ Like Bainbridge and Yates, Richards and
Brown are mindful of the tension between the progressive possibilities of
therapeutic culture, in which emotionality is linked with thought, and its
regressive possibilities, in which emotionality is linked with sentimental-
ity, false selves, and artifice.
Popular media can, as the authors suggest, clearly promote thoughtful

feeling-type expressions of therapeutic culture. In clinical work, I have
often found that patients use popular media representations as one means
of forging identifications that counter the restrictive and damaging iden-
tifications on offer in their families: for example, one patient used Patrick
Stewart’s version of masculinity in Star Trek to contest his conviction that
only macho versions of masculinity counted as masculine (see Layton
1998: Chap. 7). Another used the same figure to enable her to reflect on
alternative modes of leadership besides the sadomasochistic ones to which
she continued to find herself prey.
Media texts, however, are complex phenomena. As Jameson (1979)
pointed out many years ago, popular texts’ popularity is in no small mea-
sure due to their tendency to combine both progressive and anti-
progressive elements, and they do so in various ways, for example, by
creating contradictory identificatory and transferential possibilities, or by
throwing up contradictions between form and content (where, for exam-
ple, anti-progressive form might undercut progressive content).
Promoting both id-type and thoughtful feeling versions of emotional
expression, popular texts provide audiences with both non-normative
and normative transferential possibilities. They may provoke in the spec-
tator what I have referred to as normative unconscious processes or enact-
ments (Layton 2006), inviting unconscious collusions with such
oppressive norms as sexism or racism. At the same time, since meaning
can never be fixed and identities are fluid, the very same popular texts
may well invite unpredictable decodings that challenge oppressive norms
and normative transferences (Hall 1980). And media texts contain
unconscious subtexts that defy the intentionality of their authors and
that disrupt any possibility of narrative coherence.
David Fincher’s 1999 film, Fight Club, provides a compelling example
of these popular culture theses as it wrangles with the fine lines existing
between a culture of individualization and a culture of narcissistic indi-
vidualism. After numerous viewings and numerous teaching experiences
(in which I have found that students see the film very differently from
how I see it—an argument for the necessity of audience studies), I con-
tinue to find the film puzzling in its strange mixture of anti-capitalist cri-
tique and simultaneous proffering of id-type and thoughtful feeling-type
100 L. Layton
solutions. Indeed, in the film, therapeutic discourse is evoked as a solution

to the protagonist’s cultural malaise, only to be abruptly discarded and
replaced by a sadistic and violent discourse (that itself, at times, draws on
psychological narratives). Narrative discontinuities seem to signal the
film’s confusion in this regard. In what follows, I offer my own reading of
the film and end with some alternative readings. I hope along the way to
elucidate some of the normative and non-normative transference possi-
bilities that arise from the film’s particular way of linking masculinity,
narcissism, and capitalism.
Fight Club
Fight Club came out in 1999, at the end of two decades of filmic testa-
ments to white male anger. So many of these films—an uncommonly
large number of which starred Michael Douglas—pinned blame for
threats to male autonomy squarely on women. A prime example is Barry
Levinson’s (1994) Disclosure, in which Michael Douglas is passed over for
an expected promotion that goes instead to Demi Moore, an ex-girlfriend.
Moore engineers a scene that makes it look as though Douglas sexually
harassed her, and most of the film focuses on Douglas’s attempts to clear
his name, which he does at the end. At one or two moments, the film’s
class unconscious erupts and it becomes clear that the real causes of
Douglas’s and other unemployed men’s problems are the machinations of
upper-class male bosses focused solely on the bottom line. But this truth
is very much background to the foreground fear of female emasculators.
Fight Club is far more explicitly critical of capitalism than most films
in the white male anger genre. Its protagonists are also younger than
those the genre usually depicts. And yet, rage about the way capitalism
and hegemonic masculinity thwart longings both for agency and connec-
tion are deflected onto women in this film as well. Like Lasch’s analysis of
narcissism, the film simply cannot seem to decide whether or not its male
protagonists’ problems are caused by instrumentalized, meaningless, and
morally bankrupt work; emotional isolation; parental abandonment,
particularly abandonment by fathers; and consumer capitalism—or if
their problems are caused by feminization, mothers, and females in
g eneral. Consumerism, as is often the case, is figured as feminine, and in

several pivotal scenes, blame slips incoherently from fathers and capital-
ism to mothers and to the film’s sole female character, Marla Singer.
In brief, Fight Club is the story of a thirty-something man (Ed Norton)
who is mildly critical of the consumer culture and meaningless job that
define his life. He can’t sleep, and, in the first part of the film, he seeks
relief from his insomnia by frequenting many self-help groups. Marla
Singer’s (Helena Bonham Carter) presence at the same groups ruins this
solution for him, and after his apartment mysteriously blows up, destroy-
ing all his possessions, he goes to live with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap
manufacturer and explosives specialist he had sat next to on a plane during
a business trip. He and Tyler start Fight Club, a weekly meeting where
men gather to beat each other up. Men are drawn to Fight Club like moths
to flame, and fight clubs begin to proliferate all over the country. Tyler
develops various homework assignments designed to turn the members of
Fight Club into an anti-conformist corps of revolutionaries dedicated to
the destruction of consumer capitalism and the re-masculinization of men.
Simultaneously, Tyler begins to have sex with Marla Singer, which makes
the narrator feel marginalized and rejected. As Project Mayhem, Tyler’s
plan to blow up consumer debt institutions, proceeds, the narrator
becomes more and more uncomfortable with Tyler’s authoritarian and
dehumanizing leadership style; what began as a philosophy of radical anti-
conformity seems to have devolved into sadomasochistic ways of obliterat-
ing individuality and demanding complete obedience to the charismatic
leader. As the narrator intervenes to stop Project Mayhem from going for-
ward, he—and, simultaneously, the audience—discovers that he and Tyler
are, in fact, the same person. Realizing that Marla is in danger of being
killed by his own troops, he rescues her and kills off his Tyler self. The film
ends as he and Marla, holding hands, watch the buildings blow up.
In the first frames of Fight Club, Tyler forces a gun down the narrator’s
throat on the top floor of a skyscraper, and the narrator’s voiceover sug-
gests that something terrible is about to happen, buildings are about to
blow up, and that he knows this because Tyler knows it. At this point, the
audience presumes that Tyler is someone separate from the narrator. In a
terrifying foreshadowing of September 11, only with young white male
protagonists who are closer kin to 1999’s homegrown Columbine shooters
102 L. Layton
than to Muslim terrorists, Tyler announces they are standing at Ground

Zero. The narrator’s voiceover says, ‘We have front row seats for this the-
ater of mass destruction’. The narrator, a former yuppie turned revolution-
ary, is filmed in anxious close-up, face sweating. While the narrator worries
about whether or not the gun in his mouth is clean, Tyler, filmed at butt
and penis level, is cocksure and proud of the destruction they are about to
wreak, the reduction to ‘smoldering rubble’ of a few square blocks of
buildings in which the business of consumer capitalism is transacted. The
narrator and Tyler incarnate the two oscillating states of one narcissistic
personality: one conformist, dependent, and self-deprecating; the other
rebellious, antisocial, and grandiose. As two, we can mistake one for femi-
nine and the other for masculine, which is one of the film’s misogynist
strategies. The secret to understanding the disorder, however, is to recog-
nize them as one, the product of splitting two sets of human capacities,
connection and agency—for only when the split-off side is owned can
these two distortions become something other than monstrous.
The feminization of the narrator makes him as well the locus of the
film’s avowed and disavowed homoerotic desire. The narrator next says,
‘That old thing, how you always hurt the one you love? Well, it works
both ways’. Throughout the film, such homoerotic confessions are imme-
diately taken back as the narrator locates the blame for all of what has
happened not on Tyler, but on a woman: ‘Suddenly I realize that all of
this—the gun, the bombs, the revolution—has got something to do with
a girl named Marla Singer’.4 The film then cuts to the self-help group for
testicular cancer, ‘Remaining Men Together’, and we see the narrator’s
dazed and sleep-deprived face shmooshed between Bob’s ‘bitch tits’. Bob
intones: ‘We’re still men’. The narrator responds in monotone, ‘Yes, we’re
men; men is what we are’. And then he tells the sad tale of Bob, a former
body-builder whose attempt to be hypermasculine through use of ste-
roids and too much testosterone left him without balls, and now with
breasts. The theme has something to do with failed masculinity and the
blame seems to lie with men who bought into a cultural fantasy about
perfect bodies. But also, the film makes visible a wish that the narrator’s
symptom, terrible insomnia, might be cured by a world without women,
here by a man with breasts, later by the male-only Fight Club. Just as Bob
gives the narrator permission to cry, the narrator stops the narration
again. He tells the audience, in direct address, that he needs to go back

further in time so that all this information about castrated men and
buildings that are about to blow up will make sense to them.
In this second attempt to find the right place to begin the story, the
narrator tells us more about himself. He works for a major car manufac-
turer, and his job is to investigate car accidents and calculate mathemati-
cally whether or not it is in his company’s interest to initiate a recall or
rather quietly to settle an insurance claim and be done with it, even if the
car is, to quote Ralph Nader, unsafe at any speed. He’s single, isolated,
travels a lot for work, knows exactly how immoral his job is, and he cre-
ates what meaning there is in his life, indeed, creates a personality, via
consumerism: ‘Like so many others’, he says, describing his generation, ‘I
had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct’.
The narrator, who fittingly remains nameless, has not been able to
sleep for six months. Subjection to a meaningless bureaucracy, to a kind
of rationality that puts the cash bottom-line before any other set of val-
ues, to the pressure to fill an empty self with consumer goods recom-
mended by experts and endorsed by peers, to disrupted possibilities for
social connection—these are the quickly sketched-in origins of the char-
acter’s malaise. So how does a girl named Marla come to take the blame?
Seeking respite from his social symptom, severe insomnia, the narrator
goes to a doctor who refuses to give him sleeping pills. His rage at the
doctor is visibly marked by a quick flash in which Tyler appears, a clue
(admittedly difficult to decipher) that the way the narrator will psychi-
cally resolve his problem will be to split his self and project onto Tyler his
rage at those who have failed to recognize his vulnerability and his needs,
those who deny him care. In the film, those who do so are just about
always men. The doctor suggests that if he wants to see real pain, he
should attend a self-help group for men with testicular cancer. And so he
comes to ‘Remaining Men Together’ and the scene with Bob. Now we
learn that what cured the narrator’s symptom was the moment at the end
of the self-help group when the leader has people pair off and open them-
selves up to the other. Bob gives him permission to cry; eventually the
narrator’s cynical distance gives way and he sobs into Bob’s breasts to the
sound of medieval religious music. And then he tells us how well he slept
that night.
104 L. Layton
After a year of treating his symptom in this way, going each night to a
different group of sick and dying people, Marla Singer shows up, ghostly
and Goth and smoking her way through the same self-help cancer meet-
ings that the narrator attends, including ‘Remaining Men Together’. The
narrator can no longer cry because, as he puts it: ‘Her lie reflected my lie’.
Because he could no longer cry, he could no longer sleep.
The narrator tries to get Marla to stop attending meetings, and Marla
asks him why these groups matter so much to him. He says: ‘I don’t
know. When people think you’re dying they listen to you, instead of …’
Marla finishes his sentence, ‘Instead of waiting for their turn to speak’.
‘Yeah, yeah’. This interchange indicts a narcissistic world in which the
chances for subject-to-subject relating in everyday life are almost nil. In
moments such as this, the film crucially links capitalism with the destruc-
tion of capacities for intimacy. But the narrator cannot sustain awareness
of this connection. Instead, Marla is blamed for ruining this one chance
the narrator has found to feel alive and recognized. They agree to split up
the different groups between them, and Marla disappears from the narra-
tive for awhile.
And now the film takes a very different turn; one that I have always
found narratively incoherent, and, for this reason, symptomatic. The nar-
rator, again afflicted with insomnia and praying that the plane he’s on will
crash or have a mid-air collision, is seated next to Tyler, who is dressed in
’70s Superfly attire. The narrator again suggests that his ills derive from
capitalism’s destruction of capacities for meaningful relating, telling us
that the ‘single-serving friends’ he meets on the plane pretty much exhaust
his social life—‘between take-off and landing we have our time together.
That’s all we get.’ When the narrator arrives home from this particular
trip, he discovers that his apartment and all his belongings have blown
up. In the rubble, he finds Marla’s number and he calls her, but when she
picks up, he hangs up. He calls Tyler instead, and so he chooses to address
his pain by conjuring a macho alter whose compelling critique of con-
sumer capitalism is only part of his attraction: the other part is his con-
scienceless fucking, fighting, and authoritarian exploitation of others.
While the call to Tyler reflects the narrator’s choice at that moment for a
certain kind of re-masculinization, a violent, exploitive, and misogynist
kind, the call to Marla reflects the unconscious of the film, the narrator’s
wish for a different solution to the meaninglessness of his life than the
one Fight Club represents. The different solution is at least partly cap-
tured in the self-help groups, which the narrative discards the same way
Tyler discards Marla after fucking her. Perhaps what the final conflagra-
tion has to do with a girl named Marla Singer is that the narrator was
more afraid to call her than he was to call Tyler.
The unconscious symptom of the film is reflected in the narrator’s dif-
ficulty establishing a narrative. A narrative incoherence separates part
one, in which the cure to the character’s ills lies in mourning losses in a
context of what he considers to be meaningful relating, and part two, in
which the cure lies in the kind of sadomasochistic male bonding that
denigrates women as it claims for itself a revolutionary subject position
that in fact looks more like a militarized hate group than like the anti-
globalization movements that currently fight global capitalism.
The oscillation between capitalism critique and misogyny is repeated
in the next scene. After the narrator calls Tyler, they meet at a bar, and he
tells Tyler that all his things are gone:
Tyler: It could be worse. A woman could cut off your

penis while you sleep and toss it out of the win-
dow of a moving car.
Then Tyler asks him if he knows what a ‘duvet’ is, and of course the nar-
rator does. Tyler launches into a critique of consumer capitalism:
Tyler: What are we then?

Narrator: I dunno. Consumers.
Tyler: Right. We’re consumers. We are byproducts of a
lifestyle obsession.
Murder, crime, poverty. These things don’t con-
cern me. What concerns me are celebrity maga-
zines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s
name on my underwear. Rogaine. Viagra. Olestra.
Narrator, interjecting: Martha Stewart.
Tyler (shouting): Fuck Martha Stewart.
106 L. Layton
And he says it’s all going down (Martha Stewart was, indeed, about to ‘go
down’ for the kind of unethical business practices that would soon after
be understood to be endemic to neoliberal capitalism.). Tyler finishes his
tirade: ‘The things you own end up owning you’.
Tyler’s analysis recalls that of Lasch, blaming it all on women, feminiz-
ing consumer capitalism as if capitalism has anything to do with feminin-
ity. He does so not just by summing it all up in the figure of Martha
Stewart, which is precisely what the media did in 2004. The blame is also
evident in Tyler’s first comment about the worse fate being castration by
a woman. And while this comment goes by as quickly as the subliminal
cuts of Tyler do before his character is introduced, we should note the
fear that’s expressed here: the subtext of the film figures women not just
as agents of castration, but also as agents of rejection who could toss your
penis out the window.
It is in the next scene that Fight Club is initiated, and here again we
can glimpse a fear of rejection behind a surface bravado. The narrator and
Tyler leave the restaurant and the narrator says goodnight. Tyler is
astounded by the fact that even after three pitchers of beer, the narrator
can’t ask him if he can stay with him. ‘Cut the foreplay’, Tyler says, ‘and
just ask, man’. The narrator asks, Tyler accepts, and then Tyler asks for his
favor—‘hit me as hard as you can’. As Steve Neale (1983) has written, the
very intimation of male homoeroticism on screen usually gives way to
sadomasochistic fireworks, and this film, a male buddy movie of sorts
and, as I said earlier, certainly part of the ’80s and ’90s ‘oppressed white
male’ film genre, canonizes male on male aggression as a solution to
emasculation. So the aggression defends against the desire. But I think
one could argue that the erotic desire itself defends against the longing
for intimacy, and it is this longing against which the film consistently
defends, perhaps right through to the end. Male dependency and vulner-
ability is the last taboo (bedrock, Freud would have called it, 1937), not
male homoeroticism.
And why is the narrator so terribly vulnerable, so defended against
narcissistic wounding? The film tells us that the narrator and Tyler both
hate their parents. Shortly after they begin to expand Fight Club and re-
masculinize men, there is a scene in which Tyler is in the bathtub and the
narrator is sitting on the floor of the bathroom, treating his wounds.
Tyler: If you could choose, who would you fight?

Narrator: I’d fight my boss probably.
Tyler: Really!
Narrator: Yeah, why? Who would you fight?
Tyler: I’d fight my dad.
Narrator: I don’t know my dad. I mean I know him, but…
He left when I was like, six years old. Married
this other woman and had some other kids. He
did this every six years. He changes city and
starts a new family.
Tyler: Fucker’s setting up franchises! My dad never went
to college. So it was real important that I go.
Narrator: That sounds familiar.
Tyler: So I graduate. Call him up long distance, I say,
‘Dad, now what?’ He says, ‘Get a job.’
Narrator: Same here.
Tyler: Now I’m 25. Make my yearly call again. Say, ‘Dad,
now what?’ He says, ‘I dunno. Get married’.
Narrator, interjecting: I can’t get married. I’m a thirty-year-old boy.
At which point, the critique of long-distance abandoning dads breaks off

and once again yields to female bashing:
Tyler: We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m

wondering if another woman is really the answer
we need.
Several other scenes also locate the source of the narrator’s problems in
rejection and abandonment. In one scene, Tyler, slapping the narrator
around after pouring lye on his hand, yells: ‘Our fathers were our models
for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God? Listen
to me. You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you.
He never wanted you. In all probability He hates you. This is not the
worst thing that could happen’. ‘It isn’t?’ the narrator asks. ‘We don’t need
him…Fuck damnation, man. Fuck redemption. We are God’s unwanted
children, so be it’. After this scene, the narrator begins to act like Tyler.
108 L. Layton
For all its critique of capitalism, what the film flirts with but fails to
articulate are capitalism’s connections to a dominant version of masculin-
ity that has traditionally been tied to an ‘autonomy’ based in a denial of
dependence and interdependence. This version of autonomy psychologi-
cally carries capitalism’s assault against possibilities of achieving the kind
of intimacy and connection for which the narrator yearns. In neoliberal
times, this version of autonomy’s tie to masculinity has been loosened,
but, in the United States, it has become the dominant version of auton-
omy on offer to white middle-class subjects. Homo entrepreneur (du Gay
2004; Foucault 2008; Read 2009), the ‘proper’ subject of neoliberalism,
can be gendered male or female—but this version of subjectivity, as Kovel
presciently foresaw, is marked by a reality in which all relations are
infected by the market logic of investment for a future yield, of what is
cost-effective and what maximizes opportunity. Films such as Fight Club
can be understood as part of a backlash that blames women for the loss
of real autonomy that men and women alike have sustained in the wake
of neoliberalism: where social risk has been shifted from collectives to
individuals, where social problems are responded to with market-based
solutions, where the social contract that offered at least a modicum of
good social objects on which one could conceivably depend is repeatedly
violated, and, thus, where individuals focus their concern on self-care
rather than social citizenship. When you look closely at what happens
both in the film and the novel on which it is based (Palahniuk 1996), it
becomes clear that the narrator splits himself into two not because he
needs to be re-masculinized by Tyler, but as a defense against the wounds
caused by repeated humiliations and abandonments that come from both
individual and institutional sources. Humiliating slights from his father,
the medical system, his boss; the way he is instrumentally used by others,
even Tyler, are visible in the film but are avenged by blaming Marla and
seeking solace in an all-male, authoritarian, violent organization. The
narrative is incoherent because the narrator’s chosen solutions enact his
split-off rage and defend against experiencing the narcissistic wounds that
caused the rage in the first place.
Alternate Interpretations
In this chapter, I have played with a few different popular culture theories
to account for filmic representations of a crisis of white middle-class het-
erosexual masculinity: Richards and Brown on id-type versus thoughtful
feeling-type emotionality (and the implications for therapeutic culture);
Bainbridge and Yates on the continuum from rigidified representations of
masculinity to representations that open transitional space for possible
renegotiations of masculinity; Jameson’s reflections on the reified and uto-
pian possibilities on offer in most media representations that become very
popular; and theories about the unconscious subtexts that disrupt narrative
coherence. What theory needs to account for is the contradictory qualities
of any popular text and how those contradictions contend with what I have
taken here to be a central contemporary problematic for all cultural sub-
jects: the tension between a narcissistic individualism and opportunities for
individualization (the latter of which, in Fight Club, are simultaneously
allowed to the leaders and refused to the nameless followers).
Jameson’s thesis on contradiction, the thesis that culture enacts hege-
monic struggle between dominant and subordinate discourses taken up
differently by different audiences (Hall 1980), and the idea that texts have
unconscious subtexts, all suggest we look for other possible interpretations
of the film besides my own, and, as I mentioned earlier, my students
through the years have helped me see these other possibilities. In one alter-
nate interpretation, the film can be seen to narrate the way a macho and
narcissistic version of masculinity utterly fails to cure the ills of anomic
modern existence. Evidence for this reading lies in the fact that when the
narrator realizes that Project Mayhem has spun completely out of control,
he destroys Tyler, his split-off macho alter. It is Tyler, though, who in fact
has all the left-wing charm and who voices the critique of consumer capi-
talism. Nonetheless, perhaps the film recognizes that his version of mascu-
linity, based as it is in a hatred of women and what they culturally stand for,
leads to an impersonal destruction of self, others, and any sense of connec-
tion. Indeed, the film’s turning point is the death of Bob, the narrator’s old
self-help partner in the testicular cancer survivors’ group, ‘Remaining Men
Together’. Against Tyler and against the ‘rules’ of Project Mayhem, the nar-
rator insists that Bob’s human dignity and specificity be recognized.
110 L. Layton
As I mentioned earlier, there is also evidence in the film that the narra-
tor is unclear from the outset whether it is Marla or Tyler who provides
the key to solving his troubles. In this reading, the narrator becomes a real
revolutionary only when he rejects Tyler’s version of masculinity, the vio-
lent and authoritarian organization this version spawns, and his hostility
toward Marla and women in general. Realizing that Project Mayhem is
killing the very humanity it was created to save, the narrator saves Marla
from the destruction his own rageful fantasy is about to enact. In the final
scene, he and Marla hold hands and watch the symbols of consumer capi-
talism blow up, which perhaps suggests that Tyler has found a way to
value love and connection while holding on to his desire to destroy capi-
talism.5 But even if this ending suggests that one can remain human and
still wish to destroy capitalism, it can nonetheless only be read as an
individual and not a collective solution—perhaps too much to ask of a
Hollywood film. For the film definitely does not imagine a functioning
revolutionary collective but rather an authoritarian hierarchy in which
the minions are encouraged to conform to the leader’s rules and not to
think or ask questions.
Indeed, a third psychoanalytic reading, one that takes account of the
individualist strain of the film, might argue that, as in a dream, Marla,
Tyler, and the narrator are all parts of one person and that Tyler can only
disappear when the narrator connects with the part of himself represented
by Marla. Evidence for this interpretation includes the fact that Marla
takes the place of the narrator’s power animal in his meditation and that
Marla is a ghostlike figure who walks out into traffic and doesn’t die. The
narrative perhaps makes most sense, best coheres, with this interpreta-
tion. But it took several viewings and a few student comments for me to
find this way of establishing some narrative coherence, and that is because
the film’s excitement derives neither from Marla’s filmic presence, which
is rare, nor from the narrator’s struggle to acknowledge those parts of
himself that humanize him. Not only are such moments of struggle few,
but they are mostly repudiated explicitly in the narrative. The weight of
the narrative is on narcissistic masculinity as a solution to both the prob-
lems of consumer capitalism and emasculation; most of the film’s plea-
sure comes from Fight Club, not from its dissolution in the final frames
or from the hero’s early flirtation with self-help groups.
Conclusion
Regardless of the interpretation that most speaks to us, it is clear that
both Fight Club and the narrator’s insomnia emerge from a social struc-
ture that splits autonomous from relational capacities and does so in sup-
port of a neoliberal, global order of consumer and finance capitalism. The
result of this split is narcissistic self-structure and narcissistic relations:
urges either to conform or to rebel in a violent form stem from experi-
ences of never feeling good enough, never feeling listened to, never feel-
ing connected to others in any but exploitive ways. The film and its
narrative structure reveal the intimate connection between capitalism
and the kind of injury in the private sphere that produces a narcissistic
defensive autonomy. This version of autonomy wreaks violence on the
self and the environment; it disparages relations with others as it struggles
against a dreaded dependency and vulnerability. Because the narration
chooses as its dominant solution the very narcissistic masculinity that is a
source of the problem, it well illustrates the way normative unconscious
processes work (Layton 2002, 2006). Hurt by dominant forms of mascu-
linity and femininity, the male characters, who know consciously who
and what the real enemies are, nonetheless are pulled unconsciously to
repeat the very dynamics that caused their problem in the first place.
A psychoanalytic reading of the film could easily focus only on the cri-
tique of capitalism, the denial of loss and the film’s critique of the fantasy
that all loss can be made good by the right consumer products. But any
psychoanalytic reading that omits the many things the narrator has to say
about his failed relationships will miss that important link between social
character and capitalism for which I am trying to make the case. It is
through looking at the historical specificity of the characters’ relationships
that we can move from the particular to any kind of meaningful analysis of
the collective. And, as I have suggested, the film downplays the only thing
that can possibly give it narrative sense—the narrator’s experience of
repeated rejections and abandonments by friends, lovers, parents, and soci-
ety. The film reveals as well that what makes women easy to villainize is not
that they represent castration or lack, but rather that they are made, unfairly,
to represent the agents of rejection and abandonment.6 In the novel, in fact,
112 L. Layton
the real target of the explosives is not capitalism but the national museum,
the dead white abandoning fathers. A reading of the film’s unconscious sug-
gests that we have to look for the roots of omnipotent grandiose destruc-
tiveness in the way capitalism and traditional forms of dominant masculinity
instrumentalize both public and private relationships, creating narcissistic
wounds that are not in fact healed, but rather are fortified by consumerism,
misogyny, and homophobia.
Notes
1. The notion of ‘social character’ itself derives from the work of early left-
wing analysts such as Otto Fenichel (1953), Wilhelm Reich (1972), and
Erich Fromm (1941). This work was further elaborated by Frankfurt
School theorists: Fromm’s (1941) ‘modern man,’ escaping from freedom
via conformity, and Adorno et al.’s (1950) authoritarian personality both
bear more than a passing resemblance to the narcissistic personality Kohut
and Kernberg were to elaborate in the ’70s and ’80s.
2. I still find Kohut’s definition of narcissism compelling, although I have
come to believe that narcissistic selves are not marked by a deficit of struc-
ture and lack of conflict, as Kohut argued, but rather by what Kernberg
(1975) and Fairbairn (1954) identified as pathological, conflict-ridden
psychic structures.
3. This is, of course, a very different interpretation of the role of experts in
late modernity than that offered by, for example, Beck (1999), Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim (2002), and Giddens (1991). But perhaps what gets lost
in their analyses is the ‘dark side’ of expertise so well chronicled by, for
example, Rose (1990).
4. It is worth noting that the first chapter of the novel (Palahniuk 1996),
unlike the film’s first scene, does NOT end with the statement about Marla’s
guilt. Rather, it ends with the Norton character trying to find a way out of
being murdered by his alter ego. In the book version, the statement about
hurting the one you love is taken back in a different way. The narrator says:
We have a sort of triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants
Marla.
Marla wants me.
I don’t want Marla, and Tyler doesn’t want me around, not anymore.
This isn’t
about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.

Without Marla, Tyler would have nothing.
Five minutes.
Maybe we would become a legend, maybe not. No, I say, but wait.
Where would
Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
Four minutes.
I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a
legend, Tyler,
man, I’ll make you a legend. I’ve been here from the beginning.
I remember everything.
Three minutes. (14–15)
I underline this difference in the novel because of how it resonates with
Columbine and other school shootings, that is, for what it tells us about the
wishes of alienated young men for some kind of celebrity to give meaning
to their lives, even if that celebrity has to occur at the moment of self-
inflicted death. This particularly male version of the celebrity fantasy, tied as
it is with death, takes to absurd extremes the simultaneous longing for spe-
cialness and awareness of the impossibility of achieving it (in life) that marks
a narcissistic culture intolerant of the ordinary (Stein 2000). And with
regard to that impossibility, the novel makes far more clear than the film the
narcissistic oscillation between grandiosity and self-deprecation—for exam-
ple, Marla and the narrator constantly refer to themselves as human butt-
wipe and both long for death as release from the meaninglessness of life.
Nonetheless, in film and novel a longing for something that would make
life meaningful is present throughout. The solutions are disastrous; the
expression of the longing is what is radical about both novel and film.
5. Interestingly, the novel ends differently and does not suggest such an inte-
gration. The novel ends when the narrator repudiates Tyler and acknowl-
edges he likes Marla, at which point Marla and the people from the
support groups come after the narrator to rescue him. In the novel, the
buildings don’t blow up—because the narrator (as Tyler) used paraffin,
knowing full well that paraffin impedes the explosion. Furthermore, the
buildings that are being blown up are not the centers of finance but
national museums that symbolize the dead white fathers.
6. When Marla re-enters the narrative as Tyler’s fuck buddy, the narrator is
enraged that she’s come between him and Tyler. In the novel, he says:
‘Long story short. Now Marla’s out to ruin another part of my life. Ever
since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends’ (62).
114 L. Layton
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Lynne Layton is a psychoanalyst and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology,

part-time, Harvard Medical School. She has taught courses on women and pop-
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Psychological Association).
5
Melancholia, the Death Drive
and Into the Wild
Derek Hook
The objective of this chapter is to explore key facets of melancholia, and

to do so by making reference both to a clinical case and to Into the Wild,
Jon Krakauer’s (1996) book depicting the tragic story of Christopher
McCandless. My more specific aims are twofold. I want, firstly, to engen-
der a distinctively Lacanian perspective on melancholia. Secondly, bearing
in mind Freud’s (1923) remark that in melancholia we observe ‘a pure
culture of the death instinct’ (p. 53), I want to foreground the role of the
death drive in melancholia. As will soon become apparent, the approach
I will develop toward melancholia may initially appear at odds with
Freud’s (1917) account, which focuses largely on the role of a previously
loved yet subsequently hated and internalized lost object. A different set
of conceptual priorities comes to the fore in a Lacanian reading, particu-
larly so given Lacan’s insistence on the death drive as enacted within the
symbolic realm. This is the death drive understood not as a quasi-biological
or organic force, nor as most fundamentally a will to self-annihilation.
The Lacanian death drive is instead a type of life in excess of life, and it
D. Hook (*)
Department of Psychology, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

120 D. Hook
entails the wish to break from—even to destroy—the network of given

symbolic roles, debts and obligations that structure social existence.
I am not the first to stress a series of Lacanian postulates regards mel-
ancholia that differ from Freudian conceptualizations (Leader 2003,
2008). In fact, I begin this chapter by citing Russell Grigg’s (2015) recent
argument that it is the presence of the object rather than its absence that
is most crucial in melancholia. Building on this challenge to Freud’s con-
ceptualization, I sketch a brief outline of a clinical case, and then turn to
a discussion of Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s (1996) book (subsequently
filmed by Sean Penn (2007)), which documents the story of Christopher
McCandless. After elaborating upon a striking series of similarities
between these two cases, I conclude by stressing a series of ideas relating
to the death drive in melancholia that a Lacanian frame of reference
allows us to foreground.
The Over-Proximity of the Object

Even those with only a passing familiarity with Freud’s (1917) Mourning
and Melancholia are acquainted with the idea that the melancholic suffers
from the loss of a once loved then subsequently hated object. Following
this account, the melancholic, having narcissistically identified with the
object, wages a clamorous psychical war against it via the medium of their
own ego. We are thus able to explain one of the key features of melancho-
lia repeatedly stressed by Freud (1917), namely the fact that the constant
complaints and allegations that the melancholic directs against them-
selves sound very much as if they fit another object altogether.
While we should not of course jettison Freud’s account, it is worth-
while interrogating whether it is the loss of an object that really plays the
predominant role. Differently put, we might ask whether the loss of an
imaginary (ego-supporting) object may not be coterminous with the inva-
sive presence of an object of a different order—that of the Lacanian real—
which cannot be kept at bay. This argument is advanced by Grigg (2015)
who observes, in respect of the psychoanalytic transference that ‘it is the
very presence of the object, rather than its loss, that is critical [in melan-
cholia]’. ‘[M]elancholia’, as such ‘is not about object loss’; ‘mourning…
which is produced by the loss of an object, is a misleading model for

melancholia’ (p. 152).
A crucial facet of Grigg’s disagreement with Freud is the idea that the
attack upon the self in melancholia is too devastating to be understood as
internalized aggression against the object. One might retort here that
Grigg is not giving the sadistic and punitive agency of the superego the
prominence it deserves in the dynamics of melancholia. (Grigg is largely
dismissive when it comes to affording the superego an explanatory role in
melancholia.) Nevertheless, he has an important point: the damage expe-
rienced by the subject, the eruption of harmful jouissance—indeed, the
toxicity of the object—seems to exceed what can be accounted for in
terms of superego violence. Let us turn directly to Grigg’s account:
What makes melancholia so different from mourning is that the melan-

cholic subject turns out to be defenceless against the object. The object
cannot be memorialized, as in mourning, and instead remains forever there
in the Real. The collapse of semblants that otherwise veil the object per-
sists, and the ‘grimace’ of the object, like the grimace of a skull behind a
beautiful face, is exposed; for the melancholic, the veil of semblants, the
i(a) over the object a falls altogether. (p. 153)
Crucial here is the distinction between imaginary or ego-sustaining

objects (semblants), which provide a type of fantasy covering, and the real
object, that is, the real object, which occurs minus any protective screen.
This object—which Grigg equates with Lacan’s object a—is not merely
the object-cause of desire, as it is so often characterized in the secondary
literature. In its real, which is to say its unmediated and ‘unprocesseable’
form, this ‘object’ is also traumatic—an excessive thing that promises to
irradiate the subject with inflammatory jouissance. This unscreened object
exerts a type of toxic over-proximity, an over-proximity that means that,
the subject has not separated himself from it as […] object cause of desire.
This separation, which for the neurotic subject is produced by the Other as
locus of speech and language, both regulates and limits his jouissance. In
the absence of this separation a plenitude of jouissance is apparent in such
[…] formations as erotomania, hypochondriasis, and the persecutions char-
acteristic of paranoia. […] In melancholia we encounter the same failure of
122 D. Hook
separation from the object. The depressive function is explained by the fact
that the unseparated-off object, in being a ‘piece of the Real’ […] leaves the
subject exposed and defenceless to its ravages. (p. 154)
I am perhaps more persuaded than Grigg that such an over-proximity of

the real object can be read as compatible with the basic outline of Freud’s
(1917) model of melancholia. One appreciates nevertheless, what moti-
vates his account. Firstly, he wants to underline a more radical distinc-
tion between mourning and melancholia than he sees in Freud’s
description (indeed, mourning is in no way an adequate paradigm within
which to broach the nature of melancholia for Grigg). Furthermore,
Grigg wishes to stress the severity, indeed, the psychotic nature of melan-
cholia, which becomes evident precisely in view of the ‘unshieldedness’
of the psychotic subject before the toxic object. The neurotic subject,
following Lacanian theory, has the resources of fantasy, and the recourse
to an Other (of prevailing socio-symbolic norms and values) to help
absorb such a traumatic impact. The Other can, in this respect, be a
point of appeal, a place to which one can direct one’s complaints or
abjections. Similarly, the Other as site of shared social meaning can pro-
vide a symbolic frame, a means of speaking about and thereby diffusing
anxieties and harmful jouissance; this Other can be used as a resource of
narrativization. Such jouissance-management strategies are not as avail-
able to the psychotic subject who, to risk a broad structural generaliza-
tion, lacks the buffers to jouissance so adeptly mobilized by the neurotic
(fantasy here again being a key consideration: neurotics fantasize about
revenge, sexual escapades, etc., whereas psychotic subjects are often more
prone to act). Psychotics—following this line of argument—could be
said to experience anxiety in a more genuinely shattering and/or destabi-
lizing way (although this would need to be investigated on a case-by-case
basis). Hence, the clinical imperative to avoid wherever possible incurring
anxiety in work with psychotic patients (not putting them on the couch,
demanding free association, etc.) Such an imperative does not operate
with neurotics, where a minimal degree of anxiety can—at least within
the domain of in Lacanian practice—prove an important means of
prompting the flow of material.
Seceding from the Symbolic: A Case Summary

One of the challenges of psychoanalysis as a ‘science of the particular’
(Verhaeghe 2001) lies with grasping how a highly distinctive set of symp-
toms is also ‘universal’, at least in the sense of belonging to a broad diag-
nostic structure. Something of this challenge was apparent in the case of
a patient I worked with some years ago, who presented with a series of
puzzling symptoms, some of which seemed, on the face of it, to have little
or nothing to do with melancholia. Several key themes came to the fore
in the clinical work, which I list, schematically, below.
1. Difficulties in receiving gifts/symbolic marking: The patient expe-

rienced extreme difficulty—and a considerable degree of anxiety—in
situations where he was forced to receive gifts. Such an aversive reac-
tion was apparent not just in the case of gifts from family and friends,
but even when he was given small tokens of gratitude from work col-
leagues. To receive any token of the Other’s desire was, in short, a
painfully excessive experience. Even as a child he disliked receiving
gifts, and he frequently contrived to get his birthday forgotten. One
way he devised of dealing with this difficulty was to transfer such gifts.
He would request, for example, that Christmas gifts take the form of
charitable donations. His preferred Christmas activity was to work in
a soup kitchen—an effective way of enacting a reversal from the posi-
tion of a recipient to a giving position.
In one particular case, the effects of receiving a large gift proved
disastrous: it brought a longstanding intimate relationship to an
unhappy and definitive end. This problem with accepting gifts was
evident also in my patient’s disinclination to accept any remuneration
offered by his place of work beyond his usual salary. His preference for
giving to (rather than receiving from) others was apparent also in a
long-held wish to work for a charity. Related to this was his profound
distaste for what he considered to be the unethical business practices
of large financial institutions. He wished, by contrast, to play a part in
redistributing rather than accumulating wealth. His preoccupations
with avoiding gifts and charitable giving often took on a severe super-
ego quality.
124 D. Hook
My working theory was that he disliked his existence being too

forcefully acknowledged or symbolically marked by any desiring Other.
Much by the same token: he avoided wherever possible being locked
into reciprocal relations of exchange that fixed him in a designated
symbolic role. His interest in charity seemed to fit this idea: his aver-
sion to receiving gifts seemed largely to be about avoiding indebted-
ness, avoiding being locked into a relationship of obligation, which
itself indicates how one is tied into a symbolic place that one either
detests or simply feels unable to maintain.
2. An inability to mediate intimacy (the ‘terror of closeness’): My
patient also experienced great difficulties in managing personal rela-
tionships. Romantic relationships would invariably become too
intense, and he struggled to strike the right distance between the
extremes of aloofness and suffocating proximity. This occurred in both
social and more intimate relationships. There seemed to be no happy
medium, no balance between his powerful need for distance from
social others and the occasional bout of uninhibited and ultimately
damaging intimacy. Just as he experienced a ‘terror’ of gifts, so he
exhibited what Verhaeghe (2001) refers to as a ‘terror of closeness’. He
knew no viable way of moderating intimacy, of introducing a screen
between himself and the Other.
An accomplished sailor and solo yachtsman, my patient managed
his problem of intimacy by participating in an exhausting—and often
dangerous—series of regattas and one-man sailing events all across the
United States. For a lengthy period, participation in such events pro-
vided a solitary escape from intimate relations and social obligations
alike; virtually all of his time was spent training for, travelling to, or
participating in such events. This difficulty in mediating relationships
chimes with Grigg’s (2015) description of the over-proximity of the
object in melancholia and his related suggestion that such an ‘unsepa-
rated off’ object exerts a type of unscreened jouissance.
3 . A yearning for anonymity and disappearance: My patient had a
frequent need to uproot himself, to cut social and professional ties, to
move from one job or residential address to another. He periodically
abandoned email accounts and cell numbers, starting afresh with new
contact details that he shared with as few people as possible. Being in
any one position for too long elicited considerable anxiety; long-term
recognizability was almost unbearable to him. He felt acutely the
weight of social relationships with people whom he was certain he
would, in due course, disappoint. He experienced his own existence as
unworthy, undeserved, as—and here we are more clearly within the
realm of melancholia—blameworthy and a source of guilt. His nega-
tive self-evaluations clearly invoked Freud’s description according to
which the melancholic patient ‘represents his ego […] as worthless
[…] morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and
expects to be cast out and punished’. (Freud 1917, p. 246).
This certainty that others would soon discover his worthlessness
was perhaps why he so frequently voiced the wish to become anony-
mous, to bypass any forms of symbolic registration—permanent roles,
positions, relationships, and so on. The reverie that he often experi-
enced when talking of his more gruelling sailing events was one of
disappearance or demise, of going ‘off grid’, being lost and never being
found. He had broken off all relations with his parents and extended
family years ago, and he maintained an unconditional hatred for his
father.
4. Existing in a twilight world: The patient’s day-to-day thoughts were
punctuated with images of his suicide. He had a richly developed and
well-researched set of ideas about how this might be most effectively
accomplished. Additionally, he often described what I thought of as
‘twilight scenes’, scenarios in which he, or others, were suspended
between the worlds of the living and dead. These were typically sce-
narios in which people were poised on the threshold of their own
death or were surrounded by those who had already passed into
another world. These images conveyed something of his everyday
experience. He existed in a state preoccupied with death, a condition
that was incommensurable with the world of the living, and near
impossible to explain to those around him. This condition of opting
out of social life whilst at the same time endlessly contemplating actual
suicide—the state of being ‘between two deaths’ in Lacan’s (1992)
memorable phrase—is ultimately what made life bearable for him.
Leader’s (2007) description of the melancholic’s existence as split
between ‘the “unreal” world of social being’ (p. 182) on the one hand,
126 D. Hook
and their ‘real’ existence, of ‘absolute solitude’ (p. 174) proves particu-

larly poignant here. As does Verhaeghe’s (2001) comment that in mel-
ancholia ‘the subject is empty, has nothing…is a member of the living
dead…[who] takes the entire guilt of the world onto its shoulders’
(p. 455).
It took me a while to understand that my patient’s twilight scenes
and his associated reveries of suicide were not indications of immanent
risk. They served instead a consoling function; the painful condition of
his existence was assuaged rather than exacerbated through such imag-
inings. His melancholia was not simply about a drive to suicide, but
about a more complex negotiation whereby the presence of (imaginary
and symbolic) death enabled him to live. Perhaps the most telling
example of his melancholic state was his wish not merely to die, but
that his life be somehow retrospectively erased, such that he had never
lived at all. This desire for complete erasure was apparent in an obstacle
he ran up against when contemplating suicide. He had the discomfort-
ing thought that there would inevitably be some remainder—his body,
traces of the suicidal act—which someone would discover, and which
would call attention both to the fact that he had lived and to the rela-
tionships which had in some respect defined him. This of course was
precisely the opposite of what he wanted: to disappear quite literally
without trace, without affirming the fact of his symbolic existence,
without revitalizing the historical social and familial relationships that
he so desperately wanted to erase.
Disturbances in the Symbolic
If we are to bring a Lacanian perspective to this case material, two fea-
tures in particular are worth stressing. Firstly—following Grigg (2015)—
melancholia can be approached not only—or even chiefly—as the
problem of a once loved now lost object. Melancholia can just as well be
conceptualized as a (at basis, psychotic) difficulty with being definitively
located, marked in the symbolic. This may be apparent in family/social
relations that the melancholic experiences as unbearable and claustro-
phobic. It may likewise be apparent in a reticence to receive gifts or any
tokens of the Other’s desire that locates the subject within a series of
obligations. This difficulty is thus the flipside of the problem with medi-
ating intimacy (‘the terror of closeness’), in which relations with the
Other seem either to plunge into suffocating over-proximity or to fall
apart altogether. The question of an optimal distance to the Other who is
somehow excessive of course resonates with Grigg’s description of the ‘too
muchness’ of object a. The object a in this respect is the traumatic kernel,
the ‘little piece of the real’, which, like the skull beneath the face that
Grigg so memorably invokes, shines through the Other to exert its trau-
matic influence on the melancholic subject.
So, whereas Grigg, following a reading of the later Lacan, emphasizes
the over-proximity of object a, I have stressed difficulties in the allocation
of a symbolic role, what we might call a crisis of marking. Of course,
from a Lacanian perspective—a point that can barely be stressed
enough—these are two sides of the same coin. Both, moreover, are indica-
tions of psychotic as opposed to neurotic structure, a fact that helps pro-
visionally differentiate the preceding case from a diagnostic category that
it may otherwise at times seem to resemble—that of obsessional neurosis.
Difficulties in the taking up a stable position relative to the desire of the
Other, in short, are at once problems of symbolic placement and of the
failure to regulate the damaging jouissance emitting from the object a in
the Other. In other words, it is not just the symbolic relation to the Other
that is the problem. There is also a crisis concerning what is in the Other
(what in them is more than them), the dilemma of the object a within the
Other that has come too close.1 And it has come too close precisely
because the melancholic (psychotic) subject lacks the means of symbolic
mediation necessary to protect themselves from it.
Life Beyond Life

While not obviously present in the first sections of the foregoing case
summary, the death drive is clearly enough in evidence in the last of the
discussed themes. The extreme maritime risks and challenges that my
patient undertook on a weekly basis clearly took him ‘beyond the plea-
sure principle’, far exceeding what could in any ordinary terms of refer-
ence be considered either healthy or enjoyable. We should nonetheless
128 D. Hook
add a clarifying proviso here, pointing out that the death drive, for Lacan,
is apparent less in a literal wish to die, than in a type of life in excess of life.
The death drive, following this tack, is apparent in activities of surplus
vitality, in forms of unnatural (‘undead’) libidinal animation (jouissance)
that override the biological imperatives of adaptation and self-preservation.
It is for this reason that Lacan insists that the death drive is not ‘a perver-
sion of instinct but rather a desperate affirmation of life’ (1992, p. 263).
As Žižek puts it:
The Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving
for self-annihilation[…]it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying—
a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself […] The paradox of the Freudian
‘death drive’ is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the
way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of
life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life
and death […] The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is
never ‘just life’: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the
strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which
sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things. (Žižek 2006, p. 61)
We might differ slightly from Žižek here inasmuch as the death drive
may—as in the current case—be signalled by a craving for self-
annihilation, even if this is not its only or even its most salient feature.
Žižek’s remarks remain instructive however inasmuch as they overturn
the assumption that melancholia should be understood along the lines of
a severe and/or encompassing mode of depression, and withdrawal. The
death drive doubtless appears also in moments of ‘unholy’ stimulation, in
jouissance-inducing highs, in the libidinal gratifications of the transgressive
or the extreme. It is in such moments that the experience of being most
fully alive comes full circle to embrace the limits or excesses of life more
typically associated with death.
Into the Wild
I think I’m going to disappear for a while. (Christopher McCandless, cited in
Krakauer 1996, p. 21)
Christopher McCandless grew up in an upper-middle-class Washington

DC suburb, graduating, with honours, from Emory University in 1990.
Immediately after his graduation, Krakauer (1996) tells us,
McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire
balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, aban-
doned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet.
And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the
ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America[…]. His
family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his
remains turned up in Alaska. (1996, p. i)
McCandless’s death in Alaska—suffering from hunger, he had misidenti-

fied a harmful plant as edible and died as a result—captured the public’s
imagination when it occurred. A brief analysis of Krakauer’s retelling of
associated events will allow us to highlight a series of key components
that bear a striking resemblance to the case discussed previously. My
intention here is neither to ‘pathologize’ McCandless nor to provide a
type of retrospective diagnosis. Given that I am familiar with McCandless
only through the existing literature, any attempt at the latter would be ill
advised. That being said, there do seem a number of extraordinary paral-
lels between these cases, and exploring them might assist us in grasping a
series of clinical motifs typical of melancholia. A point of clinical diag-
nostics should be stressed here. That a biographical account may contain
symptomatic features illustrative of a diagnostic structure does not mean
that the individual in question should necessarily be diagnosed as such.
This gap between apparent symptoms and diagnostic structure should be
borne in mind as we consider the details of McCandless’s story.
I noted in my case summary that the melancholic patient I worked
with was exceedingly uncomfortable in situations in which he was made
to receive gifts; that he preferred to transfer such gifts to others; that char-
ity, rather than the accumulation of wealth, was important to him. I
noted also that he disliked being symbolically marked; that he frequently
broke off existing social and professional ties when they became either too
intimate or threatened to tie him to a given symbolic identity; and that he
yearned for anonymity, to disappear without trace. All of these themes
are, in varying ways, apparent in Krakauer’s depiction of McCandless.
130 D. Hook
A considerable portion of the pathos of Into the Wild concerns the

degree to which McCandless was willing to cut himself off both from his
family and from the values and symbolic roles expected of him, to forge
instead an entirely different and more solitary life. His avoidance of
everyday social norms, roles and obligations had begun some time before
he set out on his wilderness adventures however. Krakauer relates how
‘McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of Washington, chatting
to prostitutes and homeless people, buying them meals (Krakauer 1996,
p. 113); this ‘teenage Tolstoyan’ seemingly ‘believed that wealth was
shameful, corrupting, inherently evil’ (p. 115). Furthermore: ‘In college
McCandless began emulating Tolstoy’s asceticism and moral rigor to a
degree that first astonished, and then alarmed, those who were close to
him’ (Krakauer 1996 p. ii). In his final year in Atlanta, ‘Chris had lived
off campus in a monkish room furnished with little more than a thin
mattress on the floor, milk crates, and a table’ (p. 22).2
A crucial turning point in Sean Penn’s (2007) film version of Into the
Wild—a moment similarly emphasized in Carine McCandless’s account
of events—concerns McCandless’s angry refusal to accept a new car that
his parents wanted to purchase for him as a graduation present. Krakauer
adds a telling point of contextualization, noting that two years earlier
McCandless ‘announced to his parents that, on principle, he would no
longer give or accept gifts’ (p. 20). He goes on to cite a letter that
McCandless wrote to his sister, Carine:
I can’t believe they’d try and buy me a car or that they think I’d actually let them
pay for my law school if I was going to go […] they ignore what I say and think
I’d actually accept a new car from them! I’m going to have to be real careful not
to accept any gifts from them in the future. (cited in Krakauer 1996, p. 21)
McCandless’s anger at being offer such a gift, along with his unwilling-
ness to be symbolically indebted to his parents, appear to have been cru-
cial factors in his decision to definitively cut ties with them:
for a few months after graduation I’m going to let them […] think that I’m
‘coming around to see their side of things’ and that the relationship is stabiliz-
ing. And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to
completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents
once and for all […] forever. (cited in Krakauer 1996, p. 64)
It is interesting that in both the McCandless story and the case discussed
earlier, an unwanted gift—which is also of course an unwanted intimacy,
an unwanted debt, a ‘too muchness’ of the Other—featured as a point of
rupture. Clearly, like my patient, McCandless evinced a volatile reaction
to being the recipient of a gift that would lock him into a designated role
(the son of his parents). Eric Hathaway, a university friend of McCandless
was perhaps more insightful than he realized when he commented that
‘Chris…would have been unhappy with any parents; he had trouble with
the whole idea of parents’ (cited in Krakauer 1996, p. 115).
Several further incidents can be cited in which McCandless was either
notably uncomfortable with, or attempted his best to sidestep, forms of
symbolic marking. An example is the new name McCandless adopted
when he began his travels: Alexander Supertramp. Upon reflection, this
was not so much a new name as the avoidance of a name. I say this for two
reasons. Firstly, ‘Supertramp’ is more a description than a name:
McCandless had after all embraced the life of a destitute wanderer, albeit
of a ‘super’ (youthful, adventurous) sort. Secondly, by incorporating the
name of a famous rock band (‘Supertramp’), McCandless was substitut-
ing a well-worn signifier from American popular culture—one of a par-
ticularly bland and anonymous sort—for his name. A similar gesture is
apparent in the case of another young man Krakauer discusses in Into the
Wild, Everett Ruess, who, he felt, clearly exhibited similar tendencies to
McCandless. Ruess sought escape from society in the American wilder-
ness, and ultimately died as a result. He had adopted the name Nemo,
the name of the sea captain in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea who, as Krakauer (1996) tells us, ‘flees civilization and sev-
ers his…every tie upon the earth’ (pp. 94–95). Nemo, of course, also
means ‘no one’, and as such it functions in much the same way as does
‘Supertramp’, not so much as a name but as a refuge in anonymity.
The second key theme of the foregoing case study—my patient’s dif-
ficulty in managing intimate relationships and a sense of feeling suffo-
cated by them—may not immediately seem to fit with what we know
of McCandless. McCandless, as portrayed in both the book and film
132 D. Hook
versions of Into the Wild, did forge a number of significant if short-lived

relationships. Krakauer (1996) remarks that Chris was ‘Outgoing and
extremely personable when the spirit moved him’, adding furthermore,
that ‘he charmed a lot of folks’ (p. 65) and that ‘He could be generous
and caring to a fault’ (p. 120). Nevertheless, a subsequent—and
undoubtedly astute—observation made by Krakauer puts this apparent
sociability into perspective. He tells of how Ron Franz, a rudderless and
disconsolate old man who had lost his family under tragic circum-
stances, befriended McCandless and subsequently offered to adopt
him. If my hypothesis regards the aversive reaction (the ‘terror of close-
ness’) that McCandless experienced when forced to assume an intimate
symbolic bond is correct, then, such an offer was, unbeknownst to
Franz, a sure-fire way of pushing McCandless away. McCandless,
Krakauer intuits, was uncomfortable with the request and dodged the
question, promising to reconsider it after his Alaskan adventure. Setting
off North, Krakaeur explains,
McCandless was thrilled to be on his way… and he was relieved as well—

relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy,
of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it. He
had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He’d successfully kept
Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg [friends he had met on the road] at arm’s
length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And
now he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well. (Krakauer 1996,
p. 55)
A series of themes come together here: an apparent inability to take a

permanent position within an inter-subjective relationship; the need—
via forms of anonymity and disappearance—to escape society and bypass
symbolic debts and obligations; the over-proximity of the object, that is,
the over-intensity of intimacies that prove impossible to mediate. I barely
need to add that all of these considerations can be understood as difficul-
ties in assuming a symbolic location. The Lacanian insight is that precisely
such difficulties might be considered possible indicators of melancholic
structure.
So rather than approaching the McCandless story in the romantic

terms of a lone spirit breaking out of a meaningless life, we might pause
to consider a different narrative. It may perhaps have been for McCandless,
as it was for my patient, that he found the symbolic and social constraints
of an everyday existence intolerable, hopelessly difficult to manage.
Carine McCandless (2014) implies as much when she declares that rather
than a selfish or irresponsible act, ‘walking into the wild […] was the san-
est thing Chris could have done’.3 A note that McCandless committed to
his journal on February 3, 1991, seems to further corroborate the per-
spective I am developing. Writing in the third person, McCandless
records that Alex [Supertramp] went to Los Angeles ‘to get a ID and a job
but feels extremely uncomfortable in society now and must return to
road immediately’ (cited in Krakauer 1996, p. 37).4
We should also consider an example that may initially appear to refute
my argument about McCandless’s apparent avoidance of symbolic mark-
ing. I have in mind an instance where McCandless gave a gift to his
friend and former employer, Wayne Westerberg, who ran a custom com-
bine crew that McCandless worked with in South Dakota. McCandless
gave Westerberg a treasured 1942 edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. On

the title page he inscribed, ‘Transferred to Wayne Westerberg from
Alexander. October, 1990’. (Krakauer 1996, p. 19)
Now while the giving away of possessions was clearly less of an issue than
receiving gifts for McCandless, this nevertheless seems to contradict my
argument. After all, in this example, McCandless quite emphatically
marks a symbolic transaction. Then again, perhaps this, the overly explicit
marking of the transaction, is itself a clue. This is clearly not the case of a
spontaneously given gift; it resembles rather a quasi-legal exchange pro-
cess (‘Transferred to…’). It is as if for McCandless the exchange of gift
giving brings with it an inherent risk or vulnerability, and that as such the
process needs to be formalized, the symbolic transfer logged in the pro-
tective fashion of a legal contract. Differently put—if one has a solid
grounding in the symbolic, then such transactions are commonplace
phenomena that remain unburdened with weighty meaning or noxious
134 D. Hook
emotional significance. If one’s symbolic position is, by contrast, tenuous

or somehow forestalled, then it stands to reason that one might wish to
restate the symbolic transaction in a definitive (almost didactic) manner,
so as to anchor the gesture, stabilize it, locking it thus into a set of clearly
defined terms.
The last of the themes I foregrounded in the earlier case summary—
the yearning for death—is, admittedly, not apparent in the published
material on McCandless. This, of course, may simply be the point at
which the two cases most sharply diverge.5 And, to make the point
explicit: I see no reason to assume that there was anything overtly or
implicitly suicidal about McCandless’s excursions. It is interesting to
note, however, that Krakauer’s personal investment in the McCandless
story stemmed from his own experiences of mountaineering, where he—
and several others whom he writes about as kindred souls to McCandless—
were fully aware of the mortal risks they were taking. Krakauer (2014)
remarks, furthermore, that ‘When [McCandless] headed off into the
Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land
of milk and honey; peril, adversity and Tolstoyan renunciation were pre-
cisely what he was seeking’ (p. ii).
A consideration of several of McCandless’s final communications
proves suggestive. In the last postcard he sent to Westerberg, McCandless
wrote:
This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne…If this adventure proves fatal[…]
I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild. (p. 69)
A similar note was received by Jan Burres:
This is the last communication you shall receive from me. I now walk out
to live amongst the wild. Take care, it was great knowing you.
We cannot of course know what walking ‘into the wild’ meant for
McCandless, or what broader associations this signifier might have
held—consciously, or unconsciously—for him. Krakauer describes the
period when McCandless first set off on the road, in the following per-
ceptive terms:
At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of

his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material
excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of
existence. Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly
new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered
experience. (pp. 22–23)
This fits well with a brief description McCandless penned of himself in

his journal:
On May 1[…] hit the road again[…] It is the experiences, the memories, the
great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is
found. God it’s great to be alive! (cited in Krakauer, p. 37)
These references to ‘the triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent’, ‘the
raw throb of existence’ and feeling free ‘to wallow in unfiltered experi-
ence’ call to mind our earlier qualification of the Lacanian death drive not
as self-annihilation, but rather as surplus vitality, as libidinal enjoyment,
‘a desperate affirmation of life’ (Lacan 1992, p. 263). They resonate with
Žižek’s description of the death drive as that ‘excess of life[…]which per-
sists beyond[…](biological) life[…][to which] humans are[…]passion-
ately attached’ (Žižek 2006, p. 61).
Perhaps the closest we can come to an approximation of what going
‘into the wild’ meant for McCandless was a third-person declaration he
wrote on a piece of plywood that was found inside the abandoned bus
where his body was eventually discovered:
TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH […] ULTIMATE

FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE
HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU
SHALT NOT RETURN […] AFTER TWO YEARS OF RAMBLING
COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE
CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND
VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDETHE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION[…]
NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZATION HE FLEES,
AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN
THE WILD. ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP MAY 1992. (cited in
Krakauer 1996, p. 163)
136 D. Hook
Consider this declaration in light of the following description of how

certain subjects are, once pervaded by the ‘undead’ animation of the
death drive, driven to escape the bounds of the symbolic:
The death drive […] does not describe literal death, but death within the
symbolic order. After having rejected the symbolic order […] the subject
persists […T]his mode of existence gives form to destruction—death in
form—so that those subjects who come back to life after rejecting the
symbolic universe come back anew; they are no longer the subjects who
were part of the symbolic order […] The subject enjoys being rejected by the
symbolic order, enjoys refusing the enjoyment offered within the symbolic
order […However] the subject does not completely escape the symbolic
order […but] recreates it to satisfy an undying urge to continue […T]he
death drive is obsession with continuation, not death itself […] the death
drive […] is not the cessation of life but its continuation. (Dawkins 2015)
This is a rich passage that contains a series of ideas that helpfully illuminate
the struggle with symbolic marking that both my patient and Christopher
McCandless appear to have experienced, albeit in different ways. We
should note, firstly, that the death drive here is fought not primarily against
the boundaries of life but against the delimiting boundaries of the sym-
bolic order (social symbolic roles, transactions, exchanges, identities, etc.).
In McCandless’s case, one could convincingly argue that ‘into the wild’
signified precisely this, an attempted escape from—or opposition to—a
given societal form of the symbolic order. Secondly, defying the symbolic
gives ‘form to destruction’ for Dawkins (2015) in the sense that such defi-
ant subjects ‘come back to life’, are made anew; it enables new modes of
enjoyment, and an undying urge to continue. The last qualification is cru-
cial: the death drive—and this holds both for my patient’s dangerous sail-
ing expeditions and McCandless’s Alaskan adventure—is not the cessation
of life, but its insistence, beyond the bounds and limits of practicality,
social norms and everyday comforts and expectations. McCandless’s own
words, his reference to ‘ultimate freedom’, to himself as ‘an extremist […]
an aesthetic voyager […] not [to] return’, to ‘the battle to kill the false
being […] and […] conclude the spiritual revolution’ to thus no longer be
‘poisoned by civilization’ (cited in Krakauer 1996, p. 163), given articulate
expression to such an interpretation of the death drive.
Let me refer back once more to Žižek, who offers another crucial qual-
ification regards the Lacanian notion of the death drive:
[W]hat the death drive strives to annihilate is not […the] biological cycle
of generation and corruption, but rather the symbolic order, the order of
the symbolic pact that regulates social exchange and sustains debts, hon-
ours, obligations. The death drive is thus to be conceived against the back-
ground of the opposition between […the] social life of symbolic obligations,
honours, contracts, debts, and its ‘nightly’ obverse, an immortal, indestruc-
tible passion that threatens to dissolve this network of symbolic obliga-
tions. (Žižek 1999, p. 190)
This poses a challenge—indeed, potentially, a corrective—to how we

think the death drive and melancholia alike. As we have seen, the death
drive need not be viewed as a type of suicidal impetus, as a literal yearning
for physical death (although, of course, such features may be clinically
present in melancholic subjects). We need, by contrast, to read annihila-
tion here in a different key, as aimed not merely at the stuff of life, but at
the level of the symbolic trace. Intriguingly then, the Lacanian clinician
should be attentive to a type of higher-order death, to the wish (indeed,
the drive) to destroy, or—less dramatically put—to evade the constraints
of the symbolic pact, to secede from the ‘social life of symbolic obliga-
tions, honours, contracts, debts‘ (Žižek 1999, p. 190). Of course, such
phenomena in and of themselves do not ensure a diagnosis of any sort—
Lacanian diagnostics being based on structural rather than symptomatic
features of a case—and yet they do provide an indication of the presence
of the death drive, and, indeed potentially, as I have suggested previously,
of melancholia.
The preceding discussion of the death drive does point to a useful dif-
ferential diagnostic qualification. Whereas an obsessional neurotic may
act out a given (repressed) conflict, repeatedly sending (an unconscious)
message to the Other, a psychotic melancholic is more likely—applying
here Lacan’s notion of the ‘passage to the act’ (2014)—to suspend any
such performance for the Other preferring simply to act, breaking thus
with the Other altogether. Indeed, building on this: whereas the obses-
sional would likely indulge in indecision, procrastinating vacillation (or
fantasy), the psychotic is often decisive, willing to take the radical step
138 D. Hook
that the obsessional shirks away from. This gives a different inflection to
the diagnostic indicator so often stressed in Lacanian circles: the uncer-
tainty and ambivalence of the obsessional neurotic is to be opposed to the
certainty of the psychotic. This suggests, in turn, that the death drive
might present somewhat differently in cases of obsessionality and neuro-
sis, indeed, the very notion of the passage to the act (more typically char-
acteristic of psychosis) implies a less moderated—unrepressed—relation
to the death drive than is the case in the acting out of the neurotic.
Melancholia as Mode of (a)Sociality?

Given that this discussion of melancholia occurs within the broader con-
text of a psychosocial project, we would be remiss if we were not to raise
the issue of how an alleged melancholic divorce from the social (as dis-
cussed earlier) might exist also in broader societal, ‘sociological’ forms.
Interestingly, although Krakauer’s (1996) Into the Wild has acquired fame
due to its sensitive narrativization of the McCandless case, it engages also
with the broader historical phenomena of young American explorers who
had sought an escape from society by venturing into the wilderness. The
McCandless story can be read, in other words, not merely clinically or
psychoanalytically, but sociologically also (indeed psychosocially).
Krakauer calls our attention to certain communities who have succeeded
in transforming an outsider status into something approaching a rudi-
mentary social bond. The most salient example from his book (also mem-
orably portrayed in the film version) is the Slabs, ‘an old navy air base that
had been abandoned and razed, leaving a grid of empty concrete founda-
tions scattered far and wide across the desert’(Krakauer 1996, p. 43). The
Slabs, Krakauer continues,
functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant,

rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the per-
petually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all
ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the
law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middleclass grind. (Krakauer 1996, p. 43)
Krakauer is clearly of the opinion that the Slabs echoed—at a community

level—McCandless’s own drive to break with the big Other (the sym-
bolic, societal domain) of middle-class expectations, roles and social
mores. His evocative description calls to mind a broader historical trend,
a type of (often self-willed) excommunication from the prevailing sym-
bolic domain:
The community was beyond the fringe, a version of post-apocalypse

America. There were families sheltered in cheap tent trailers, aging hippies
in Day-Glo vans, Charles Manson look-alikes sleeping in rusted-out
Studebakers that hadn’t turned over since Eisenhower was in the White
House. (Krakauer 1996, p. 50)
The instance of self-ostracization embodied by McCandless can be read

as symptomatic of a culture of hyper-connectivity, symptomatic indeed,
of an act of (ethical?) rupture from the tyranny of a networked existence.6
We approach thus the intriguing question of whether such communities
become sites of melancholic detachment from prevailing social norms.
This question is deserving of further consideration in its own right; I
hope to offer just such an investigation elsewhere. Let me however add
one further (and more recent) example, which suggests that there is a
broader sociological dimension to the imperative to go off-grid.
A CNN report of March 2016 describes a group of people living in
rural Montana, who sustain themselves by scavenging meat from bison
carcasses left by hunters. Dubbed ‘the gleaners’, the community is com-
prised largely of people who have ‘left behind their urban lifestyles to
pursue a more natural existence’ (Neild 2016). ‘The gleaners’ are ‘an ad
hoc community of people from different backgrounds and locations who,
in some cases have acquired butchery skills, quit their jobs and moved to
the wilderness’ (Neild 2016). Neild’s report notes—in an interesting echo
with the McCandless case—that many of ‘the gleaners’ have assumed
adopted names so as to distance themselves from the life they grew up in.
There are here, suffice to say, an intriguing number of parallels at the
communal level with what we have seen at the level of melancholic
subjectivity.
140 D. Hook
A Lost Object, After All?

Let me add a closing consideration. It is perhaps not insignificant that
both McCandless and my patient maintained a passionate animosity
toward their parents, and their fathers in particular. It will not have
escaped some readers that such a vitriolic relation of hate—a basis, surely,
for an internalized relation of (super-ego) aggression—is evident in the
stories of both men. Such a hated object might well feature as a key
emblem in a Freudian reading of the melancholic dynamics arguably
apparent in both such cases. Had we more clinical material to work with,
we might have considered whether the difficulties my patient and
McCandless likewise experienced in intimate relationships—a case of the
apparent over-proximity of the excessive object (object a)—may have
stemmed from such early relationships. It may have been such relation-
ships, made properly melancholic by being at first cherished, then lost
and made the basis of hatred and identification, that overshadowed all
other relationships and made them unworkable.7 This was perhaps the
case; it may have been the point of emergence for the ‘unseparated-off
from’ object that exerted such a damaging influence in all other sites of
intimacy.
True as this may have been, my focus here has been to identify a dif-
ferent series of diagnostic markers, to suggest that we need not think of
melancholia only within the parameters of the lost, resented and subse-
quently internalized object, but also according to a different set of ana-
lytical priorities. These analytical and diagnostic priorities concern:
difficulties in processing symbolic exchanges (receiving gifts, being
locked into symbolic obligations or roles); problems in mediating inti-
macy (the terror of closeness, inability to place oneself relative to the
desire of the Other); a yearning for anonymity and disappearance; and
existence within a twilight world beyond the constraints of a given sym-
bolic domain (a place beyond the living, a going ‘into the wild’). Each of
these themes, as I hope is by now clear, represents a mode of the death
drive.
Notes
1. It perhaps helps to add here that this distinction between the Other and
that real object (object a) that is seemingly in them is already apparent in
Freud’s (1917) famous declaration that the melancholic ‘knows whom he
has lost but not what he has lost in him’ (p. 245). In fact, this distinction
of Freud’s was one of the origins of Lacan’s notion of the object a.
2. Eric Hathaway, a university friend of McCandless, recalled that social life
at Emory revolved around fraternities and sororities ‘something Chris
wanted no part of […W]hen everybody started going Greek, he […]
pulled back […] and got more heavily into himself.’ (cited in Krakauer
1996, p. 120). Krakauer (1996) adds to this: ‘McCandless was offered
membership in the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity but declined for the reason
that titles and honours were, he thought, irrelevant’.
3. She has in mind particularly the abusive family situation that she and her
brother grew up in, yet her comments nevertheless fit the psychological
context that I am suggesting.
4. That McCandless chose to write about himself in the third person is also
surely telling. Might it be that he—like my patient—was made uncom-
fortable when his presence was too directly marked or affirmed? Perhaps
the third-person ‘he’ afforded a greater modicum of distance than the
intimacy implied by the first-person ‘I’? Interestingly, it is precisely for this
reason that literary theorist Derek Attridge (2005) argues that author
J.M. Coetzee uses the third person in his autobiographical novels Boyhood
and Youth.
5. There is an important and perhaps definitive difference between the two
cases. My patient wished to retrospectively erase all symbolic traces of his
life. McCandless, by contrast, left a note, signed, significantly, in his own
full name: ‘I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Good-bye and may
God bless all. Christopher Johnson McCandless’.
6. I owe this point to Julie Walsh.
7. Consider the following description of a speech McCandless gave for his
father, as described by his sister, Carine: ‘He was almost crying, fighting
back tears, telling Dad […] he was grateful for all the things Dad had
done for him. Chris said how much he respected Dad for starting from
nothing, working his way through college, busting his ass to support eight
kids. It was a moving speech. Everybody there was all choked up’ (Krakauer
1996, p. 118).
142 D. Hook
References
Attridge, D. (2005). J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Dawkins, S. (2015). Death Drive. http://www.actforlibraries.org/death-drive/
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIV,
pp. 237–258). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIX, pp. 3–66).
Grigg, R. (2015). Melancholia and the Unabandoned Object. In P. Gherovici &
M. Steinkoler (Eds.), Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t (pp. 139–158).
London & New York: Routledge.
Krakauer, J. (1996). Into the Wild. New York: Anchor.
Krakauer, J. (2014). Forward. In C. McCandles (Ed.), The Wild Truth (pp. xi–
xv). New York: HarperOne.
Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. London: W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2014). Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. Trans. From the
French by A.R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Leader, D. (2003). Some Thoughts on Mourning and Melancholia. Journal for
Lacanian Studies, 1, 4–37.
Leader, D. (2007). The New Black. London: Penguin.
Leader, D. (2008). The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression.
London: Penguin.
McCandless, C. (2014). The Wild Truth. New York: HarperOne.
Neild, B. (2016). Bloody, Visceral World of Montana’s Off-Grid Buthers. CNN.
com. Retrieved January 16, 2017, from http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/27/
world/cnnphotos-the-gleaners/
Penn, S. (2007). (Screenplay and Director) Into the Wild. Paramount Pictures.
Verhaeghe, P. (2001). Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive. New York: Other
Press.
Žižek, S. (1999). There Is No Sexual Relationship. In E. Wright & E. Wright
(Eds.), The Žižek Reader (pp. 174–205). London: Blackwell.
Žižek, S. (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Derek Hook is an Associate Professor in Psychology at Duquesne University,

Pittsburgh and a visiting Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria.
He is the author of ‘A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial’, ‘(Post)apartheid
Conditions’ and the forthcoming ‘Lacan and the Psychological’. He received his
psychoanalytic training at the Centre for Freudian Research and Analysis in
London.
6
The Monster in the Mirror: Theoretical
and Clinical Reflections on Primary
Narcissism and Melancholia
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
In his 1914 essay on narcissism, Freud posits an intriguing inability, in

human subjects, to mourn ‘the lost narcissism of [their] childhood in
which [they were their] own ideal.’ ‘As always where the libido is con-
cerned’, Freud explains, ‘man has here again shown himself incapable of
giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo
the narcissistic perfection of his childhood’ (94, italics mine). Something
unmournable therefore seems to preside over human subjectivity from
the outset, something inherent in infantile narcissism, pertaining to a
primary form or state of the ego. This can never be relinquished by the
human psyche, Freud implies, probably because it is constitutive of the
ego itself, premissing, as it were, its very formation.
The ego is not an innate entity, it ‘has to be developed’, Freud tells
us, as opposed to the ‘auto-erotic drives’, which are ‘there from the
very first’ (ibid.: 77). Hence Freud’s ‘introduction’ of narcissism—pri-
mary narcissism more specifically—to account for the shift from the
auto-erotic to the allo-erotic, which underlies the development of the
ego. Freud concedes that, for this primary form of narcissism to arise,
D. Bonnigal-Katz (*)
Leamington Spa, UK

146 D. Bonnigal-Katz
something must be added to auto-eroticism, something he refers to as

‘a new psychical action’.
A ‘new psychical action’—let us briefly go back to Freud’s Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality in order to elucidate what he means by that: ‘At
a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked
with the taking of nourishment’, Freud explains, ‘the sexual drive has a
sexual object outside the infant’s own body in the shape of its mother’s
breast. It is only later that the drive loses that object, just at the time,
perhaps, when the child is able to form a total representation of the person
to whom the organ that is giving it satisfaction belongs. As a rule the
sexual drive then becomes auto-erotic’ (1905: 222). There would be
much to say about this famous and widely discussed section of the Three
Essays. What I would like to foreground here is the hypothesis that it is
‘perhaps’ the perception of the nurturing other/owner of the sexual object
as ‘a total representation’ (Gesamtvorstellung) that couches the advent of
sexuality in its primary state (the sexual drive becomes auto-erotic).1 Let
me specify briefly here that whenever I use the term ‘primary’ throughout
this chapter, it is not to be understood in temporal or developmental
terms. As Lacan remarks, ‘it is not because a process is said to be primary
(…) that it is the first to appear’ (Lacan 1988 [1975]: 56), as Freud’s
distinction between primary and secondary process best evidences.
A combined experience of wholeness and separateness therefore seems
to establish the object as irreversibly lost, entailing the discovery of a
bodily limit beyond which a fully differentiated other is envisioned: such
is the configuration that premises the advent of primary narcissism—a
three-term formula: unamendable loss, endowed totality, bodily border.
Hence, Freud contends, the imperative to restore some form of ‘unity
(…) in the individual’ via the ‘introduction’ of an object likely to bring
together the anarchic dissociated sexual drives (Freud 1914: 77). The
object in question is of course the ego. There’s the ‘new psychical action’:
the logical upshot of the perceived ‘total representation’, its possible
incorporation, as we can infer from Freud’s hypothesis in the Three Essays.
The term ‘incorporation’ is not used casually here; it follows Laplanche
and Pontalis’s apt definition of incorporation as ‘the matrix of introjec-
tion and identification’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967: 212).2 And crucial
to the incorporation of this ‘total representation’/endowed other is the
mediation of visual perception, of the gaze.
6 The Monster in the Mirror: Theoretical and Clinical Reflections... 147
This leads me to discuss the link between narcissism and the ‘scopo-
philic drive’, which Freud posits in Drives and their Vicissitudes3: ‘We have
become accustomed to call the early phase of the development of the ego,
during which its sexual drives find auto-erotic satisfaction, “narcissism”
(…)’ says Freud. ‘It follows that the preliminary stage of the scopophilic
drive, in which the subject’s own body is the object of the scopophilia,
must be classed under narcissism, and that we must describe it as a narcis-
sistic formation’ (Freud 1915: 131–132). The emergence of the ego could
thus be said to coincide with this ‘preliminary stage of the scopophilic
drive’, suggesting that primary narcissism be a primordial vicissitude of
the scopic drive via a ‘turning round upon the subject’s own self ’.4
This brings us to Lacan, of course, and his theorisation of the ‘mirror
stage’ (1949): the paradigmatic moment of identification with a Gestalt
of unity and control, the foundational convergence of self-idealisation
and identification. Lacan’s account of the birth of the ego as the ‘jubilant
assumption’ of a ‘total representation’ resonates with the process of incor-
poration I just discussed. Yet, while it undeniably involves some of the
same components (endowed totality, bodily border), the loss of the object
is significantly obliterated in the specular mirage of omnipotence and
perfection that the child comes to ‘assume’, as Lacan puts it (1966 [1949]:
94 [2007: 76]). This points to the very function of the ego, which is to
restore unity in the individual. This confirms that the ego is the binding
remedy to an original experience of separateness, the first restorative
response to the loss of the object: it is, in short, what is added to auto-
eroticism, to go back to Freud’s argument in his 1914 essay.
But Lacan’s strategic use of the word ‘assumption’ points to yet another
important element that is not featured in Freud’s earlier account. Let us
not forget that Lacan’s choice of words in the Ecrits is always very meticu-
lous.5 Unlike its English translation ‘assumption’, the French term assomp-
tion carries a religious connotation, which is, in fact, dominant in
common usage. In French, assomption primarily refers to the Virgin’s
abduction to Heaven by a group of angels. This reference to the Virgin’s
triumphant rapture is no accident in my view: inscribed in the child’s
foundational specular experience is the ‘jubilant’ possibility of everlasting
maternal plenitude, suggesting a coincidence between the mirage of
omnipotence endorsed by the child and the presumed advent of maternal
bliss. These converging fantasies of infantile omnipotence and maternal

ecstasy thus mobilised in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage point to the
underlying power of the maternal gaze in the advent of the ego as pri-
mary narcissistic formation. It further suggests that the assumption of
infantile omnipotence via identification with the specular image is neces-
sarily relayed, if not elicited by the nurturing adult’s projected (and
unmourned) fantasy of omnipotence. As Freud notices, such mechanisms
of projection partake in the parental ‘compulsion to ascribe every perfec-
tion to the child’: ‘The child (…) shall once more really be the centre and
core of creation’, Freud continues,—‘“His Majesty the Baby,” as we once
fancied ourselves’ (Freud 1914: 89–90).
This leads me back to the unmournable core with which I started this
discussion, this human inability underlined by Freud to mourn the
assumed perfection of our childhood. This is what Freud further theorises
as the ‘ideal ego’, ‘the target of the self-love’ (94), which was once consti-
tutive of infantile narcissism and which elicits, via mechanisms of dis-
placement and projection, the unconscious preservation of a narcissistic
ideal of omnipotence and perfection. Now, even though Freud does not
distinguish between the ideal ego and the ego ideal (he seems to use the
terms rather interchangeably), our reading of his account of primary
narcissism will be strengthened by this important theoretical distinction.
It is in fact Herman Nunberg who formally isolates the ideal ego as an
autonomous entity: ‘The as-yet-unorganised ego which feels as one with
the id corresponds to an ideal condition, and is therefore called the ideal
ego. For the small child, up to the time when he meets with the first oppo-
sition to the gratification of his needs, his own ego is probably the ideal’
(1955 [1932]: 126). Following Daniel Lagache, I would like to stress that
the ideal ego is, in fact, a distinct narcissistic formation in which ‘fantasies
of omnipotence are supported by identification with’ the mother, herself
‘represented as omnipotent’ (1993 [1962]: 852). In contrast with the ego
ideal and the superego both of which are inscribed in triangulated con-
figurations and are thus supported by secondary identifications, the ideal
ego stands as ‘a primary identification’, Lagache specifies, ‘with another
being invested with omnipotence’, foregrounding ‘the syncretic partici-
pation in maternal omnipotence’ (Lagache 1961 [1958]: 42–43). In
other words, the ideal ego dwells in primary conflict.6
This unamendable narcissistic entity (‘an irreducible formation’,

Lagache suggests) is what I would like to refer to as the monster in the
mirror, a complex panoptical formation that arises from the specular con-
vergence of self-idealisation and identification. This convergence is, I
would argue, characteristic of primary narcissism, yielding a persistent
and unmournable narcissistic formation that maternal omnipotence or
plenitude crucially mediates, as Lagache and Lacan respectively suggest.
This mediation not only operates via primary identification, it is also
featured through the active involvement of the idealising maternal gaze
that effectively relays the specular gaze, incidentally sanctioning the fro-
zen perfection of the narcissistic mirage. Like the gaze of the Medusa, the
maternal gaze thus endows the budding subject with petrifying omnipo-
tence, inscribing death, from the outset, as an inherent constituent of
primary love. For let us not forget that the Virgin of this jubilant
Assumption is not the Virgin of the Annunciation, she is the Virgin of
the Pietà: the one for whom the child has been murdered in the name of
the father. This points to another unsettling convergence: embedded in
the fantasy of maternal plenitude that predicates the Gestalt of infantile
omnipotence is the foundational fantasy of the murdered child.
In A Child is Being Killed, Serge Leclaire reminds us that Oedipus is a
close survivor of infanticide.7 Had Oedipus not escaped the death that
his parents wished and actively planned for him, the prophesy would
have remained unfulfilled. Infanticide must therefore be regarded as the
key prologue of the Oedipus story; it is its primary term. Yet, as Leclaire
points out, the focus tends to be on its triangular sequel, its secondary
term (i.e., incest/patricide). But this psychoanalytic bias obliterates the
fact that infanticide is as structural as incest in the making of the human
subject.8 Unconscious infanticidal fantasies seem to derive quite logically
from maternal omnipotence. The omnipotent mother is, by default, a
murderous one.9 If she has the power to give life, she equally has the
power to take it away and primary identification to maternal omnipo-
tence is bound to include some integration of the infanticidal wishes that
the latter embeds.10 To put it plainly, the convergence of self-identification
and self-idealisation seemingly couches a foundational encounter with
the contingency of one’s own death11 via primary identification with and
‘syncretic participation in maternal omnipotence’, tethering death to love
in the frozen perfection of an ideal that is always already lost.12
Clinically speaking, there are many variations in the ways in which this
particular landscape can be featured. Needless to say that a lot can go
wrong in a configuration predicated, at the outset, on combined fantasies
of infanticide and posthumous plenitude. The model of perfection that it
mobilises and sustains—the monster in the mirror—is undeniably not
on the side of life. The subject’s constitutive failure to relinquish it and
mourn its impossibility opens up a rather broad spectrum of clinical situ-
ations ranging from psychosis where the failure of repression inscribes the
infanticidal component in horrifying literality to less chartered categories
of psychic responses that sometimes feature astounding complexity, both
in terms of symptom and structure.
In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to focus on a clinical
profile characterised by its compliance with the distinguishing mental
features listed by Freud in his account of melancholia: ‘a profoundly
painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the
capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-
regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and
self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’
(244). My point is to consider this clinical picture in the light of my dis-
cussion of primary narcissism as ‘syncretic participation in maternal
omnipotence’ with a view to identifying the possible pitfalls that underlie
melancholia.
Looking into Medusa’s Eyes

Psychoanalysis is very good at identifying melancholia. Freud’s clinical
observations on the subject are astute and compelling. The melancholics
who venture into our consulting rooms tend to tick all the boxes, the
clinical picture is perfect. So perfect that it is impervious, leaving psycho-
analysis at a loss when it comes to treatment and technique. The melan-
cholic subject confronts the analyst to the conundrum of untreatability in
a very distinct way. Predominantly women though not exclusively, these
arresting characters have all initially left me with a sense of overwhelming
powerlessness facing the magnitude of their despair and self-destructive
rage. Riveted to my chair, I often felt strangely paralysed, frozen in their
presence, flooded by a formidable excess of excitation, unable to move, to

think. Oddly enough, I never experienced any anxiety but felt literally
petrified by the lethal power of such relentless, unfettered negativity. The
murderous fury that often overcame them changed their faces radically,
turning them into a hideous mask, a monstrous grimace, disfiguring an
otherwise childlike and endearing appearance. Was I looking into the eyes
of the Gorgon? One thing for sure, I could not look away.
The Gorgon is a relevant figure to invoke in this context. In Greek
mythology, the latter refers to a monstrous female creature with hair
made of living venomous snakes and a gaze endowed with the power to
turn anyone who ventures to meet it to stone. Medusa, the most famous
of the three Gorgons, is featured in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (4.770) where
she starts out as a ravishing maiden. Seduced by Poseidon who rapes her
in Athena’s temple, Medusa is punished by Athena who turns her beauti-
ful hair into snakes and her fair face into such a horrifying sight that
those who behold it become petrified. When Freud discusses the Medusa
in his short 1922 text, he does so in the strict context of the castration
complex, focusing on Medusa’s ‘horrifying decapitated head’. ‘The terror
of Medusa’, Freud suggests, ‘is (…) a terror of castration that is linked to
the sight of something’ (273), something pertaining to the ‘horror’ of
female genitals. Yet Freud interestingly notes that the horrific wound of
castration is framed by multiple phallic symbols that serve a dual func-
tion: as restorative substitutes, they provide ‘a mitigation of the horror’
but, by the mere fact of their multiplicity, they also signify castration.13 In
this sense, the paradox of the Gorgon consists in being a phallic symbol
of castration: the monster intriguingly connotes and negates the dual
possibility of having and being the phallus, thus inscribing the dialectics
of having and being in the most enigmatic terms.
However, as French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant points
out (1991), there is a whole other dimension to the Medusa, one that
precedes her beheading by Perseus and inscribes the mythical figure in the
context of warfare where it embodies what the Greeks refer to as lussa, the
murderous fury and rage that some warriors display in combat in order to
induce horror and dread in the enemy.14 This ties the Gorgon to a force of
death that is at once inherent and radically other. Looking into the
Gorgon’s eyes confronts us with this lethal force, one that we bear within
and is returned to us from without via the gaze of a deadly double. To

fully understand this, Vernant stresses, it is important to relocate the
head-to-head encounter with the Medusa in the context of the Greek
theory of vision, which distinguishes between the eye and the gaze and
understands the fundamental impossibility of seeing oneself seeing, which
would be a marker of the irreducible otherness that always lies within.15
Referring to Plato, Vernant explains how looking into the eyes of the
other yields an image (eidolon, both a simulacrum and a double) of our-
selves seeing, reflected as we are in the pupil of the other’s eye. ‘I see
myself ’, Vernant concludes, ‘in the act of seeing, objectified in the other’s
eye, projected and reflected in this eye, as in a mirror reflecting me in my
own eyes’ (297). Yet, just as the eye can never see itself, this eidolon is
always other, always beyond—on the side of Eros when it arises from the
eye of the loved one, on the side of Thanatos when it is found in the eye
of the Medusa.
For the purpose of my argument, I would like to retain both dimen-
sions of the Gorgon as they apply equally to the clinical picture at issue.
Resonating with my earlier discussion of the Oedipus myth, Vernant’s
anthropological reading could in fact be regarded as accounting for the
primary term of the Gorgon myth. A dyadic confrontation with murder-
ous omnipotence via a double endowed with a deadly gaze, it raises the
question of the possibility of existence in the face of an unfathomable
force of death that is at once innate and alien. Conversely, Freud’s psy-
choanalytic reading provides insights into the secondary term of the
myth, in keeping with its focus on the sequence that follows the interven-
tion of Perseus (who significantly uses his shield as a mirror to defeat the
monster). We could argue that Perseus operates as a separating third
term, introducing the question of castration and sexual difference. My
understanding of melancholia is that it features both types of conflict
(primary and secondary) and combines questions of form and existence
and questions of content and identity in distinct and complex ways.
If I may abstract some of my own clinical observations, I would sug-
gest that the melancholic subject is somewhat mired in a dyadic relation
with the omnipotent mother, which makes the possibility of existence
highly precarious at times (primary conflict). The same could of course be
said about the psychotic subject, but, in psychosis, it is the absence of a
third term (foreclosure) that dooms the subject to the unfettered tyranny
of murderous omnipotence and existence is therefore never secured.
There is a third term operating in melancholia, but it is generally charac-
terised by its weakness (inconsistency, intermittent presence, unreliabil-
ity), leading to strategies of over-compensation and idealisation that are
reminiscent of the clinical picture of hysteria. But while the hysteric is
intent on seducing the father in an attempt to expose his weakness under
the guise of establishing his power, the melancholic wrestles with seduc-
tion fantasies directed at the mother—not the mother of secondary con-
flict but the omnipotent mother of primary narcissism. Underlying this,
I would speculate, is the fact that something goes wrong in how the ide-
alising maternal gaze effectively sanctions the narcissistic mirage of whole-
ness that arises from the specular experience. The convergence of
self-idealisation and self-identification posited earlier as constitutive of
primary narcissism is, in this instance, not adequately relayed by the
maternal gaze. The reasons for this are interestingly rooted in secondary
conflict and in the castration complex more specifically: for the majority
of melancholic subjects who have come my way, the certainty that their
gender is at odds with the mother’s desire is almost always part of the
story. Let me illustrate my thought by way of a brief clinical vignette.
Chiara
When I first met Chiara, she was the embodiment of melancholia’s clini-
cal picture. I hasten to add that this proved no help at all. This is a woman
with a broken heart, I thought to myself.
‘Is your heart broken?’, I asked.
‘A thousand and million pieces.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Like they’re sticking needles into it.’
‘The conflict within the ego, which melancholia substitutes for the
struggle over the object’, Freud tells us, ‘must act like a painful wound
which calls for an extraordinarily high anti-cathexis’ (1917 [1915]: 258).
Chiara was a foreigner, not from here, could never fit in. ‘A foreigner like
you!’ she once told me, completely unexpectedly, and she looked at me
very intently. Perhaps an attempt to disrupt the asymmetry of the ana-

lytic situation and as such a possible marker of resistance, granted. Yet her
question also brought to the fore the kind of specularity at work in the
transference, one that radically separates. ‘I am nobody, Who are you?’
Emily Dickenson writes, wonderfully summarising many of my sessions
with Chiara. ‘Are you—Nobody—too?/Then there’s a pair of us!’ I
remember thinking of Perseus on a few occasions, wishing I could get
useful tips from him. Perhaps Athena’s shield would have come in handy
to deflect the horror of not being and mirror the possibility of life back to
us both.
Chiara’s story is that her mother never wanted a girl, she only cared for
boys, for the ‘endowed’ kind. She was not what was hoped for—a bitter
disappointment. Some time later, came a baby brother who almost died
shortly after his birth. But the infant-king survived. As for Chiara,
whether failed girl or failed boy, her mother did not want her. Chiara
came from some country south of here, a country with a warm climate.
‘I like warmer weather’, she once said and it occurred to me that it was
probably the first time that she had ever expressed a positive feeling or
emotion. Coming from her, believe me, this was a ray of sunshine. But I
quickly had to learn that every possible indication of therapeutic efficacy
was generally doomed to destruction and obliteration, always ultimately
reinstating the triumph of persecutory turmoil and negativity. Always
failure in the face of success, as French psychoanalyst Catherine Chabert
points out in her book on melancholia (2003).16 So I stopped holding my
breath. But could there be more to it than the mere victory of negativity?
What was it that Chiara was desperately trying to say in that repeated ‘no’
to the possibility of suffering less? ‘A no that unveils, in the outraged
adult’, as Chabert further suggests, ‘the child lost in a process of infinite
waiting, clinging on to a blind (…) maternal figure whose gaze she does
not ever lose hope of summoning’ (59). But the unveiling of the lost
child also conjures up intolerable fantasies which the increase in suffering
perhaps serves to avert and counter.
Negative therapeutic reaction: Freud interestingly mentions this phe-
nomenon in his essay on masochism (1924), in relation to an unconscious
sense of guilt. ‘The satisfaction of this unconscious sense of guilt’, says
Freud, ‘is perhaps the most powerful bastion in the subject’s (…) gain from
illness’ (166). But in the case of melancholia, this masochistic ‘bastion’ or

defence in the form of moral masochism is a binding mechanism which the
ego can actually rely on. Because, for the rest, the melancholic ego seems
irreversibly crippled in its unifying function, dooming the subject to a sense
of ontological disintegration. The melancholic ego is somehow always
crumbling, as if the identification with the self-idealized totality in the mir-
ror had to be cruelly undone over and over again, and the ego had to be fed
to the monster in the mirror. It is an ugly sight, a heart-breaking one.
But the perverse defence provided by moral masochism, a binding
remedy, undeniably, which, in terms of fantasy could be described as a
shift from the murdered to the beaten child, remains a very dangerous
one: moral masochism is, Freud claims, ‘a classical piece of evidence for
the existence of the fusion of drive. Its danger lies in the fact that it origi-
nates from the death drive and corresponds to the part of that drive which
has escaped being turned outwards as a drive of destruction. But since, on
the other hand, it has the significance of an erotic component, even the
subject’s destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satis-
faction’ (1924: 170). A rather lethal defence therefore because of the pro-
cess of re-sexualisation that it couches. Accounting for the aforementioned
unconscious sense of guilt via a reference to his hypotheses in ‘A Child is
Being Beaten’ (1919; the need for punishment veiling an incestuous wish
for sexual possession by the father), Freud reveals how moral masochism
re-sexualises morality, revives the incestuous wishes and carries out a
‘regression from morality to the Oedipus complex’ (169). Not a very
helpful remedy, sadly, especially since it ‘creates the temptation to per-
form “sinful” actions, which must then be expiated (…). In order to pro-
voke punishment (…), the masochist must (…) act against his own
interests, and must, perhaps, destroy his own existence’ (169). Whenever
the masochistic defence gives in, as it regularly does, a paranoid defence
is sometimes mobilised, leading to persecutory delusions, which signal a
temporary retreat into primary conflict. Back to fearing for one’s life. But
for the melancholic, the dilemma remains the same: ‘either they get me
or I get myself, there is no way out’.
‘What consciousness is aware of in the work of melancholia is thus not
the essential part of it’, Freud argues, ‘nor is it even the part which we
may credit with an influence in bringing the ailment to an end. We see
that the ego debases itself and rages against itself, and we understand as
little as the patient what this can lead to and how it can change. (…) It is
possible for the process in the Ucs. to come to an end, either after the fury
has spent itself or after the object has been abandoned as valueless. We
cannot tell which of these two possibilities is the regular or more usual
one in bringing melancholia to an end, nor what influence this termina-
tion has on the future course of the case’ (257). ‘After the fury has spent
itself’: there’s a helpful tip I had somewhat missed at first. The clinic of
melancholia is no doubt a perilous endgame but, following Freud’s tip, it
is perhaps a good idea to approach it as a waiting game in which one
strives to dispel the pathos, the excitation, despite the magnitude of the
murderous rage, exploring the resources of one’s own passivity so that the
fury may spend itself indeed.
Notes
1. The idea that the sexual drive becomes auto-erotic is especially interesting
for it implies a threefold split involving three distinct sets of pairs: the
drive and its object, desire and need, and the part and the whole. All three
pairs become split and irreconcilably separate. What Freud in fact cap-
tures powerfully in this section of the Three Essays is how sexuality thus
departs from self-preservation and endorses a self-serving logic, a logic
led by fantasy.
2. This is interestingly underscored by the etymology of the word ‘incorpo-
ration’, which includes a key reference to the body. This is also true of the
German word Einverleibung.
3. In the Standard Edition, the German term Trieb is translated as ‘instinct’.
I am deliberately modifying this translation in the present context to
convey the distinction between instinct (Instinkt) and drive (Trieb). On
the subject, see Jean Laplanche’s thorough discussion in ‘Drive and
Instinct: Distinctions, oppositions, supports and intertwinings’ (2011
[2000]: 5–25).
4. A ‘turning round upon the subject’s own self ’ is indeed one of the vicis-
situdes ‘that a drive may undergo’ according to Freud (Freud 1915: 126,
translation modified).
5. See Bruce Fink’s discussion of his choice of ‘to assume’ and ‘assumption’
in his English translation of the Ecrits in the Translator’s endnotes (Lacan
2007: 759).
6. According to Lagache, the ego-ideal and the superego, on the other
hand, involve another pole of identification and are thus inscribed in
triangulated configurations, implying the mediation of a third term; in
other words, they are supported by processes of secondary identification.
7. In the myth of Oedipus, the queen and the king of Thebes (Lauis and
Jocasta) order that their son be killed (by infant exposure, a common
practice in Ancient Greece) to avert the fulfillment of a prophesy—the
very prophesy that Oedipus eventually fulfills. Oedipus is saved by the
compassion of his executioner and entrusted to a childless couple
unaware of his true identity.
8. While the Oedipus complex is primarily predicated on the failure of
infanticide, we could argue that its success conversely bars the access to
the triangular sequel, as psychosis compellingly illustrates. Psychosis can
indeed be seen as a prime illustration of the kind of psychic murder that
forecloses subjectivity, dooming the subject to the unfettered tyranny of
the monster in the mirror. Brett Kahr interestingly develops the notion
of ‘infanticidal attachment’ when discussing the aetiology of psychosis.
This kind of attachment, Kahr affirms, must ‘contain one or more spe-
cific experiences of deadliness that would have made the infant fear for
his or her life on one or more occasions’ (2007: 129). Because my pre-
ferred focus is not aetiological but phenomenological, I would suggest
that, in the psychotic experience, the parent’s infanticidal wish tends to
be endowed with distinct literality, regardless of the ‘actuality’ of the
wish itself. In this sense, infanticide is featured in every possible attach-
ment style—secure and insecure alike—and its literal inscription in psy-
chosis fundamentally signals, in my view, the impairment of the
mechanisms of secondary repression.
9. In the psychotic experience, this murderousness is often conveyed by
terrifying accounts of infanticidal mothers actually threatening the life of
individuals. Knives and sharp objects are weapons of choice significantly,
inscribing the pivotal figure of the omnipotent phallic mother in very
legible fashion. Due to the failure of repression, the parent’s murderous-
ness comes through as literal.
10. Serge Leclaire furthers this discussion by positing the murder of the ‘won-
derful child’, the ‘tyrannical representation of the infant-king’ (the ‘core
and centre of creation’) as ‘the most “primal” of all fantasies’ (Leclaire
1998 [1975]: 5) and as a pivotal stake in the analytic process. ‘There is for
all of us, always, a child to kill’, Leclaire continues. ‘The loss of a represen-
tation of plenitude, of motionless jouissance must be relentlessly mourned
and mourned again. A light must be eclipsed so it can shine and spread
out on a background of darkness’ (…) ‘I’ begin at that moment, already
subjected to the inexorable second death—the other one, the one of
which there is nothing to say’ (ibid.).
11. The question of suicidality definitely resonates with this formula, as clin-
ical observation amply confirms.
12. In metapsychological terms, this could be a chance to briefly locate the
death drive in the complex landscape of primary narcissism, something
Freud himself never explicitly does. In fact, as André Green points out,
Freud never really considers ‘possible relationships between narcissism
and the death drive’ however close he might have come to discovering
them (2002: 636). There is some kind of hiatus in the Freudian corpus
between the 1914 theorisation of narcissism (featuring the opposition
between narcissistic libido and object-libido) and the post-1920 theory
of the drives (featuring the opposition between life drives or Eros and
death drives via mechanisms of fusion and defusion). This leads Green to
develop a ‘dual conception of narcissism’ likely to be mapped onto the
irreducible dualism of life and death drives, opposing a ‘positive narcis-
sism, whose aim is to reach unity, a narcissism aiming at oneness’ and a
‘negative narcissism, which strives toward the zero level, aiming at noth-
ingness and moving toward psychic death’ (637). Negative narcissism is
thus at the service of the death drive, seeking defusion and dissolution
and striving for a return to some inanimate and inorganic state. Green’s
dual view of narcissism resonates fruitfully with primary narcissism and
its constitutive ‘assumption’ of omnipotence. We see how the subject’s
primary identification with an inanimate mirage of unified perfection
can give way to both life and death narcissism. Along the same lines, it is
worth mentioning the work of Francis Pasche who opposes narcissism
and anti-narcissism (1965).
13. Anticipating some of his forthcoming insights into fetishism (1927),
Freud understands that the hair surrounding the horrific wound has an
alleviating function, like the snake-like hair on the head of the Medusa.
The same logic applies to Medusa’s petrifying gaze, according to Freud:
the stiffness induced by the gaze is equally restorative, offering ‘consola-
tion to the spectator’. From this, Freud draws the ‘technical rule accord-
ing to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration’ (273).
14. This is the context in which Vernant reads Medusa’s snake-like hair,
which, along with the monster’s horrifying grimace, contributes to the
desired effect. ‘What is being “staged”’, Vernant suggests, ‘is not virility,
the male sex in general, but this very specific form of masculine behav-
iour peculiar to the warrior when possessed with a force of death that
likens him to a “rabid” wolf or dog’ (294).
15. This naturally brings to mind Lacan’s discussion of ‘the gaze as object a’
in Seminar XI (1964).
16. Chabert’s observation is made with reference to Freud’s text ‘Some
Character-Types Met in Psycho-Analytic Work’ (1916).
References
Chabert, C. (2003). Féminin Mélancolique. Paris: PUF.
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Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. SE, XIV, 67–104.
Freud, S. (1915). Instincts and Their Vicissitudes. SE, XIV, 109–140.
Freud, S. (1916). Some Character-Types Met in Psycho-Analytic Work. SE,
XIV, 309–333.
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Origin of Sexual Perversions. SE, XVII, 175–204.
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Freud, S. (1924). The Economic Problem of Masochism. SE, XIX, 155–170.
Freud, S. (1927). Fetishism. SE, XXI, 147–158.
Green, A. (2002). A Dual Conception of Narcissism: Positive and Negative
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1966, 93–100. English Translation: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I
Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. Ecrits, Trans. B. Fink.
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psychanalyse (p. 1990). Paris: Seuil.
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Translation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. On Feminine Sexuality: The
Limits of Love and Knowledge. Trans. B. Fink. New York: Norton & Co., 1998.
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New York: Norton & Co.
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Agressivité, structure de la personnalité et autres travaux: Oeuvres IV
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(Ed.). London: Karnac Books.
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Intertwinings. Freud and the Sexual (pp. 5–25). New York: International
Psychoanalytic Books, 2011.
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Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst and a translator. She is a member

of the SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and one of the editors of Sitegeist:
A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. She is the founder of the Psychosis
Therapy Project. She has translated a number of psychoanalytic works including
Dominique Scarfone’s Laplanche: An Introduction (2015) and she translates for
the International Journal of Psychoanalysis on a regular basis.
7
Shame, Pain and Melancholia
for the Australian Constitution
Juliet B. Rogers
There is much that is particular to Australia’s history that allows us to

employ psychoanalytic frameworks in respect of its constitution (Rogers
2017). Whereas some nations will reference the days before their consti-
tution—South Africa, Italy or perhaps even the United States—the
Australian Constitution enshrines an ‘Australia’ that existed only as sup-
posedly terra nullius [empty land] before settlement and the practice of
nationhood. That is, Australia ‘before’ is an Australia that only existed
‘after’ colonisation. Any reference to a prior Australia necessarily refers to
the timeliness of law, a timeliness in which law came to manage the vio-
lence and savagery of a supposedly untamed land. As Dorsett and
This work forms part of an ongoing conversation and publication with Prof Mark McMillan. So
much of this thinking would not have been possible without his generosity and insights. The
research is also made possible by funding by the Australian Research Council on two intersecting
projects DE120102304 and DP130101399, which analyse the quality of remorse and the
practices of resistances, recognition and reconciliation in Australia, South Africa and Northern
Ireland. I thank my colleagues on these projects.
J.B. Rogers (*)

School of Political Sciences, University of Melbourne,
Parkville, VIC, Australia

162 J.B. Rogers
McVeigh note: ‘[the lawing of Australia] has been understood as setting

order against chaos, and justice against violence’ (2002, 291). Australia
apparently needed law because it had none; what was being confronted
was ‘chaos’ and ‘violence’. When the British authorities stated that the
colonisers bring ‘as much of the common law as is applicable to the cir-
cumstances of the colony’ (Mabo 1992),1 they indicated both the author-
ity of their jurisdiction—in terms of their authority to assert law—and
they indicated that law would certainly be needed in the coloniser’s cir-
cumstances. Australia required order over chaos. The fiction of terra nul-
lius, which enabled the legitimation of the ‘settlement’ of Australia, thus
operates as more than a legitimation of invasion, but also as a gesture to
the abyss: the emptiness that needs to be covered up by the language of
the law. A language, like any symbol in the psychoanalytic work of Jacques
Lacan, which both covers the lack and gestures to it.
The abyss of law in Australia was, and remains, a fantasy, however.
Australia was far from terra nullius, as is now well documented (Pascoe
2014; Reynolds 1972; Watson 2014), and the colonisers were well aware
of the presence of Indigenous people. What came to be the ‘law of the
land’ (Dorsett and McVeigh 2012) was laid carefully and brutally over
the bodies of Indigenous people: killed, starved, enslaved and massacred
to ensure its legitimacy (Daley 2017; Rush 1997; Watson 2014). In 1901,
the Australian Constitution was instantiated to legitimate the land called
Australia as ‘Australia’. By 1901, the chaos of Australia was represented as
having been mastered as the ‘savages’ were supposedly dying out.2 It was
instantiated in spite of the killings; the genocide that was necessary to
present it as legitimate.3 The colonisers and the law had triumphed over
the harshness of the climate and its inhabitants, and all that was left to do
was ‘smooth the dying pillow’ of the ‘Indigenous race’.4
The constitution, once enshrined as such, was more than a legal docu-
ment ripe for re-negotiation and re-writing: it was order, protection, a
reference for authority, and a location for a kind of paternal transference.5
This paternal transference is enabled through not only the ordinary idea
that law evokes a fantasy of the site of justice,6 but through the enhanced
capacity of law’s perceived foundations to emanate a mastery beyond the
capacities of ordinary men; or, we might say, a mastery before ordinary
men (in the mode of ‘Founding Fathers’ in the United States). And
7 Shame, Pain and Melancholia for the Australian Constitution 163
Australia has its own image of founding fathers. The transcendental

authority of British Law—the mysteries of which are distilled and then
diluted to speak to the land of Australia—sit above the people of Australia
and cast law into the emptiness, to relieve the chaos and protect His (and
then Her) Majesty’s subjects from violence. The constitution collates this
authority and renders it doubly paternal through its historical authority,
and through the fact that it requires a referendum to alter its language.
The collation of the authority of law and paternity, once rendered as the
Australian Constitution, is, I argue, aggressively melancholic, in that its
very presence suggests a return the ‘Good’ nation that never had to slaugh-
ter or disenfranchise Indigenous people in order to establish its authority.
This is a return not only to the Good that ‘it could be’, but to a Good that
is fantasised aggressively as always existing in the mode of the melancholic
who has lost the good object. The Australian Constitution plays a founda-
tional role in framing the lost object of Australia. The constitution is the
only space from which the potential sanction of knowledge about a good
Australia emanates, and, consequently, it both signifies and enables a kind
of cover-up: a cover-up that can ameliorate the shame of the past genocide
perpetrated against Indigenous people. I argue that by having knowledge
of what Australia is, and having a constitution that declares it to be so, the
non-indigenous Australian subject can feel there is nothing to be ashamed
of. But this shamelessness, I suggest, cannot last.
In this chapter, I consider the recent attempts in Australia to ‘recog-
nise’ Indigenous people in the changing of the Australian Constitution
and the particular work of what has been termed the ‘Black Process’,
rupturing the melancholic attachment of non-indigenous Australians to
the constitution. The Black Process is the term coined by several
Indigenous leaders who have demanded that any change to the constitu-
tion is a product of a consultation with Indigenous communities and
their representatives.7 This process, I suggest, is precisely what gestures to
a time before colonisation and certainly before the existence of the con-
stitution, and in so doing, it points to the impossible legitimacy and
authority of the constitution itself. The Black Process should be a great
source of shame to non-indigenous Australians precisely because it
exposes an Indigenous politics, a nationhood and a legal system that
existed prior to what Rowse describes as ‘the ongoing colonial encounter
164 J.B. Rogers
called “Australia”’ (1993, 129). It demands that non-indigenous

Australians must wrangle with the legitimacy of their own laws and hence
their own existence as Australians who claim this identity despite the
genocide that enabled it. Thus, shame, we could say, is crucial. As
Raimond Gaita says:
Shame is as necessary for the lucid acknowledgment by Australians of the

wrongs the Aborigines suffered at the hands of their political ancestors, and
to the wrongs they continue to suffer, as pain is to mourning. It is not an
optional emotional addition to the recognition of the meaning of their
dispossession. It is, I believe, the form of that recognition. (Gaita 2000,
91–92)
In this chapter, I ask what is shame’s relationship to an acknowledgment

of Indigenous people? How might shame work in relation to changing
the Australian Constitution? And why does non-indigenous Australia not
feel shame at this time? I propose that the non-experience of shame per-
sists, in part, because the Australian Constitution fulfils a melancholic
function for non-indigenous Australians, and in so doing it covers over a
terrible history that can only be reckoned with slowly and painfully.
Imagined Australia
In 1992, discussion began in non-indigenous Australia on the topic of
changing the constitution to reflect the existence of Indigenous people. By
1999, the discussion had effectively ended with the ‘No’ vote in the ref-
erendum on the possible move to a republic. In 2011, it was revisited
again. An expert panel of Indigenous and non-indigenous leaders, schol-
ars, activists and politicians researched the constitution and its contexts
and recommended changes to be applied in 2013.8 The debates were
technical, tentative and involved legal considerations on, for example,
whether the use of the terms ‘the peoples’ as opposed to ‘the people’
would offer Indigenous people legal standing (and therefore potentially
sovereignty) as a group of nations.9 Ultimately, however, when the rec-
ommendations were delivered, it was concluded that the Australian
ublic was not ready for constitutional change.10 To address ongoing con-
p
cerns about recognising the existence of Australia’s Indigenous people,
the Act of Recognition was passed as law in 2013. The supposed unreadi-
ness of Australia for constitutional recognition and reform is reflected in
the Act of Recognition, which specifically notes the working towards
Australian (non-indigenous) ‘readiness’. This work was to be pursued
with vigor and commitment, enhanced by the unusual fact that the Act
had a sunset clause and an urgent note—that the Act ceases to have effect
two years after its commencement (on March 27, 2013). After these two
years, the Act legislated that a review of the ‘readiness’ of the Australian
public must be undertaken to consider proposals for constitutional
change.
While recognition of Indigenous people as ‘Peoples’, or rather as a
group of nations, had been withheld for more than 220 years, the Act
dictated that something needed to happen, and that it needed to happen
quickly in political terms. The pressure for something to happen in
respect to ‘recognition’ worked upon Australia in several ways that relate
to processes of mourning and the management of pain, as I will discuss
later. Additionally, the time limit certainly added pressure to have, in
South African anti-apartheid parlance, ‘talks about talks’.11 After the pro-
cesses on ‘recognition’ seemed to stall, or be marred by political in-
fighting and uncertainty over what it was that was being ‘recognised’, in
July 2015, Indigenous leaders wrote to then Prime Minister Tony Abbott
to say they wanted to advise on the terms of the changes to the constitu-
tion. They wanted to consult with the wider black communities and
develop a change that would reflect what Indigenous people wanted
(Robinson 2015). Abbott refused to support what was specifically called
by that time ‘the Black Process’. Instead, the commentary emanating
from the Abbott government favored what they called, in turn, an
‘Australian process’.
The distinction between an ‘Australian process’ and a Black Process is
significant in a number of ways. Most obviously, the request itself for
recognition of a Black Process suggests that Indigenous people (some but
perhaps not all) felt that such a process was significantly different from an
Australian process—specifically, that a process for Australia may not
reflect the interests, ideas, knowledge or desires of Indigenous people and
166 J.B. Rogers
Indigenous nations. As celebrated Indigenous journalist Stan Grant

stated recently ‘I am not an Australian or more precisely I don’t feel
Australian. I am not alone among my people in feeling this way’ (2015).
The experience of feeling Australian, or not, also has its roots in a political,
legal and popular culture idea of the nation and what it is to be ‘Australian’.
Such ideas are enshrined in iconography that speaks to land and law, such
as that of Dorothea McKellar’s famously nostalgic poem ‘My Country’
quoted often by non-indigenous Australians to describe their fondness
for the ‘sunburnt country’. But as Grant notes:
The sweeping plains and rugged mountain ranges of Dorothea Mackellar’s

imagination were also places of death for our people. We were stricken by
disease on those plains. We were herded over those mountains. (Grant 2015)
What this expresses is an experience of difference at the level of belong-

ing, and of feeling Australian.
Feeling Australia
The perception of nation as a place, which reflects identity, is at stake in
the idea of feeling Australian and in the possibility of rewriting of the
constitution. The nation is, of course, a fantasy in both the psychoana-
lytic and the Disney sense. It is imagined, in Benedict Anderson’s terms,
like any other nation (Anderson 1983). It has moments of what Anderson
calls ‘communion’ over an ‘Australian way of life’ or indeed over the exis-
tence of Australian borders and Australian values.12 However, it is imag-
ined over and above the existence of, let us call it, reality—a reality that is
embodied in the existence of a Black Process. Indigenous people in
Australia exist as inhabitants and owners of a group of nations, the names
of which do not resemble the word ‘Australia’. Further, the lawful rela-
tions practiced within these nations are largely incompatible with the law
that currently governs the inhabitants of Australia, whether Indigenous
or not (Black 2011; Pascoe 2014; Patton 2000; Reynolds 1972; Watson
2014; Wolfe 2014). Additionally, the land called Australia resembles only
partly what the British invaders expected would result after generations
of settlement: a land largely populated by agriculture and arrogance. It is

less white than it should have been,13 with one half of Australia’s popula-
tion being born or having parents born overseas14 and with an increasing
amount of students and immigrants coming from Asia, and an increasing
number of specialised businesses catering for the student and migrating
populations from Asia. It is because of these responses to migration and
because of migration itself that the chant ‘it just doesn’t look like Australia
anymore’ is reiterated ad nauseum by white Australians.15
That Australia doesn’t look like Australia is a chant; and it is also an
authority to chant. That is, it is authority-as-identity that is passed to suc-
ceeding waves of migrants in Australia. Many Vietnamese settling, ini-
tially, as refugees from the Vietnam war—and then joined by their
families—make up a substantial population of the inner-city suburbs of
Sydney and Melbourne. They were initially vilified and treated poorly,
not only by ‘white’ Australians,16 but also by the Greek and Italian
migrants of the 1940s and 1950s; and later by the Lebanese, Turkish and
South American migrants of the 1970s, many of whom had endured the
blunter but no less derisive ends of the White Australia Policy, which
encouraged Northern European migration and discouraged, at least ini-
tially, the swarthy migrants of the Mediterranean. The swarthy migrants,
however, feel whiter and whiter, until they too are able to say ‘it just
doesn’t look like Australia anymore’ (Hage 1998). Indeed, to know (to
possess the knowledge of) what Australia ‘looks like’, is to be and certainly to
feel Australian.
The statistical picture of the presence of Indigenous people is mathe-
matically baffling for a moment, but crucial to recognising what Australia
looks like, or, more properly perhaps, to the idea of what Australia used to
look like but supposedly no longer resembles: in other words, White.
Almost 60 percent of the Northern Territory population are Indigenous,
but most Indigenous people live in the southeastern urban centres known
as Sydney and Melbourne.17 To acknowledge the complexity of the sta-
tistical and affective picture and its obvious disjuncture with what
Australia looks like is to describe the level of pre-emptive redaction in the
idea of a constitution uninformed by a Black Process (if not the pre-
emptive redaction, which can be said to be the assertion of an Australian
Constitution itself in 1901). It is the image of a ‘white’ Australia that has
168 J.B. Rogers
been mobilised in order to present the Disney-like fantasy of an ‘Australian

consultation’ as opposed to a Black Process. And it is through the contor-
tion, which accompanies any idea of a cohesive ‘Australia’, that we wit-
ness the first compartmentalisation of shame from recognition, or, in
Gaita’s helpful terms, we witness the extraction of pain from mourning.
Defending Against Loss

Through the idea that any Australian Constitution must reflect a Black
Process, something gets lost in the imagination of non-indigenous
Australians. As the nation that is imagined (supposedly before migrants
arrived, or Indigenous people asked for a Black Process) is threatened by
the fact of non-resemblance—or, in the same vein, as the nation becomes
threatened by the questions of its reality, and indeed of the moral and legal
legitimacy of its politico-social existence—there are those who defend it
violently. These are the extremists such as the Australian Defense League
who comfortably exercise racist violence. In Hages’ analysis, such violent
practices ‘assume, first, an image of a national space; secondly, the image
of the nationalist himself or herself as master of this nationalist space and,
thirdly, an image of the “ethnic racial other” as a mere object within this
space’ (1998, 28). Those who exercise racist violence are thus those who
demand the fantasy of the nation, its ‘image’, fits the symbol, the poem,
the anthem, the law—or at least their reading of it. These same people
then determine the others who are ‘objects’ who do not fit. Such practices
‘cannot be conceived without an idealized image of what this national
spatial background ought to be like’ (Hage 1998, 39, his emphasis).
The idea of what the nation is and what it ‘ought to be like’ is not
exclusively the terrain of violent nationalists. This idealised nation also
accompanies more so-called progressive ideas of the nation emanating
from people who might politically describe themselves as ‘left-leaning’.
As Paul Muldoon has pointed out, even for the left-leaning progressive,
who believes the nation/the government should be responsible for its
past, the nation is still a coherent and definitive ideal—even if it is dis-
obedient and/or disappointing (2017). That is, the idea of a nation with
a definitive image remains present in the more left-leaning demands for
an apology to Indigenous people. Sara Ahmed makes a similar point

about the Sorry Books in Australia: the books that document commen-
tary on what it is to be an Australian (2004).18 Ahmed suggest that com-
mentary in these books from well-meaning non-indigenous people is still
organised through an idea of a ‘we’ that should apologise, an Australian
‘we’ that perpetuates the omission of Indigenous people (2004, 110–113).
In the apologising and the request for an apology from the Australian
government, Ahmed argues, national ‘pride’ is returned to the ‘we’ of
Australia, and in this she means the non-indigenous ‘we’ who see them-
selves as good Australians (113).
To say that the Australian government should apologise, to say that land
should be given back, is to evoke a moral landscape: a ‘goodness’ that
applies to the image of an Australia to which ‘we’ all belong. In Ahmed’s
terms, it is, in fact, the very feeling of shame as an Australian that unites
the nation in its idealised form. And this is because shame comes from a
sense of being seen, or exposed before an idealised other. Ahmed pre-
sciently shows how idealisation works across two registers that are crucial
to understanding resistances to the Black Process in Australia: ‘on the one
hand, the idealisation of another is presumed if the other’s look matters to
me. At the same time it is “an ideal” that binds me to another who might
be assumed to be “with me” as well as “like me” (sharing my ideals)’
(2004, 106). Indeed, the danger of saying that ‘there should be a Black
Process’ is the potential implication that the Australian nation is good: ‘we
are good’ because we are inclusive. This too is an idea of what the nation
is, or should be, that collates ideas of its identity and what it looks like, or
should look like. An actual Black Process, however, confronting constitu-
tional change, is one that may undermine the very notion of an ‘Australian
process’; and the ideal of who ‘we’ are, the ideal of what an Australia is—
white, just, or free—comes under threat. It fragments the national image,
good or bad, and instead evokes the statistics, the deaths, and the black
voices that have been meaningfully and affectively disavowed.
The Black Process demands particular attention to the question of
Australia. Or we might say the idea that Indigenous people are both capa-
ble of an organised, political and lawful process of consultation amongst
themselves, suggests there is another nation (or nations) at work, which,
perhaps, have never looked like ‘Australia’. And this work, in a very obvious
170 J.B. Rogers
sense, undermines the precise image of the Australian nation qua ‘Australia’.
This recognition would involve a loss—a loss to identity, to place, and,
above all, to feeling. It would be recognition of the loss of an identity forged
in the fantasies of a present and a past. This loss would be painful, excruci-
atingly so, and as such it must be mourned in order to allow for a new
recognition of what the ‘sunburnt country’, its policies and it practices, are;
as well as, historically speaking, what they have done.
However, what I suggest has occurred instead of a genuine recognition
of a Black Process is a melancholic resistance. A wish for the idealised lost
object’s return (a good ‘Australia’), and a holding of this object aloft in the
gaze of the melancholic. In Freud’s terms, I will suggest that a ‘hallucina-
tory wishful psychosis’ (1917, 244) occurs as a practice of knowing and
of imagining oneself as knowing—as being in the state of possessing knowl-
edge; and this knowing is achieved, I suggest, through a melancholic rela-
tion not just to its nation, but to its symbolic legal representative, the
Australian Constitution.
Melancholia for the Good Constitution

Although the statistics suggest that overwhelmingly non-indigenous
Australians are in favour of some form of constitutional change that rec-
ognizes the existence of Indigenous people in Australia, there is little
political energy in this direction.19 What I am concerned with here is a
melancholia that produces a disinclination to act toward constitutional
change because of the possibility that it might disrupt the foundations of
one’s identity. The symptoms of this melancholia are couched in the
terms of Australians not being ready. As the Act of Recognition states:
1. The Minister must cause a review to commence within 12 months

after the commencement of this Act.
2. Those undertaking the review must:
(a) consider the readiness of the Australian public to support a refer-

endum to amend the Constitution to recognise Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples;
And in the final words of the Act there is a sunset provision.
Note: The 2 year sunset period in this section will provide Parliament and
the Australian people with a date by which to consider further the
readiness of Australians to approve a referendum to amend the
Constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
(Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Act 2013, At
4.1 and 2).
Crucially, this Act was passed in 2013, the same year that the Expert
Panel on constitutional change had stated that the change needed to
occur. The unreadiness of the Australian population was clearly observed
in the two years of the sitting of the Expert Panel—and, certainly in the
225 years before that; but as I write, five years after the Expert Panel, it
seems that non-indigenous Australians are still not ready!
On the one hand, we can say that asserting that the ‘Australian public’
are not ready for change is a political convenience. No prime minister
wants to shepherd a failed referendum, and no prime minister wants to
push an unpopular idea. On the other hand, we can note that this
unreadiness is hardly being challenged; it is barely raising concern
amongst non-indigenous Australians, even those on the left who were so
passionate about the need for an apology.20 And yet the fact remains that
the constitution does not reflect the existence of Indigenous people as the
people of Australia; indeed it enshrines this non-recognition as a recogni-
tion of Indigenous people as requiring special law, akin to those required
by animals and plants. As Stan Grant has noted, ‘The Australian
Constitution does not recognize us. Provisions in that same document
have meant that our children have been taken away; our homes could be
invaded; our privacy ignored’ (2015). Given this state of affairs, why are
non-indigenous people not shouting from the rooftops for change? Why
are they not screaming and stomping, or, at least, petitioning? In short,
why aren’t they ashamed?
Shame, in the psychoanalytic terms of Jacques Lacan, is felt at the
point of the subject’s orientation to an unknown.21 The unknown is cru-
cially experienced at the point of a belief in the having of knowledge and
in the face of the Other seeing that this ‘having’ is not the case. In other
words, shame appears where the subject thinks he is being seen by another
in a compromising position; when he is exposed. The exposure—in psy-
choanalysis—is classically represented as an exposure of the genitals
172 J.B. Rogers
because it is those features of the body—unaesthetic, unhygienic and so

on—that most undermine the identity of the subject in its perception of
itself. Shame is a metaphor for ‘the cover up’ that the subject perpetuates
against the Other; the Other who, supposedly, sees all.
That shame usually appears in a visceral way—through blushing,
cringing or even a kind of agony22—is deeply relevant to our discussion
here. Shame overcomes the subject for a moment. It is experienced in the
flesh, then it passes, only to appear again upon the point of the memory
of exposure. In Ahmed’s terms: ‘I remember an action that I committed
and burn with shame in the present, insofar as my memory is a memory
of myself ’ (2004, 106). If the cover up can be maintained, however, and
the gaze, from which one’s identity is sanctioned, can be orientated
toward the subject (as master of knowledge), and if one imagines one is
all for the Other, then the exposure will not occur—or rather the shame
will not occur. And the crucial element here is the figure or location from
which one’s identity is sanctioned. That figure, in Lacanian terms, articu-
lated by Jacques-Alain Miller is the (imagined) ‘Other prior to the Other’
(2006, 14): the Other who does not accuse me of not knowing, but,
rather, who places and secures me in the world. For the terms of my argu-
ment, it is the Australian Constitution as configured by a melancholic,
non-indigenous ‘Australian public’ that performs the role of this sanc-
tioning Other.
The ‘Australian public’s’ unreadiness, I suggest, is the product of the
imagined loss of an old Australia. For the conservative, this is the Australia
that ‘doesn’t look like Australia anymore’; for the left-leaning progressive,
it is the Australia that should be apologised for. In this sense, the loss is of
an ideal Australia, and for both sides this is embodied in a constitution
that sanctions the nation. But, as I will explain, this same constitution
turns the process of ordinary mourning or valediction for an Australia
that no longer exists into a state of melancholia.
Melancholia, in Freudian terms, is an affect that stagnates around a
loss (1917). The loss and its accompanying affects turns the lost person,
home, or thing into an object. That is, it reduces it to something that is
lifeless or only has a life within the remembered parameters of the one
who has lost. The object itself, which was not originally an object at all
but in fact a subject with life and unknown (and unknowable) qualities,
becomes sapped of life in its status as a lost object. To say that it is sapped
of life is not to say that it is dead, although this may also be true. It is to
say that the thing—when it becomes an object—has no more life for the
one enduring the loss. Or, that it is known, completely. In Lacanian
terms, to turn life into an object is the reduction of any contestability of
the object to the point where ‘tension is maintained at its lowest level’
(2007, 16). Tension insists when one is unsure about the exact reference
points of a thing. Tension is reduced when the uncertain determinations
of an object are denied, limited or eradicated; when the thing that once
existed in a world of ordinary uncertainty is now deprived of these
uncertainties and only imagined as having one fundamental meaning; or,
we might say, is imagined only to have existed in the terms of the
melancholic.
As Freud describes melancholia, ‘[it] borrows some of its features from
mourning, and the others from the process of regression from narcissistic
object-choice to narcissism.’ (1914, 250). Narcissism, if we recall Ovid’s
tale, is the reduction of life to only what one sees in the mirror, or of only
what is reflected in the assertive parameters of the viewer.
he has, on the one hand, substituted for real objects imaginary ones from
his memory, or has mixed the latter with the former; and on the other hand,
he has renounced the initiation of motor activities for the attainment of his
aims in connection with those objects….The libido that has been with-
drawn from the external world and has been directed to the ego and thus
gives rise to an attitude that may be called narcissism. (Freud 1914, 74–75)
And Narcissus, of course, reduced his life to death through the refusal to
disturb what he saw in the mirror (the pool); a refusal that covered over
any actual disturbances. One of these disturbances, in the narcissistic
image of the nation, is of course, the Black Process, which carries the sug-
gestion that the nation called ‘Australia’ is constituted by more than those
who might feel Australian. As Freud says, in a condition of melancholia ‘a
turning away from reality takes place’ and what is seen is only that which
does not disturb the ‘reality’ of the viewer (1917, 244).
174 J.B. Rogers
Lacan says something similar about the relation to the ‘good’ ‘assumed
to be the Good only if it presents itself …in spite of all objects that would
put conditions upon it’ (2006, 646). The orientation of the melancholic
to the ‘good’, which has no conditions upon it, is precisely, I suggest, why
melancholics do not feel shame. As Freud says of the melancholic:
the melancholic does not behave in quite the same way as the person who
is crushed by remorse and self-reproach in a normal fashion. Feelings of
shame in front of other people, which would more than anything charac-
terise this latter condition are lacking in the melancholic, or at least they
are not prominent in him. (1917, 247)
And why not? Because, simply put, they have positioned the lost one as
the quintessential good, and it is only in the tractor of the gaze of the
perfect lost object that they reference their identity: the melancholic’s
identity is all for the lost object. To explain this we can employ some
Lacanian thinking on shame. Shame is what Miller describes, ‘a primary
affect in relation to the Other’ (2006, 13). To say that shame is a primary
affect is to say that it is primary in relation to what Miller terms the
(imagined) ‘Other prior to the Other’.23 Shame is felt in the gaze of the
one who is able to see all. Ahmed, in a complementary configuration of
shame, describes the location from which the gaze emanates thus:
it is not just anybody that can cause me to feel shame by catching me doing
something bad. Only some others can witness my action such that I feel
ashamed…shame—as an exposure before another—is only felt given that
the subject is interested in the other; that is, that a prior love or desire for
the other exists (2004, 105)
But Miller goes further in distinguishing between the Other who judges
and the prior Other who can see all. As he says, this ‘Other prior to the
Other’ is ‘primordial’. He elaborates:
one would say that guilt is the effect on the subject of an Other that judges,
thus of an Other that contains the values that the subject has supposedly
transgressed. One would also claim that shame is related to an Other prior
to the Other that judges but instead one that only sees or let’s be seen.
(2006, 13 my emphasis)
The distinction between shame and guilt is helpful for understanding the
location of the Australian Constitution as the melancholic object, as it
marks a distinction between positive laws and a constitution as a ‘prior’ site
of authority; between, on the one hand, rules or judgments in the world,
and, on the other, the (primal) place from which the law emanates.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, drawing from Freud’s work on law and
prohibition in the primal horde, this form of ‘prior Other’ can only be
filled by the primal father.24 What is crucial for our understanding of
melancholia here is that the primal father, as a figure who is no figure at
all, but a location—only articulated through the organisation of uncon-
scious desires—precisely fills the requirements of the Australian
Constitution.25 We must remember that this is a constitution that cov-
ered over the abyss—‘order against chaos’ (Dorsett and McVeigh 2002,
291), as well as the massacres, the genocide and the ongoing policies that
would legitimate its status; this is the constitution that solidified the
(supposed) reality of Australia qua Australia, and an Australia that is now
painfully receding, potentially experienced as a terrible loss for those for
whom it was all.
When the constitution, in its quality as the Other prior to the Other is
lost, however, the melancholic who feels Australian positions himself
fundamentally in relation to that loss, and in the gaze of the Other who
sees and sanctions. In this position, shame melts away and the melan-
cholic remains in a kind of terrible ecstasy,26 in Freud’s terms a ‘satisfac-
tion in self-exposure’ (1917, 247), before the one who can sanction all.
Pain
Whereas, in the experience of mourning, as Freud says ‘respect for reality
gains the day’ (1917, 244) and the one lost can retain ambivalent quali-
ties—sometimes good and sometimes bad, and sometimes neither—in
melancholia the lost thing is recalled as only good, and the bad parts of
the lost thing are introjected into the self: ‘In mourning it is the world
which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself ’
(1917, 246). A poor and empty world might be precisely what Indigenous
people feel about an ‘Australia’ that is enshrined in foundational laws that
have never acknowledged their existence. And the experience of ‘a poor
176 J.B. Rogers
empty world’ might be exactly the kind of pain that non-indigenous

Australia needs to endure in order to promote an engagement in the kind
of shame or even remorse that Gaita has described. The realisation that
there is and always has been a Black Process might be to experience
remorse, in Gaita’s terms, as ‘a dying to the world’ (2004, 48); a painful
experience indeed.
The acknowledgement of a Black Process might undermine the melan-
cholic’s comfort with non-shame, non-remorse and non-guilt. In its indi-
cation of a process that not only suggests that Indigenous people are an
organised group of nations that inhabit a legal and political world—and
potentially a different legal world at that—but also that they need to be
asked about the constitution,27 the Black Process gestures painfully to the
impossibility of a legitimate constitution of Australia. It disturbs the kind
of homogenous ‘good feeling’ that Ahmed has said persists as ‘a nostalgic
vision… a vision of a white community, of white people happily living
with other white people’ (2008, 2). Simply put: the Black Process indi-
cates the impossibility of an image of Australia without Indigenous peo-
ple.28 This confrontation with reality—for non-indigenous Australia—would
be profound. But in order to provide the kind of ‘lucid acknowledgment’
(2000, 91) that Gaita refers to, it must also be painful.
Pain has its merits in the political condition of contemporary ‘Australia’.
Pain, Joanna Bourke tells us, ‘is a definition defying beast’, an experience
of the body, which demands the attention of the signifying world—
whether this be to describe it for doctors, or to master its agonies in the
fleeting satisfactions of finding points of identification with others (2014,
10). Pain does not allow for a resting of the experience of the body on any
single, stagnant signifier. It defies readily codified experience and is never
singly locatable in a body; we might say that pain ensures the impossibil-
ity of the reduction of life and loss to narcissistic and melancholic defini-
tions. Pain demands attention and a continuous form of cathexis. It is
through this cathexis—as a mix of the attempt to signify in the world and
to constantly re-signify in relation to the changes of flesh—that pain
brings life back to the one who has lost something profound. It is pain
which turns a ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ into what Freud describes
as the point where a ‘respect for reality gains the day’. Or as loss hurts it
comes to be grieved in the world.
It is cathexis demanded through the experience of pain, which allows

mourning to overcome melancholia. In Freud’s terms:
[a return to reality] cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by
bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the
experience of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of
the memories and expectations is brought up and hyper-cathected, and
detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it. (1917, 244–245)
The detachment of the libido is not only a detachment from the object
itself. It is a detachment from the self that holds tightly to that object, the
narcissistic self that sees itself reflected in the image of the mirror, or for
our purposes, in the image of the nation. Pain mobilises this detachment
through a continual cathexis and the refusal to die.
Melancholia, as we recall from Freud, signals the emptiness of the
ego; and it is precisely this emptiness that mourning works upon to
produce what we might think of as an ordinary state of pain. Mourning,
if you like, fills the emptiness with the pain of the loss. And pain is noth-
ing if not a condition of the living. Pain does something other than
enjoy emptiness. Pain plays with life, but it never finds life in its entirety,
or as something to be known. When pain comes in contact with a con-
stitution that requires—as all constitutions do—a practice of finding
definitions, for people, for places, for its own parameters, then its ‘defi-
nition defying qualities’ can begin to do their work. Pain, in this con-
text, is the experience of an impossible arrival onto the body—and
bodies—of the nation. Pain is the agony of uncertainty, in this sense,
which, if it can be borne, ensures the constitution can only be a docu-
ment of mourning.
The Black Process, in its ongoing existence defies the fixed definition
of the land called ‘Australia’. That is to say that if there was always a Black
Process then there was always a question as to the priority of the
Constitution. It is this obvious undermining of jurisdiction, of the settle-
ment, and of the authority of the ‘Australian Constitution’ that the ques-
tion of ‘recognition’ of Indigenous people points to; it points to a
displacement of the constitution from its position as the paternal author-
ity, and, by the melancholic’s definition, as the location of the Good.
178 J.B. Rogers
Re-writing the constitution, deciding on words that might speak to

the Black Process, demands the introduction of pain. The finding of
words, the labour of locating signifiers—and not only one—that will
speak to what Australia looks like now (as well as how it has looked his-
torically) is a labour that can produce the pain required of mourning. The
play of language already present in Indigenous responses to the promise
of recognition tell us something of what writing can do in this domain.
‘Just another Con’ is the phrase employed by some Indigenous refusers of
the promise of ‘recognition’: the ‘Con-stitution’ indicating both the com-
fort and the violence of its jurisdictional parameters. Re-writing the
constitution could do no less. But in this phrase ‘just another con’ we can
also detect the temporal dimension. Insofar as there will be ‘just another’,
and another, ‘con-stitution’, we can say that there is a future to the
Australian constitution. The slogan both undermines its definitive pater-
nity and points to its possibilities—its life and its losses.
Notes
1. As quoted by J Brennan in Mabo.
2. There is a plethora of references to the ways in which indigenous-settler
relations manifested at this time. One of the most comprehensive and
thoughtful articulations of the events and the politics of these events can
be found in Wolfe (2014).
3. I have elaborated this history of Australia in relation to the primal scene
and the killings in depth in Rogers (2017).
4. ‘smooth the pillow of the dying breed’ or ‘smooth the dying pillow’ is the
phrase commonly quoted from the Aboriginal Protectorate who indi-
cated that policies to remove (whiter) children from their Indigenous
parents were formed on the basis that the ‘indigenous race’ was dying
out. See Bringing Them Home (1997).
5. The deference with which constitutions are regarded in other, particu-
larly colonial lands may resonate with the case of the Australian
Constitution. However, South Africa’s Constitution, having been re-
written, and indeed re-constituted in living memory of most South
Africans, is a document that is perceived to be still ‘up for grabs’. Australia’s
Constitution enjoys no such fluidity.
6. This is akin to the status of ‘international law’ in Anne Orford’s discus-

sion of its status as a receptacle for paternal transference (2004).
7. The Term ‘Black Process’ in relation to constitutional recognition was
articulated in a statement by Indigenous leaders Noel Pearson and Pat
Dodson in an article in The Australian newspaper ‘Recognition: Patrick
Dodson and Noel Pearson unite for cause’ addressed to the Australian
Parliament, in July 2015. It was not the first time it had been used, but
it may have been the first time non-indigenous Australia, more broadly,
had noted its use.
8. The Expert Panel was a group of Indigenous and non-indigenous people
regarded as having expertise on the topic of constitutional change, and
chosen with the idea that some of them would represent indigenous
views. Changes recommended by the Expert Panel can be viewed in the
Executive Summary of their report at www.recognise.org.au/about/
expert-panel/ accessed 5 January 2016.
9. Personal communication with Prof Mark McMillan, 25 July 2015.
10. Statements on the non-readiness of the Australian public appeared
largely as murmurings from the then Labour Government. Such state-
ments then appeared in the Act of Recognition, 2013, and the organisa-
tion Recognise was subsequently commissioned to make non-indigenous
Australia ready.
11. This phrase has been used by several key figures who worked toward a
post-apartheid South Africa and describe the ‘talks about talks’ as a cru-
cial step in the pre-liberation period.
12. As I write, there is a renewed push for migrants to take a test on ‘Australian
values’ in order to be able to become Australian citizens. See Karp, Paul,
‘Malcolm Turnbull to add hurdles for “privilege” of Australian citizen-
ship’ theguardian.com, 19 April 2017.
13. As reflected in the desires and policy designs of the early and later settlers
and their accompanying law and protocols.
14. Australian Bureau of Statistics.
15. Ghassan Hage gives a very thorough account of how the hierarchies of
migrants aspiring to the supposed values of white Australia functions to
enable this form of what he calls ‘governmental belonging’: ‘believing
one has a right to contribute to its management’ (Hage 1998, 46).
16. I am using the term ‘white Australians’ in line with Ghassan Hage’s argu-
ment that while a great deal of the population of Australia is not white
at all, that whiteness is a status that all aspire to through the accumula-
tion of cultural capital. For Hage, there is a white aristocracy operating
180 J.B. Rogers
in Australia, but ‘whiteness’ is imagined to be able to be accumulated

through the means of, what he calls, the ‘spatial management’ of others
(Hage 1998 see particularly Chaps. 1 and 2).
17. The image of what Australia looks like is not so much baffling as disturb-
ing when you look inside prisons. Twenty-five percent of the prison
population in Australia are Indigenous, while they make up only 3 per-
cent of the broader population. Indigenous people are more likely to go
to prison than finish school. There is no capital punishment in Australia,
but in 1996, the Deaths in Custody report found that 10.4 Indigenous
people died in prison every year; in 1995, it was twenty-two people, and
that number has increased. There have been ninety-six Aboriginal deaths
in custody in the seven years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody completed its Report.
www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/indigenous-deaths-
custody-report-summary.
Indigenous people are more likely to go to prison than finish school. As
Grant says of the national anthem: ‘“Australians all let us rejoice.” What
is there for us to rejoice about in our troubled history? “For we are young
and free.” My people are some of the most incarcerated people on earth’
(Grant 2015).
18. The Sorry Books are an initiative that emerged after conservative Prime
Minister John Howard refused to apologise for the policies of child
removal of Indigenous people, which operated across the more than 100
years prior to his government. See Ahmed (2004) for a description of the
inception and work of the Sorry Books.
19. There is some controversy over these statistics as they are largely pedaled
by the organization ‘Recognise’, which has a vested interest in indicating
that it is doing its work effectively. However, anecdotally I would suggest
that these statistics articulate with people who voice any interest in con-
stitutional change. What is uncertain is exactly what they are in agree-
ment with. ‘Recognition’ is the only term used, and it seems largely
non-controversial amongst non-indigenous Australians. Indigenous
Australians, however, seem increasingly wary about such a gesture.
20. Ahmed’s comments on the Sorry Books again give us some of the sense
of urgency and passion for an official ‘apology’ (2004).
21. Lacan says this: ‘Out of what knowledge is the law made? Once one has
uncovered this knowledge it may happen that that changes. Knowledge falls
to the rank of symptom seen from another perspective’ (2007, 186–187).
22. ‘Blushing’ for shame is Probyn’s description (2010), where Ahmed talks
about shame being experienced on bodies ‘whose surfaces burn’ (2004,
103). She writes: ‘shame can be described as an intense and painful sen-
sation that is bound up with how the self feels about itself, a self-feeling
that is felt by and on the body’ (2004, 103).
23. Lacan was very clear that there was no ‘Other to the Other’, hence we
can only say that this location is a fantasy.
24. I have discussed this dynamic precisely in terms of the history of the
colonisation of Australia (Rogers 2017).
25. For a more comprehensive distinction between constitutions and positive
law (particularly in the context of South Africa, see Jaco Barnard-Naude
(2017) ‘The Anxiety Provoked by the Double’ (forthcoming). My thanks
to him for letting me read the drafts of this work.
26. This might be considered a form of Lacanian jouissance, but the techni-
calities of that experience are too open to uncertainty for this claim here.
27. As Brennan states: ‘contemporary Aborigines whose ancestors were
denied the vote at the referendum approving the Constitution might
assert their sovereignty by actions other than acquiescence, thereby call-
ing into question the legitimacy of the Constitution’ (1995, 128).
28. Further, the beginning of 2016 saw public and publicised refusals of the
idea of constitutional change at all from Indigenous people see Graham
(2016) https://newmatilda.com/2016/02/08/recognise-rejected-historic-
meeting-500-black-leaders-unanimously-opposes-constitutional-
recognition/
References
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University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2008). The Politics of Good Feeling. ACRAWSA e-Journal, 1, 1–18.
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Barnard-Naude, J. (2017). The Anxiety Provoked by the Double. Law and
Critique, in press.
Black, C. (2011). The Land Is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter with
Indigenous Jurisprudence. London: Routledge, Cavendish.
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Bourke, J. (2014). The Story of Pain; From Prayer to Painkillers. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Brennan, S. J. (1995). One Land, One Nation. St. Lucia: University of Queensland
Press.
Daley, P. Black Diggers Are Hailed on Anzac Day. But the Indigenous ‘Great
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Britain.
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XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on
Metapsychology and Other Works. Trans. J. Strachey. Vintage 2001, Great
Britain.
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Justice (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge. First Published 1998.
Gaita, R. (2004). Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (2nd ed.). London:
Routledge.
Graham, C. (2016). Recognise Rejected: Historic Meeting of 500 Black Leaders
Unanimously Opposes Constitutional Recognition. New Mathilda, 8
February.
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I Don’t Belong? The Guardian, 21 October.
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Society. NSW: Pluto Press.
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Citizenship. theguardian.com, Weds 19 April.
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New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (2007). The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book XVII. Trans. R. Grigg. London: W.W. Norton & Company.
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and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Durham and London: Duke University
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Orford, A. (2004). The Destiny of International Law. Leiden Journal of

International Law, 17, 441–476.
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Magabala Books.
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Analogy of English Jurisprudence…. Parallax, 6(1), 25–38.
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Affect Theory Reader (pp. 71–90). Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
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1788–1939. Sydney, Australia: Cassell.
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a Cause. The Austraian, 18 July.
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Colonial Contexts. Journal of Political Psychology, 38(4), 685–700.
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Legislations and Reports

Bringing Them Home. (1997). Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families,
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Mabo and Others v. Queensland (No. 2). (1992). 175 CLR 1.
Juliet B. Rogers is a senior lecturer in Criminology in the School of Political

Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and Adjunct Professor at Griffith Law
School, Queensland. She is currently an Australian Research Council DECRA
Fellow examining the ‘Quality of Remorse’ after periods of political and military
conflict. She has recently been a visiting fellow at the European University
184 J.B. Rogers
Institute, Italy; Yale Law School, US; University of Cape Town Law School,
South Africa and Queens University Law School. She is currently a visiting fel-
low at Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, at the University of Bologna. She
recently published Law’s Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision,
Torture and Sacred Flesh (Routledge), and she is completing a monograph on
Remorse.
8
Dr Fanon on Colonial Narcissism
and Anti-Colonial Melancholia
Colin Wright
Frantz Fanon is known as a theorist of anti-colonial resistance and decol-

onisation who put his ideas into practice during the Algerian war of inde-
pendence. However, what is often forgotten or passed over far too quickly
is his training and innovative practice as a psychiatrist, despite the central
role both evidently play in his critique of the de-humanising effects of
racism and colonial oppression.
This chapter provides an outline of Fanon’s involvement in the most
progressive strand of French psychiatry that became known as ‘psycho-
thérapie institutionnelle’, as well as of his clinical response to the colonial
context at the Bilda-Joinville hospital in Algeria, in order to demonstrate
the strong continuities between his psychiatric practice on the one hand,
and his critical writings and political activism on the other. This brief
portrait of ‘Dr Fanon’ paves the way for a discussion of the impact of the
Freudian concepts of narcissism and melancholia on his two best-known
works. Firstly, I discuss his use of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage argument
in the theory of colonial narcissism developed in Black Skin, White Masks
C. Wright (*)
School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, University of Nottingham,
Nottingham, UK

186 C. Wright
(Fanon 1986). Secondly, I extract from the later text, The Wretched of the
Earth (Fanon 2001), a notion of ‘colonial melancholia’, which accounts
for the collective self-loathing and internecine violence Fanon observes
amongst colonised blacks, as well as for the individual ‘reactionary psy-
choses’ he describes in its final chapter on ‘Colonial War and Mental
Disorders’. Finally, I argue that through his critical (re)deployments of
narcissism and melancholia, Dr Fanon controversially comes to prescribe
revolutionary violence and the creation of a new militant national com-
munity as a means of ‘treatment’ for the subjective yet always also social
ailments.
The Fanon We (Think We) Know

Frantz Fanon is rightly celebrated as one of the key intellectuals of the
twentieth century. His searing critique of racism and colonialism not
only inspired decolonisation movements around the world, but has also
become an indispensable reference point for a whole field of interdisci-
plinary academic research today in ‘postcolonial studies’. It would be
strange indeed to encounter a university course on postcolonial theory
that did not list either Black Skin, White Masks or The Wretched of the
Earth as essential reading (in every sense). In these and other texts by
Fanon, one encounters a tone of righteous fury tempered, but also
focussed, by an incisive intellect.
Yet Fanon impresses as much by his actions as by his words. Despite
his origins in a bourgeois family on the tranquil island of Martinique,
Fanon was, by the mid-1950s, far from the Caribbean in North Africa
where he became an active member of Algeria’s Front de Libération
Nationale (FLN). He was thus centrally involved in one of the bloodiest
of all the mid-century independence struggles. He was expelled from
Algeria by the French government and placed on their most wanted list
by its secret police. He survived several assassination attempts, including
a bomb that blew up his jeep and left him with twelve fractured vertebrae
(Alessandrini 1999, 4). In these extreme conditions he still managed to
write about the liberation struggle vividly enough to have one of his
books—L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne (translated into English as
8 Dr Fanon on Colonial Narcissism and Anti-Colonial Melancholia 187
A Dying Colonialism)—banned by a French government clearly worried

about its power to fan the flames of anti-colonialism, at home as well as
abroad. It is this image of the (black) man of letters who was also a (black)
man of action that dominates the reception of Fanon today. The roman-
tic pathos of this image was secured by his early death, from leukemia, at
the age of only thirty-six.
Not surprisingly, the dramatic dénouement to Fanon’s life has led to
a skewed retrospective view of it, as if down the wrong end of a tele-
scope. In particular, what is obscured by the glare of Fanon-the-
revolutionary is his professional training, his innovative clinical practice,
and his theoretical writings as a psychiatrist. Perhaps because of the
complex entanglements and collusions between European psychiatry
and its imperial project, including a dovetailing of pathologisation and
racialisation (Keller 2007), this aspect of Fanon’s life and work has
sometimes been passed over in slightly embarrassed silence, or reduced
to a mere biographical stepping stone on the way to the ‘true’ Fanon.
Much is made, for example, of his resignation from his post at the Bilda-
Joinville hospital in Algeria in 1956. His letter of resignation, repro-
duced in Towards the African Revolution (1967, 52–54), does indeed
show that he felt the practice of psychiatry in such a colonial society to
be ethically untenable. There were pragmatic as well as ethical reasons
behind this resignation in fact, yet it is often presented as an equivalent
to Caesar crossing the Rubicon, as if Fanon had to stop being a psychia-
trist to become a revolutionary.
However, I would argue that this does a serious disservice to the extent
to which Fanon’s clinical and critical thinking was thoroughly shaped by
a strand of radical French psychiatry we in the Anglophone world might
more readily associate with the (problematic) term ‘anti-psychiatry’,1
with its simultaneous debt to, and criticisms of, psychoanalysis. I want to
give a little room to Dr Fanon the psychiatrist here, because it will provide
a context for my subsequent claim that the Freudian (or Freudo-Lacanian)
concepts of narcissism and melancholia can be seen to influence both his
psychiatric and his political writings; their point of convergence being his
trenchant critique of the pathogenic effects of racism and colonial
oppression.
188 C. Wright
Dr Fanon: From Saint-Alban to Bilda-Joinville

Thankfully, there is an emerging body of scholarship that attempts to
give psychoanalytically inclined psychiatry its rightful place in the devel-
opment of Fanon’s thought. Much of this work is, naturally, in French
(see Maspero 2006; Postel and Quetel 1994; Cherki 2000; Razanajao
and Postel 2007; Khalfa and Young 2015), but it is appearing with gath-
ering momentum in English too (Adams 1970; Bulhan 1985; Macey
2012; Khalfa 2015; Ludis 2015).2 Here then, I will only give a brief
outline of Fanon’s relation to psychiatry, in order to pave the way for a
reflection on narcissism in Black Skin, White Masks and melancholia in
The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon’s colonial education ensured that his initial imaginary encounter
with France came via the revolutionary ideals of liberté, egalité and frater-
nité, and it was probably this idealism that led him to join the Free French
Army to fight for the ‘mother country’ in 1944 (see Chap. 3 of Macey
2012). His first real encounter with war-torn Europe then was a shock: it
was in Paris, not his hometown of Fort-de-France, that he first experi-
enced the ‘epidermal’ racism that would prompt the writing of Black Skin,
White Masks. Although this precipitous fall of the ideal of French egalitari-
anism was by his own account deeply painful, it seems that it was Fanon’s
passion for medicine that encouraged him to return to France in 1946. He
studied medicine at the University of Lyon between 1947 and 1951,
where he heard lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, after belatedly
choosing to specialise in psychiatry, became influenced by the-then cur-
rent phenomenological psychiatry that drew on Husserl, Heidegger and
Karl Jaspers. As we will see, this phenomenological orientation exerted a
strong influence on Fanon’s approach to the lived experience of racism.
During his time in Lyon, Fanon also engaged closely with debates
opened up by neurologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Henri Ey, who
posed urgent questions about the relationship between neurology and
psychiatry. These were also questions about the etiological place of biology
in relation to the psychosocial model pioneered by psychoanalysis. Fanon’s
final, rather rushed dissertation3 focussed on exactly the issue Ey raised of
the interactions between brain-based illnesses on the one hand, and men-
tal disorders of a psychological nature on the other. He leant quite heavily,
though not uncritically, on Ey’s attempted articulation of these in his the-

ory of ‘organo-dynamic psychiatry’ (Ey 1975). By taking a hereditary and
degenerative condition called Friedreich’s ataxia as his focus, Fanon’s dis-
sertation tested ‘the reducibility of the mental to the neurological’ and,
foreshadowing future concerns, ultimately ended up showing ‘the rela-
tional—and by extension social—dimension of the development of men-
tal illness’ (Khalfa 2015, 56). In other words, Fanon already argued that
the psyche must be situated in its social context. He defended this disser-
tation in November of 1951,4 thereby earning the right to practice as a
psychiatrist. Despite the Rubicon narrative previously mentioned, he
would continue to publish on psychiatric issues right up until 1960, just
a year before his death, and indeed to practice clinically within the Health
Divisions of the Algerian Army of National Liberation.
Soon after the defence of his dissertation, Fanon was accepted on to a
residence programme at the Hôpital Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, in the
département of Lozère, where he would work for another two years. This
experience had an absolutely formative effect on his ideas about the
overlaps between psychiatry, the institution, and wider society. For it was
at Saint-Alban that he came into contact with François Tosquelles whose
personal and professional trajectory would be echoed in many ways by
Fanon’s own. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst from Catalan, Tosquelles
was also an immigrant and a militant activist: he fought for the
Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, but was forced to flee to France in
1939 after Franco condemned him to death, crossing the Pyrenees on
foot to take up a post at the Saint-Alban hospital (technically as a psychi-
atric nurse in the first instance, since his Spanish qualifications were not
recognised in France). As well as being a key figure in Saint-Alban’s leg-
endary role during the Résistance, he completely transformed psychiatric
practice there, developing an approach that he called ‘sociothérapie’, but
which came to be better known in France as ‘psychothérapie institution-
nelle’ or ‘institutional psychotherapy’ (for an overview of the emergence
of this movement, see Ayme 2009).
Institutional psychotherapy experimented with psychoanalytic
approaches to the treatment of psychosis in institutional contexts recog-
nised to be in dire need of reform. It mixed an ‘anti-psychiatry’ style cri-
tique of the carceral asylum system as itself pathogenic, with both a
190 C. Wright
psychoanalytic ethics of the singularity of every human being, including

those suffering mental distress, and a broadly Marxist emphasis on human
being as fundamentally social being (Reggio and Novello 2007; Mackie
2016). In keeping with what has become a much broader tradition of
therapeutic communities, institutional psychotherapy attempted to cre-
ate a horizontal, collective and democratic social milieu, in order to cure
at once the psychiatric patient and the sick asylum system. Tosquelles was
one of the founding members of the Groupe de travaille de psychothérapie
institutionnelle, which would find, in the 1960s and beyond, a more
famous home at La Borde clinic, and an equally militant spokesperson in
Félix Guattari (future collaborator, of course, with Gilles Deleuze). The
other key figure at La Borde, Jean Oury, had also been an intern at Saint-
Alban under the inspiring tutelage of Tosquelles. This remarkable man,
then, became Fanon’s mentor, and it is clear that he exerted a profound
influence over his thinking, both as a psychiatrist and a militant. They
gave several joint conference papers drawing on the innovative techniques
they were developing at Saint-Alban (Khalfa 2015).
Nonetheless, one can go too far with this idea of a simplistically ‘pro-
gressive’ psychiatric avant-gardism in Fanon’s case: awkwardly for some
within critical psychiatry today, Fanon supported and made extensive use
of electro-shock treatments, was an early adopter of narcoleptics like lith-
ium, and even advocated insulin-induced comas (though he always
viewed these methods as enabling psychoanalytic or at least psychothera-
peutic work, rather than as ends in themselves). The overall position out-
lined in his psychiatric writings remained rather closer to Ey’s
organo-dynamic theory than to Lacan’s structuralist emphasis on the
Other of language, though I will be exploring important tensions in
Fanon’s relation to these two frameworks here. Nonetheless, he was cer-
tainly on the inside of these radical currents within French psychiatry,
indicating that between his politics and his psychiatric practice, there was
much more continuity than discontinuity.
By 1953 however, Fanon was growing disillusioned with the racism
even of the French Left (see Ludis 2015) and made the fateful decision to
take a job in Algeria, where he took up the post of chef de service in the
aforementioned Bilda-Joinville psychiatric hospital. There he innovated
well beyond the parameters of his mentor’s sociothérapie because what he
found forced him to. He took over two spatially but also ethnically
divided wards: on one side the Europeans, on the other, the ‘indigènes’.
This hospital-based apartheid reflected the racist ethnopsychiatry of
Antoine Porot, himself trained at the University of Lyon though many
years before Fanon. Porot had established the Algiers School of Psychiatry
in 1925 precisely, it seems, to legitimise the brutal nature of French rule
over an Arab population deemed to be inherently inferior, biologically
but also psychologically (Gibson 2003; Mahone and Vaughan 2007;
Keller 2007; Macey 2012). Fanon’s critique of Porot’s ‘indigenous psy-
chiatry’ in The Wretched of the Earth was so excoriating because he had
seen its consequences in his own hospital. Needless to say, he immedi-
ately set about deconstructing the spatial, temporal and organisational
manifestations of Porot’s racist binaries, applying to the letter Tosquelles’
‘social therapy’ techniques to do so. Although stories of Fanon immedi-
ately relieving inmates of their straightjackets (Gendzier 1973) are no
doubt apocryphal (see Bulhan 1985 for a corrective), he did quickly set
up a music appreciation society, a film club, and even a hospital journal,
all run by the patients themselves. He also involved them in building a
football pitch in the grounds for their own use. However, what really set
Fanon down a path we might now think of in terms of cross-cultural
critical psychiatry was the starkly uneven response to these social thera-
peutic methods adapted from Tosquelles. As he reflected in an article
co-written with Jacques Azoulay at the time (Fanon and Azoulay 1954),
the ‘European’ ward (a female ward) responded extremely well to these
initiatives, yet the ‘Indigenous’ ward composed of Algerian Muslim men,
did not: they remained sullen, disengaged and withdrawn.
Of course, Fanon would not appeal to Porot’s almost eugenic ideas to
explain this phenomenon, any more than to the related ‘North African
syndrome’ he had decried in his very first academic publication (repro-
duced in Fanon 1967, 3–16). Instead, he began to explore the impor-
tance of the cultural dimension of his new setting in addition to the social
one that Tosquelles had stressed. Fanon realised that the activities he had
organised could not possibly have the same cultural salience for the
Muslim Algerian men in the ‘Indigenous’ ward as they might for the
mostly Catholic European women. Nor, indeed, would these men share
the same conception of mental illness and health as the one imposed on
192 C. Wright
staff by a colonial training system. He took it upon himself to consult

anthropological literature on indigenous North African practices and
cosmologies, particularly their framing of mental illness, to better under-
stand his patients and their cultural milieu. Newly informed, he then
experimented not just with socio-therapeutic but also with what could
crudely be called ‘culturo-therapeutic’ activities. He arranged for local
storytellers to perform in the hospital as well as local musicians; he inte-
grated celebrations of religious festivals into ward life; he set up a café
maure, which served traditional mint tea and sweet pastries; he encour-
aged the involvement of family and friends to reflect the less individual-
istic and more communal Arab culture (Macey 2012). It was as if the
walls separating the psychiatric from the general population were dissolv-
ing, or at least becoming much more permeable. Jean Khalfa refers to this
bold experiment as ‘a complete reversal of the ethnopsychiatric gaze’
(Khalfa 2015, 66).
Although clinically successful, opening his wards to the world in this
way inevitably invited in the violence and brutality of the worsening
independence struggle. Fanon stuck to the humanism of his Hippocratic
oath, treating police and members of repressive para-military groups with
just as much care as the nationalist revolutionaries whose cause he more
and more fervently supported. However, as the oppression of FLN mili-
tants and their sympathisers intensified after 1954, the shift from the
social to the cultural that Fanon had enacted at Bilda-Joinville inexorably
brought him up against the political sphere. Of course, his position had
always been that one cannot separate these domains in any case.
On Colonial Narcissism

Now that we know Dr Fanon a little better, as a radical psychiatrist who
was also at least passingly familiar with Freudian and post-Freudian psy-
choanalysis, we can turn to the relevance of the concepts of narcissism
and melancholia for his simultaneously critical and clinical writings.
While I certainly don’t want to go as far as proclaiming him to be ‘an
apprentice Lacanian’ (Macey 2012, 140), I do want to foreground the
impact of Jacques Lacan’s reformulation of Freudian narcissism on
Fanon’s theorisation of the dialectic between coloniser and colonised in

Black Skin, White Masks.
There is no doubt Fanon was aware of some of Lacan’s ideas well before
he (Lacan) became such a notorious figure. Fanon’s dissertation devotes a
whole section to Lacan, referring to his 1932 thesis on paranoia in the
case study of ‘Aimée’ (when Lacan himself was still a psychiatrist rather
than a psychoanalyst); to his 1938 text on the family, which had been
reproduced in the Encyclopédie française and was thus very widely avail-
able; but particularly to his barbed critique of Ey’s ‘organo-dynamic’ psy-
chiatry, which was originally given as a paper at a 1946 conference
organised by Ey himself (Lacan 2006a). This last was particularly perti-
nent for Fanon’s dissertation insofar as it focussed on psychic causality,
providing a counter-point to Ey’s emphasis on organic causation with an
already structuralist understanding of the psychogenesis of symptoms.
Tosquelles, too, would have encouraged Fanon to engage with Lacan, no
doubt with an eye to linking psychogenesis to sociogenesis. According to
David Macey (2012, 144), Tosquelles was part of a reading group in the
Catalan city of Reus that studied Lacan’s thesis on ‘Aimée’: when he
crossed the border into France, one of only two books he was carrying
was a well-thumbed copy of Lacan’s thesis. Once in Saint-Alban,
Tosquelles wrote to Lacan himself to let him know that he was circulating
‘homemade copies’ of the text among staff there, and it is quite possible
that Fanon came by his copy this way even before meeting the Spaniard
in person (Macey 2012, 139). Prior to Tosquelles’ influence however,
Fanon included a long footnote precisely on Lacan’s mirror stage argument
in the chapter entitled ‘The Negro and Psychopathology’ in Black Skin,
White Masks (1986, 161–164), to which we shall turn in a moment.
A note of caution before doing so, however. Within the field of post-
colonial studies generally, the links between Fanon and Lacan have argu-
ably been grossly exaggerated, thanks to the uptake of Lacanian theory in
the academy as a kind of all-purpose cultural and/or political theory in
ways that Lacan himself would no doubt have mocked as ‘university dis-
course’ (Lacan 2007).5 For example, Homi Bhabha’s extremely influential
reading of Fanon in Locations of Culture (1994) undertakes a strongly
Lacanian re-framing of his entire oeuvre, but I would say in a very ‘theo-
reticist’ vein, and with little or no sensitivity to historical context or the
194 C. Wright
points of clinical overlap between the two men. In Bhabha’s hands, Lacan
seems more of a Derridean post-structuralist literary theorist than a prac-
ticing psychoanalyst, while Fanon’s Maoism is set aside in favour of a
textualist model of political agency it is very hard to imagine the FLN
militant endorsing. Nonetheless, specifically around the notion of colo-
nial narcissism, Bhabha is evidently right that there is a genuine encoun-
ter with Lacanian ideas that warrants close attention. Indeed, more recent
theorists, such as Mikko Tuhkanen (2009), have managed to produc-
tively re-visit the relevance of Lananian theory for critical race studies in
ways that avoid over-stating the ‘anxiety of influence’ between Lacan and
Fanon, which seems, in fact, to have been very minimal.
In any case, thanks to the aforementioned footnote in Black Skin,
White Masks, we are on safe textual ground. In it, Fanon refers directly to
‘Lacan’s theory of the mirror period’ (1986, 161). The paper reproduced
in the Écrits (Lacan 2006b) is actually a version of a talk originally given
in 1949, yet Lacan’s first public outline of it goes as far back as 1936. In
all of these iterations, he can be seen to be developing a response to a
question posed by Freud’s 1914 text, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’
(Freud [1914] 1957a, 67–102): namely, what prompts the transition
from primary narcissism to secondary narcissism and object-cathexis? In
other words, why would we ever give up the quintessentially narcissistic
position Freud memorably described there as that of ‘His Majesty the
baby’ (91), opening ourselves up to the risks of libidinal investment in
others, either by way of identification or as objects of the sexual instincts?
As early as 1909, Freud had posited narcissism as a necessary stage
between auto-eroticism and object choice before his colleagues in the
Vienna Circle (Jones 1955, 304). Five years later in ‘On Narcissism,’ he
introduced the new distinction between ‘ego-libido’ and ‘object-libido’
(Freud [1914] 1957a, 76), and observed that ‘there must be something
added to auto-eroticism—a new psychical action—to bring about narcis-
sism’ (77). It was to the question of what this ‘something’ was that Lacan
was responding in his mirror stage argument.
That this question remained rather obdurate for Freud himself arguably
stemmed from the fact that he did not always succeed in escaping from a
Darwinian conception of the ego, with reference to an organism domi-
nated by a survival instinct: the opening of ‘On Narcissism’ glosses it as
‘the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation’ (74). For Lacan however,

the very structure of the ego needs reconceiving on the basis of a com-
pletely different topology, one that holds at bay the threat of biological
reductionism. The ego is not there from birth, nor does it emerge as an
adaptive response to an experiential reality testing, as Freud sometimes
suggests. Rather, it is dialectically entangled in an Other whose recogni-
tion is a condition of the ego’s very being, as well as the cause of its consti-
tutive alienation from it. The psychical action that needs to be added to
auto-eroticism in order to bring about narcissism then, is the mirror phase.
Though probably familiar to most readers, a quick summary of Lacan’s
argument should clarify what Fanon found so useful in it. Drawing on
preceding work on mimicry by Henri Wallon and on childhood transitiv-
ism by Charlotte Bühler, Lacan makes three key inter-related claims.
Firstly, that the human baby is born prematurely in comparison to most
other animal species, and thus in a state of radical dependency on its
caregiver (Lacan 2006b, 75). This dependency stems in part from a com-
plete lack of motor co-ordination: the human baby is little more than a
chaotic bundle of libidinal drives. It has no conception of a self-Other
distinction with which to regulate or apportion these drives. Secondly,
however, a bounded sense of self with which to contain its drives does
begin to emerge around six to eighteen months of age, thanks to the
external support given by a reflective surface, such as (but not confined
to) the titular mirror. Such surfaces gradually provide a correspondence
between visual perceptions and direct bodily experiences of motility,
giving the body a coherent image on the basis of which to establish an ego
distinct from the (m)Other. This operation is behind the emergence of a
second-order self-consciousness beyond the immediate but unreflexive
consciousness possessed by animals. To put this simplistically, the pain of
hunger, for example, can cease to be an alien and unpredictable force to
become my hunger, and thus something that can enter into the dialectic
of demand and desire addressed to an Other through a cry that already
has symbolic dimensions. Crucially however, Lacan also insists on a third
element: in order for the binding of an ego to an image in what he calls
‘the imago’ (76) to be fixed, this Other has to give its seal of approval in
some way, uttering something of the order of a ‘yes, that’s you!’ In a very
fundamental sense then, Lacan argues that the ego receives its being from
the ‘outside’, from the Other.
196 C. Wright
One of his reference points here—as also for Fanon, but from a more
phenomenological perspective—is obviously a certain reading of Hegel.
The Kojévian interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind was enor-
mously influential on French intellectual life in the first half of the twen-
tieth century, including on Lacan who attended these lectures himself in
the 1930s (see Roudinesco 1993). Just as Hegel’s account of the master-
slave dialectic in the Phenomenology suggests a dynamic and relational
form of subjectivity with a ‘struggle for recognition’ at its core, so Lacan
suggests, from a psychoanalytic rather than a philosophical perspective,
that the ego’s very being is not given by nature from the outset but is
rather granted by and through this Other. Beyond Hegel moreover, Lacan
would stress not a mutual recognition between self and Other, but a
structural misrecognition without the consolation of a future aufhebung
[sublation]6 in the Absolute. Thus, for Lacan the resulting ego is, in its
imaginary dimension, fundamentally illusory, the site of a deceptive
inauthenticity relative to desire and the subject of the unconscious.
We could say that the mirror is two-sided then. It is only thanks to the
articulation of both sides that the mirror function enables the ego to situ-
ate itself relative to the two axes Freud already outlines in ‘On Narcissism’;
namely, the ‘ideal-ego’ and the ‘ego-ideal’.7 The first side of the mirror, as
it were, provides an ideal-ego that gives a sense of a body localised in
space and thus a place from which ‘I’ am seen by others. But the other
side of the mirror, which is also that of the Other, establishes an
ego-ideal—a concept posited by Freud for the first time in ‘On Narcissism’
but later to become the better known ‘super-ego’ in the second topogra-
phy and a crucial element in his arguments in Civilization and its
Discontents. It is this ego-ideal that imparts an often anxious sense of
what ‘I’ should try to be in the eyes of the Other on which the ‘I’ depends
for its consistency. One side of the mirror then provides a place and a
purpose within a coherent ‘reality’, but there is a recto to this verso. The
resulting fantasies about what one should be or do for the Other ensnare
desire in alienating identifications that end up exhausting neurotics in
particular in their search for an impossible wholeness.
It should be immediately obvious why this notion of an illusory ego
imposed by an alienating Other was immensely useful to Fanon in his
reflections on the effects of internalised racist stereotypes in the colonies.
However, as with his use of Marxism, Fanon was well aware of the dan-
gers of an uncritical transposition of psychoanalytic concepts into the
colonial context, as his critique of Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban
demonstrates (see Chap. 4 of Fanon 1986). Thus, the chapter entitled
‘The Negro and Psychopathology’ in Black Skin, White Masks opens with
a reference to Lacan’s text on the family (Fanon 1986, 141), but precisely
in order to go on to critique the universalising tendencies of psychoanaly-
sis when unreflexively grounded in Eurocentric assumptions about the
family—‘Like it or not,’ he boldly asserts, ‘the Oedipus Complex is far
from coming into being among Negroes’ (151–152). Nonetheless, the
centre-piece of the chapter is a contextualised use of Lacan’s (Hegelian)
mirror stage argument, in order to isolate the structure of black identity
in the colonies: ‘The goal of [the black man’s] behaviour will be The
Other (in the guise of the white man), for The Other alone can give him
worth’ (154). It is this notion of racialised narcissism that is explored in
the footnote on the mirror stage (161).
In it, Fanon’s insight as a fledgling psychiatrist is apparent, for he ini-
tially situates Lacan’s discussion of narcissism in its relation to psychosis
rather than to neurosis.8 In effect, and in surprising anticipatory accord
with Lacan’s third seminar on the psychoses (Lacan 1997), which did not
take place until three years after the publication of Black Skin, White
Masks, Fanon acknowledges the construction of a persecutory Other in
paranoid delusions as a means of reconstituting an ego that has suffered
the decomposition of a psychotic break: as he aphoristically puts it,
‘Whenever there is a psychotic belief, there is a reproduction of self ’
(161). In many ways, this is classically Freudian in its echoes of the
Schreber case, yet Fanon’s interest here is far from classic: it is in the role
of the figure of the Negro in this process of delusional stabilisation in
white psychotics, as potential support for his claim that ‘The Negro is a
phobogenic object’ (151).9 If, as Freud’s Little Hans case suggests, phobia
partially succeeds in localising an otherwise generalised (castration) anxi-
ety in a phobogenic object (horses for Little Hans), could the culturally
hyper-cathected figure of the Negro, as bestial and terrifyingly potent
sexually, serve a related function in the repressed and repressive psyche of
the coloniser?
198 C. Wright
However, Fanon’s interest soon turns in this footnote to the specificity

of the narcissism he discerns in the Antilles of his youth. It is here that he
pursues the implications of Lacan’s notion of narcissism when under-
stood—as it must be once the role of the Other is acknowledged—as
both social and indeed political, rather than merely ‘psychological’. He
notes that even in the dreams and ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’ (162) of
Martinicans, their blackness remains absolutely unmarked or ‘neutral’.
This is because at the level of everyday life, they constantly compare
themselves and each other to a white ego-ideal (an argument Fanon has
already outlined earlier in the chapter, through a polemic with Alfred
Adler). He cites several scenarios that illustrate this. Antillean children
write in their schoolbooks of having ‘rosy cheeks’ (ibid.); at the cinema,
they identify with Tarzan against the Negroes (152); and even as adults
their everyday speech reflects a colour-coded value system imported by
the French, as in phrases such as ‘He is black but he is very intelligent’
(163) or ‘They’re very black, but they’re all quite nice’ (164), and the
derogatory use of ‘blue’ to describe the darkest skin pigmentation.
It is only when the Martinican goes to France or encounters whites
that the fact of his blackness will suddenly be felt. It will be felt in the
reduction of his or her subjectivity to the skin-deep superficiality which
is all that this white Other recognises, leading to a dissolution of the
ideal-ego or body-image as well as to a profound disorientation with
regard to the ego-ideal (what am I for the Other?); in other words, to a
catastrophic failure of narcissism. It is as if when one side of the mirror
shatters, the other must follow: when ‘I(A)’ or the ego-ideal clearly
demands a whiteness the black body can no longer attain, the ‘i(a)’ or
ideal-ego dissolves into a body deprived of consistency by the Other. This
is the experience that Fanon uses a Sartre-inspired phenomenology to
capture in the famous ‘Look mummy, a Negro!’ scene, when, of his own
fragmenting bodily integrity, he exclaims, ‘the corporeal schema crum-
bled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema’ (112). The overall tra-
jectory of the footnote on Lacan’s mirror stage in Black Skin, White Masks
implies that this experience of racism is akin to a psychotic decomposi-
tion of egoic coherence.
Violence and Melancholia
I want to turn now to the later, very different text, The Wretched of the
Earth. This work bears all the hallmarks of the circumstances of its pro-
duction, written as it was at the height of the Algerian war of indepen-
dence as well as coinciding with the decline in Fanon’s health. Where
Freud and Freudians are a major reference point throughout Black Skin,
White Masks, in this book, it is a Maoist interpretation of Marx and
Marxism that drives the argument forward. The result is an acute analysis
of, among other things: the violence of colonial oppression; the dialecti-
cal transformation of this violence into armed resistance; the ambiguous
role of ‘native’ bourgeois intellectuals in independence struggles; the pit-
falls of regressive appeals to pre-colonial traditions in cultural forms of
nationalism; and—very presciently from today’s globalised perspective—
the persistence of economic forms of dependence after nominal indepen-
dence. The Wretched of the Earth, then, is a manifesto of Third World
Marxism and a practical handbook for the anti-colonial militant.
And yet, psychiatry remains a decisive element in this text too, as evi-
denced by the final chapter entitled ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’
(Fanon 2001, 200–250). Fanon notes the incongruous appearance of this
conclusion in such an ostensibly political work, but he seems resigned to
it, as if to an indelible aspect of both himself and the reality of the situa-
tion: ‘Perhaps these notes on psychiatry will be found ill-timed and sin-
gularly out of place in such a book; but we can do nothing about that’
(200). Far from being an after-thought however, I would suggest that the
inclusion of this chapter demonstrates the strong underlying consistency
of Fanon’s concerns, arguably dating back to his 1951 dissertation and
shaped by his association with Tosquelles. I would agree, then, with
Gwen Bergner’s assertion that ‘Fanon’s return to the psyche toward the
end of The Wretched of the Earth signals his continuing demand that we
explore the interdependence of nation and subject’ (Bergner 1999, 220).
To this end, ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ consists in a series
of clinical case studies or vignettes of varying length, which Fanon
gathers under the umbrella psychiatric heading of ‘reactionary psycho-
ses’. Contemporary equivalents of this category would be ‘brief reactive
200 C. Wright
psychosis’ or ‘situational psychosis’, the common denominator being a

stress on an external and contingent triggering factor, rather than some
hereditary or constitutional predisposition, as well as on the transience
of the symptomatology. Fanon appeals to this term, it seems, primarily
to emphasise the pathogenic causality of the colonial war itself, and
thus to support his long-held position on the sociogenesis of many
mental disorders that informed his experiments in psychothérapie insti-
tutionnelle. In the context of Algerian psychiatry, the category of reac-
tionary psychosis also had the added benefit of putting at arm’s length
Porot’s dominant ethnopsychiatry, which would be quick to biologise
and even essentialise indigenous pathologies. Indeed, Fanon’s overall
approach in this chapter arguably prefigures the politicised use of
‘Vietnam Syndrome’ as an element of anti-war discourse in the US in
the 1970s, later to be recognised, for better or for worse, as Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder (Young 1995; Summerfield 2001).
Fanon organises these clinical cases of ‘reactionary psychoses’ into
three sections with a clear trajectory. The first section groups five cases
involving both Algerians and Europeans who have clearly been directly
affected by the violence of the war itself, either as combatants and tortur-
ers or as victims. It is important to Fanon’s Marxist but also ‘medical’
humanism that he includes cases representing both sides of the conflict.
The second section gathers five more cases that reflect a more diffuse
atmosphere of violence and tension in the context of a ‘total war’ that
cannot be limited to direct combat or combatants per se (this group
includes behavioural problems among children, for example). Finally,
and in very fragmentary form, Fanon lists the respective mental disorders
that seem to correspond to the various modes of torture that were raised
by the French army to a kind of horrific Sadean art during the Algerian
conflict (for an unflinching history of this, see Lazreg 2007).
Beyond the overarching strategic category of ‘reactionary psychoses’
however, I want to suggest that there are strong grounds for framing the
clinical data Fanon outlines in this chapter in terms of the classic presen-
tation of Freudian melancholia. His clinical notes refer to ‘a mass attack
against the ego’ (203); ‘prolonged insomnia […] anxiety and suicidal
obsessions’ (ibid.); ‘a thoughtful, depressed man, suffering from loss of
appetite, who kept to his bed’ and ‘showed a marked lack of interest’ as
well as sexual impotence (206); another’s ‘chest was lifted by continual

sighs […] two attempts at suicide since the trouble started’ (210); ‘they
shun contact’ (227); ‘Apathy, aboulia, and lack of interest’ (228); patients
who are ‘inert, who cannot make plans, who live from day to day’ (ibid.),
and so forth. This overall clinical picture corresponds rather precisely to
Freud’s description of the ‘distinguishing features of melancholia’ in his
1917 text, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (Freud [1917] 1957b, 243–268):
‘a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world,
loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of activity, and a lowering of self-
regard to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings’
(244).
However, here one should be cautious. Freud himself was always con-
cerned to push beyond merely descriptive psychiatry, with its tendency
towards catchall syndromes, in an effort to isolate the underlying psychic
mechanism. Thus, it is worth reminding ourselves of the more ‘structural’
psychoanalytic argument in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. As the title
suggests, Freud organises his discussion around the comparison with
mourning suggested to him by Karl Abraham. Many of the presenting
problems are similar, though with an important and revealing difference:
those who have suffered a bereavement do not usually display the vehe-
ment and often voluble self-deprecation of the melancholic, who fre-
quently presents himself as ‘worthless, incapable of any achievement and
morally despicable’ (246). People in mourning are also generally con-
scious of the loss that has occasioned their grief, whereas the melancholic
does not know from whence his feelings of despair and self-disgust origi-
nate. To Freud, this suggests three things: firstly, that the nature of the
loss in melancholia is of the order of an ideal (245); secondly, that an
economic process similar to mourning takes place in the unconscious
system rather than the conscious one (246); and thirdly, that in the ‘clini-
cal picture of melancholia, dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds
is the most outstanding feature’ (247–248). The ideal nature of the
object-loss involved in melancholia calls for fine clinical distinctions,
since it opens up the field of possible losses well beyond bereavement, to
include all manner of libidinally invested abstractions. Of relevance to
Fanon’s focus on colonised peoples is Freud’s reference to ‘one’s country,
202 C. Wright
liberty, an ideal’ (243) as among the possible object-losses at the root of a

melancholia.
Showing his courage as a clinician, Freud makes two related observa-
tions about therapeutic work with melancholics: firstly, that it is of more
clinical value to confirm the patient’s accusations of being worthless as
psychically real, than it is to deny them with counter-evidence from a
supposedly objective reality (246–247); and secondly, that if one situates
the insistent self-reproaches in the broader context of the patient’s biog-
raphy, one quickly sees that the reproaches can be applied word for word
to some significant other, usually a loved one. Thus, ‘the self-reproaches
are reproaches against a loved object which have shifted away from it on
to the patient’s own ego’ (248). This puts Freud on the scent of the role
in melancholia of the very withdrawal of libido along pathways laid down
by narcissism he had identified in the 1914 text ‘On Narcissism’. It also
alerts him to the related division of the psyche into an ego and a persecu-
tory ‘moral’ agency that will later become the super-ego. In this way, he
arrives as his metapsychological hypothesis regarding melancholia: in it,
there has been ‘an identification of the ego with the abandoned object’
and thus, in the famous phrase, ‘the shadow of the object fell on the ego’
(249). In melancholia then, we have a particular mechanism for dealing
with what Freud calls, here as elsewhere, a ‘conflict due to ambivalence’
(251): because the lost object was always both loved and hated at the level
of the unconscious, one way of attempting to retain it as ideal is to
internalise and direct against the ego the portion of hatred and aggression
which had always been the object’s secret obverse. This self-directed
sadism helps to explain the propensity to suicide amongst melancholics,
since in killing themselves they are actually taking indirect revenge on the
lost object: ‘the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the
object-cathexis […] it is able to direct against itself the hostility which
relates to an object’ (252). This involution is possible because the original
object-choice had a narcissistic component, which is to say, melancholic
reproaches can be directed against the self because the lost object was
‘loved’ (but also hated) via a fundamentally narcissistic identificatory
pathway in the first place. One almost has the image of an elastic band:
as libidinal cathexis stretches out from the ego towards an object, it can
also snap back violently along the same trajectory.
Returning to Fanon, we can see that this melancholic mechanism for
internalising a primordial violence has a general pertinence in the colo-
nial context. The first two chapters of The Wretched of the Earth deal with
the issue of violence, the repressive violence of colonial power and its
inscription in the very sinews of the black body, as well as the diverse
ways in which that violence tries to find indirect expression. Fanon is
eloquent about the phenomenon of hypertension amongst colonised
blacks, as well as the tendency to inter-tribal or ‘black-on-black’ violence
during certain phases of decolonization struggles. Such incidents are
used by the colonising powers to prop up the image of the ‘uppity native’
legitimising their rule, yet they are really the dialectical consequence of
it: ‘collective auto-destruction in a very concrete form is one of the ways
in which the native’s muscular tension is set free’ (Fanon 2001, 42).
Does this not remind us of the suicidal tendency in melancholia noted
by Freud? It is also connected to the violent rivalry Lacan recognises as
an inherent aspect of the imaginary and thus the ego, as early as his
1932 thesis on ‘Aimée’ (who stabbed a famous Parisian actress with
whom she identified) but also in his 1948 paper on ‘Aggressiveness in
Psychoanalysis’ (Lacan 2006c) in which aggression is once again corre-
lated to narcissistic identification. Fanon also identifies a kind of subli-
mated form of this colonial violence in the recourse to superstition and
‘wild’ shamanic rituals. Among these, the spiritual ‘takeover’ of posses-
sion could be said to be a displaced symbolisation of colonial domina-
tion, with exorcism representing a kind of staged expiation (Fanon
2001, 45). However, echoing the ‘stuckness’ of the arrested mourning
characteristic of Freudian melancholia, Fanon suggests that the dis-
placed modalities of colonial violence in each of these ‘cultural’ solu-
tions merely ‘turn in the void’ (ibid.).
At this level, it is possible to discern in The Wretched of the Earth an
implicit socio-cultural, not simply ‘individual’, diagnosis of a colonial
form of melancholia, a condition it is very tempting to neologistically
term ‘melancolonia’. How would one treat such a disorder?
204 C. Wright
owards a National Community

T
of the ‘New Man’
In the broader field of postcolonial and critical theory, there has in fact
been an appeal to the category of melancholia as a way of framing the
contemporary persistence of the colonial past in the allegedly post-
colonial present. In Postcolonial Melancholia for example, Paul Gilroy
(2005) draws less on Freud and more on Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour
(1975). This book examined Germany’s post-war difficulties with con-
fronting its Nazi past, but Gilroy refers to it in order to upbraid post-9/11
Britain’s related inability to let go of its memories of Empire, and to
highlight the ways in which this continues to sustain a xenophobic dis-
course around the figure of the immigrant.10 For Gilroy, inspired pre-
cisely by a certain reading of Fanon’s humanism, the solution to this
postcolonial melancholia lies in a multicultural ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy
2005, xv) that can lay the foundations for a planetary cosmopolitanism.
Notwithstanding the merits of Gilroy’s vision, I would argue in closing
that Fanon himself prescribed a quite different treatment for colonial—
rather than postcolonial—melancholia, one that was much less compat-
ible with the values of liberalism insofar as it focussed on the constitutive
role of violence. It is certainly possible, as I have suggested, to identify a
truly pathological form of melancholia that Fanon sees as intrinsic to
colonial forms of domination, but his suggested exit from that condition
resembles less an improved mode of cosmopolitan cohabitation and more
a kind of passage á l’acte in the Lacanian sense: a ‘leap into the unknown’,
off the current stage, but also one with the capacity to create new possi-
bilities, new destinies, new (national) communities.
The movement of decolonization theorised by Fanon in The Wretched
of the Earth is simultaneously the creation of a new national community,
one libidinally bound not by the kinds of imaginary identifications Freud
identified in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud [1921]
1955)—a text that presciently maps the psychic foundations of the very
Nazi period reflected on by the Mitscherlichs—but by a collective work
of co-creation. In many ways, this emphasis on vital action resonates with
a question Freud posed in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ itself, when he

wondered about the underlying economics of that ‘most remarkable
characteristic of melancholia […] its tendency to change round into
mania’ (Freud [1917] 1957b, 253). Although today’s psychiatry holds
these together in the affective highs and lows of ‘bi-polar disorder’, the
stakes for Fanon are rather different, since the transition from a depres-
sive to a manic phase would relate to the emergence of a revolutionary
subjectivity stirred to action.
Typically, this move beyond melancholia also involves a critical passage
through colonial French psychiatry for Fanon. He notes a dilemma for the
Algerian School of psychiatry when faced with the kinds of Algerian mel-
ancholics described in ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’:
[French psychiatrists] were accustomed when dealing with a patient subject

to melancholia to fear that he would commit suicide. Now the melancholic
Algerian takes to killing. The illness of the moral consciousness, which is
always accompanied by auto-accusation and auto-destructive tendencies,
took on in the case of Algerians hetero-destructive forms […] This is the
homicidal melancholia which has been thoroughly studied by Professor
Porot in the thesis of his pupil Monserrat. (241)
Fanon turns this racist ethnopsychiatry on its head by demonstrating the

theoretical limitations inherent in its ideological function: ‘Since by
definition melancholia is an illness of the moral conscience it is clear that
the Algerian can only develop pseudo-melancholia, since the precarious-
ness of his moral sense are well known’ (242). Thus, the pathologisation
of Algerian violence in colonial psychiatry depoliticises it, yet in a way
that also creates a blind-spot with regard to its dialectical transformation
beyond a truly melancholic ‘stuckness’, into the revolutionary form of
transformative violence that Fanon sees as a ‘cure’ for colonial melancho-
lia. From the internalisation of the violence in the body of the colonised,
we pass to the externalisation of this same violence against the colonial
oppressor, and this passage from suicide to homicide is fundamentally
‘healthy’. This is the ‘moment of the boomerang’ (17) that Sartre identi-
fies in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth, when European aggression
is returned-to-sender; it is also the moment, for Fanon, of the birth of an
independent nation.
206 C. Wright
Far from leaving psychiatry behind in order to become a revolutionary

then, once his involvement in psychothérapie institutionnelle with its focus
on social relations is appreciated, and once his critical engagements with
the concepts of narcissism and melancholia are identified, one can see the
mutually reinforcing relation between these two domains in Fanon’s revo-
lutionary thought. As I have tried to show in this chapter, Fanon is
indebted to a Freudo-Lacanian understanding of narcissism in his elabo-
ration of a specifically colonial form of narcissism organised around a
racializing white Other. I have also tried to show that Fanon pushes criti-
cally beyond notions of Freudian melancholia that had become distorted
by Eurocentric psychiatry, in order to posit an anti-colonial melancholia
that can be dialectically transformed into a violent resistance with the
potential to found a new, decolonised national subject. In this way,
Dr Fanon can still show us how culture and clinic can and should coin-
cide with critique.
Notes
1. Problematic in that the term was invented as a pejorative by mainstream
British psychiatrists threatened by the unorthodox ideas that came to be
associated with Michel Foucault, Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing and David
Cooper amongst others. The ‘anti’ part also implies a misleading external
opposition to psychiatry as such, whereas the movement’s power argu-
ably lay in internal radicalisation in the name of a renewed psychiatry.
There are also problems with placing the social constructivism of the
libertarian Thomas Szasz under the same heading as the French strand,
which was much more philosophically complex, implied a very different
politics, and was also less inclined to accept a ‘mythical’ reading of
madness.
2. To this list we will soon be able to add the forthcoming title Frantz
Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics, jointly written by Nigel Gibson and
Roberto Beneduce, which will provide a sustained focus on Fanon’s clini-
cal writings in English.
3. It was rushed because his supervisor, Professor Dechaume, had perhaps
understandably refused to endorse a version of Black Skin, White Masks
as an acceptable dissertation submission.
4. Only one chapter of this dissertation was ever published as a journal

article (see Fanon 1975) and Fanon doesn’t make reference to it himself
in his subsequent writings.
5. Lacan formalises four discourses (adding a fifth, that of the capitalist, a
couple of years later), the specificity of ‘university discourse’ being that it
situates knowledge in the position of mastery. As well as anticipating the
rise of technoscience, Lacan’s matheme of university discourse is useful
precisely because it shows its fundamental difference from analytic dis-
course, which has a completely different relation to knowledge.
6. ‘Sublation’ is the standard translation of this Hegelian term, though it
carries a number of other meanings including ‘transcending’ and a para-
doxical combination of ‘abolishing’ and ‘preserving’ within the same
movement, but the main meaning centres on a picking up or carrying
over to a higher level. Certainly for ‘Right Hegelians’ the movement of
aufhebung is one of teleological progress in which the negative is eventu-
ally annulled in the Absolute. In this respect, Lacan is much more of a
‘Left Hegelian’ in that such a final resolution would be an imaginary
fantasy covering over the structural persistence of the negative as lack.
For a sustained consideration of the Hegel-Lacan relation see Žižek (2014).
7. The difference between the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal is perhaps clearer
in Lacan than it is in Freud, thanks to his distinction between the imagi-
nary and the symbolic. Lacan represents the difference in his character-
istic algebra as ‘i(a)’ and ‘I(A)’ respectively. We can think of i(a) or the
ideal-ego as the narcissistic identification with, and investment in, an
image of plenitude linked to that jubilatory ‘thou art that!’ moment cen-
tral to the mirror stage; whereas I(A) or the ego-ideal emphasises the
symbolic dimension of this egoic being which necessarily entangles it in
an anxious interpretation of what an authoritative Other wants.
8. Thanks to the commonplace understanding today of ‘narcissism’ as a
kind of preening self-regard, it is often forgotten that Freud’s ‘On
Narcissism’ opens up the general question of narcissism via a discussion
of the withdrawal of libido from ‘reality’ observable in dementia praecox,
or schizophrenia. Freud had long categorised dementia praecox as a ‘nar-
cissistic neurosis’, as opposed to the properly neurotic ‘transference neu-
roses’ treatable by psychoanalysis.
9. This thesis regarding the phobogenic status of the Negro may have derived
from Fanon’s direct clinical experience at the Saint Ylié hospital in Dôle
between the end of his psychiatric studies in Lyon and the start of his place-
ment at Saint-Alban. This was when he encountered ‘Mlle B.’, a nineteen-
208 C. Wright
year-old woman who suffered facial tics and spasms and complained of
hallucinations of concentric circles, always to the sound of ‘Negro tom
toms’ (Fanon 1986, 205). Sessions with this patient revealed the presence
of a group of dancing black men preparing to boil and eat a white man.
10. Gilroy’s argument only seems more relevant today in the wake of the so-
called Brexit vote in June 2016, which was arguably decided on the basis
of the figure (rather than the reality) of the ‘immigrant’.
References
Adams, P. (1970). The Social Psychiatry of Frantz Fanon. American Journal of
Psychiatry, 127, 109–114.
Alessandrini, A. (1999). Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Ayme, J. (2009). Essai sur l’histoire de la psychothérapie institutionnelle.
Institutions, 44, 111–153.
Bergner, G. (1999). Politics and Pathologies: On the Subject of Race in
Psychoanalysis. In A. Alessandrini (Ed.), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives
(pp. 219–234). London: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (1994). Locations of Culture. London: Routledge.
Bulhan, H. (1985). Frantz Fanon: The Revolutionary Psychiatrist. Race and
Class, 21(3), 252–271.
Cherki, A. (2000). Frantz Fanon, Portrait. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Ey, H. (1975). Des idées de Jackson à un modèle organo-dynamique en psychiatrie.
Paris: Privat.
Fanon, F. (1967). Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Trans.
H. Chévalier. New York: Grove.
Fanon, F. (1975). Le Trouble mental et le trouble neurologique. L’Information
psychiatrique, 51(10), 1079–1090.
Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C. L. Markmann. London:
Pluto.
Fanon, F. (2001). The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington.
London: Penguin.
Fanon, F., & Azoulay, J. (1954). La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes
musulmans: Difficultés méthodologiques. L’Information psychiatrique, 30(9).
Freud, S. (1955). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Group Psychology and Other Works. London: The Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. ([1914] 1957a). On Narcissism. In Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the
History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other
Works (pp. 67–102). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. ([1917] 1957b). Mourning and Melancholia. In Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XIV (1914–1916):
Other Works (pp. 237–258). London: Hogarth Press.
Gendzier, I. L. (1973). Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Grove.
Gibson, N. (2003). Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. London: Polity.
Gilroy, P. (2005). Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Jones, E. (1955). Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (Vol. 2). London: Basic Books.
Keller, R. (2007). Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. London:
Khalfa, J. (2015). Fanon and Psychiatry. Nottingham French Studies, 54(1),
52–71.
Khalfa, J., & Young, R. (Eds.). (2015). Frantz Fanon: Écrits sur l’aliénation et la
liberté. Paris: La Découverte.
Lacan, J. (1997). The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book III. The Psychoses. Trans.
R. Grigg. London: W. W. Norton & Company.
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Edition in English (pp. 123–158). Trans. B. Fink. London: W. W. Norton &
Company.
Lacan, J. (2006b). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Practice. In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English
(pp. 75–81). Trans. B. Fink. London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (2006c). Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis. In Écrits: The First Complete
Edition in English (pp. 82–101). Trans. B. Fink. London: W. W. Norton &
Company.
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London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lazreg, M. (2007). Torture and the Twilight of Empire. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Ludis, P. (2015). Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades. London: Pluto
Press.
Macey, D. (2012). Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London: Verso.
Mackie, B. (2016). Treating People with Psychosis in Institutions: A Psychoanalytic
Perspective. London: Karnac.
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Mahone, S., & Vaughan, M. (Eds.). (2007). Empire and Psychiatry. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Maspero, F. (2006). Note de l’éditeur. In F. Fanon (Ed.), Pour la revolution
Africaine: écrits politiques (pp. 7–10). Paris: La Découverte.
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of Collective Behaviour. London: Grove Press.
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Dunod.
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Fanon. Sud/Nord, 22, 147–174.
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32–46.
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pensée. Paris: Fayard.
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the Social Usefulness of a Psychiatric Category. The British Medical Journal,
322, 95–98.
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Press.
Colin Wright is Associate Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of

Culture, Film & Media at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is a founding
member of the Centre for Critical Theory there, and convenes the MA in Critical
Theory and Cultural Studies. His research interests are in French critical theory
and continental philosophy, but particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis. Book
publications include Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation (2006, co-
edited with Cristina Demaria), Psychoanalysis (2008), Badiou in Jamaica: The
Politics of Conflict (2013) and most recently the collection, co-edited with Diana
Caine, Perversion Now! (2017). He is currently working on a book monograph
entitled Toxic Positivity: A Lacanian Critique of Happiness and Wellbeing. As well
as being an academic, he is a practicing Lacanian analyst in formation with the
Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London but with a private prac-
tice in Nottingham.
9
‘This Nothing Held in Common’:
Towards a Theory of Activism Beyond
the Community of One
Barry Watt
How are we to be left political activists, today? For those in the Global
North, this question has been pressing for some time. At the ballot box,
support for traditional left parties has been steadily declining for years,
presenting electoral challenges that remain unmet. Left-wing intellectu-
als, meanwhile, appear to be retreating into insular debates over political
economy or squabbles around socio-cultural critique. Meanwhile unions,
campaign groups and social movements flounder on how to organise in
‘the age of the organisationless’, to collectivise amidst ‘the cult of the
individual’. It is, however, the Global North’s rapidly and dramatically
changing geo-political climate that, in 2016/17, makes further deferral of
this question impossible.
As both an activist and a psychotherapist, I am frustrated by protest
movements’ frequent lack of engagement with difficult questions of
group dynamics. Although, in my experience, struggles with emotional
and psychological distress run high within many activist circles, I have
often observed a taboo on addressing directly the ‘psychodynamics of
B. Watt (*)
Department of Sociology, University of Roehampton,
London, UK

212 B. Watt
protest’; all too often, I’ve encountered a discernible preference for

addressing such distress through individualised frameworks of ‘self-care’.
Correspondingly, within the literature, on the occasions the intersection
between emotional wellbeing and protest is considered, it’s from largely
de-psychologised sociological, systems-theoretic or process philosophy
standpoints. Reflecting my investments in psychoanalytic therapy and
political activism I wish, then, to orient this chapter towards two broad
goals: (1), to contribute to debates around building sustainable and effec-
tive protest movements by proposing some analytical tools for making
sense of some of the more obvious psychodynamics within contemporary
activism; (2), to identify what I cautiously hope may provide the ground-
work for a rapprochement between an analysis of the interpersonal chal-
lenges faced by protest movements and the questions posed to both
philosophy and political-economy by the problem of property.
My starting place, however, to address the persistent challenge belea-
guering left organising, is the distress of what Jo Freeman first identified
within the women’s movement as ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’
(1970). This phenomenon, widely encountered within protest groups
promoting non-hierarchized social relationships and the undesirability of
leaders, concerns the failure to adequately acknowledge and practically
address pre-existing social stratifications, thereby disguising and repro-
ducing established power relationships, privileges and inequalities. Why
do leaderless groups and de-stratified associations, the prospect of which
is so emotionally and intuitively compelling, frequently collapse into
infighting and the replication of aggression and dominance that they pro-
claim to have abandoned?
In formulating a response, there is no avoiding the key role that guilt
plays in activist life and culture, and how it directly bears upon the infa-
mous tribalism of the left—a matter more often satirised, than addressed.
To address this, I suggest that we try to account for two of the major
challenges of communal life Freud identified in Civilisation and its
Discontents. First, we must work-through some consequences of Freud’s
observation that ‘the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and dis-
trustful is [his super-ego’s] behaviour [toward him], so that ultimately it
is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who
reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness’ (1961 [1930]: 126).
9 ‘This Nothing Held in Common’: Towards a Theory of Activism... 213
Second, we must try and comprehend why the left is especially prey to
the envy and enmity of what Freud called the ‘narcissism of minor differ-
ences’, denoting the challenges of communal life he associated with the
Biblical question: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ (109). From my experience,
the question dogging the contemporary left is less ‘who is my neighbour?’
(or ‘for whom am I struggling?’), but instead the reflexive one: ‘Who is
my ally?’ We might even put this in terms of Carl Schmitt’s well-known
friend/enemy distinction (2007 [1932]). The problem exercising today’s
left is not so much figuring out who its enemies are, but trying to be sure
of its ‘true’ friends.
In the first part of the chapter, I sketch Freud’s group psychology as a
way of understanding the tyranny of structurelessness. I then offer an
activist reply to Freud, from the perspective of ‘prefigurative politics’.
Prefiguration is a collection of modes of social organisation the commen-
tators and theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, in their Inventing
the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), describe as
today’s principal form of ‘folk politics’. As will be seen, by considering the
work of academic and activist Jeremey Gilbert, prefiguration is popular
because it subverts the top-table, party-leader politics, characteristic of so
much of the twentieth-century left. Drawing on currents within the anar-
chist tradition, prefiguration more comfortably aligns left political prac-
tice with broader twenty-first century scepticisms towards grand narratives
and authority figures. However, despite the ‘prefigurative turn’ ushering
in a more fitting style of contemporary activism, I will suggest that in its
current guises prefiguration falters in its reliance upon the hidden presup-
position of a ‘community of one’, a presupposition unintentionally repli-
cating the kinds of sociality activists seek to supplant.
I propose that to be adequate to the demands of organising for a post-
capitalist world, we must navigate a path beyond positing communities
and subjectivities as reified, closed and self-identical. This obliges draw-
ing out the radical implications for political thought and praxis, by rec-
ognising the deep and abiding connection within the Western
philosophical tradition, between its reliance upon ontological notions of
property and the emergence and hegemony of liberal capitalism’s legal
and economic categories of rights to and relations between, property
ownership. In this respect, one way of regarding the argument I attempt
214 B. Watt
here, is as a psychoanalytic affirmation of a version of the central tenets of

anarchist philosophy, amounting to the political demand for the aboli-
tion of private property and insisting upon the priority, for activists, of
establishing organisational networks exemplifying an economic configu-
ration of ‘mutual aid’, that I will here try and formulate as a free exchange
of gifts where such an exchange makes no expectation of a counter-gift or
a return in kind.
A Herde or a Horde?
For Freud, a group is a cohort sharing a single point of libidinal invest-
ment. ‘A primary group’, he tells us, ‘is a number of individuals who have put
one and the same object in the place of their ego-ideal and have consequently
identified themselves with one another in their ego’ (1956 [1921]: 116,
Freud’s emphasis). Following Freud, three characteristics of sociality are
discernible: First, a group is stratified, the lateral ties of its members con-
stituted by a foundational vertical investment in an ‘ego-ideal’ such as a
leader, ethos, ideology or similar. The ego-ideal is, accordingly, closely
aligned to what Lacanians call the ‘symbolic order’, that generalised system
of law, language and custom locating individuals in the social-space ‘held
in common’. Second, this initial cathexis confers upon groups a narcissistic
coherence and consistency, because its members ‘re-find’ something of
themselves outside of themselves. Third, this positive dimension of a
group’s primary stratification and mutual narcissistic recognition, bestows
a negative dimension, insofar as a group seals itself off as an inside defined
against what is outside it. It is this tripartite convergence of stratification,
ego-substitution and enclosure, prompting Freud to regard the ego-ideal as
the ‘heir to narcissism’ (139) and the group as, ultimately, a communal
sexual tie organised around a shared and idealised love object (120).
It is not to be overlooked that Freud’s group theory is an ‘up scaling’
of his tripartite theory of the psyche, a model duplicated in both the
Oedipal dynamics he finds at the heart of the familial and his ur-myth
of the primal horde. Furthermore, it is not only that Freud’s model of
the psyche and his model of the social mirror one another, but both tend
to the essentialist—the ‘essential property’ of both might be said to be
narcissistic identification, first with oneself, and then with social groups.
The result is that ensuing psycho- and social dynamics have far-reaching
implications for the kind of community we can imagine building. A
strong, cohesive, ‘healthy’ subject, is a subject managing to concede
something of itself to the ‘law of the father’, whilst correspondingly a
strong, cohesive, ‘healthy’ community, a united community, is a com-
munity in which something of the particularity of its members is par-
tially effaced in the collective substitution of an aspect of their egos by
that of the group’s ‘law of the father’ (i.e., its shared ego-ideal). This
partial loss and surrender of an aspect of oneself, stands in dialectical
tension with the narcissistic gratification of re-finding oneself, outside of
oneself, first in familial and latterly in social life.
From a Freudian perspective, then, the contemporary left’s valorising
of lateral associations is woefully naïve. By failing to grapple with the
libidinal satisfactions groups seek in identification with the figure of a
leader, groups affirming themselves as being leaderless, will frequently
tend toward the unconscious and, therefore, unacknowledged, elevation
of members that might perform this function. It is no wonder unac-
knowledged and oppressive elitisms frequently return within putatively
de-stratified organisations, nor is it hard to appreciate the relentless splin-
tering and infighting that marks them. Contrariwise, the increased nar-
cissistic gain, afforded by exclusionary and protectionist groups, makes it
possible to understand one reason for the current resurgence and popu-
larity of right-wing political movements championing racist policies and
issuing nativist demands.
Personal narcissism finds ready gratification in submission to the abso-
lute narcissism of the demagogic leader, someone who Theodor Adorno
reminds us, ‘can be loved only if he himself does not love’ (1991 [1951]:
141). The magnetism of such charismatic leadership is well rehearsed. As
Freud puts it: ‘All the members [of a group] must be equal to one another,
but they all want to be ruled by one person. Many equals, who can iden-
tify themselves with one another, and a single person equal to them all—
that is the situation that we find realised in groups that are capable of
subsisting. Let us venture, then, to correct [the] pronouncement that
man is a herd animal and assert that he is rather a horde animal, an indi-
vidual creature in a horde led by a chief ’ (1921: 153).
216 B. Watt
It is unsurprising that Freud’s assessment of sociality is decried for its

pessimistic anti-utopianism, as the many are subsumed under the one,
the particular beneath the universal, and individual difference subordi-
nated to collective sameness. The inescapably totalising nature of Freud’s
theory has long been critically noted—by Adorno (1951) and Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen (1988), amongst others—and it is, of course, highly rel-
evant that Freud was writing in Europe during the rise of nationalism,
sectarianism and authoritarianism. Here, it is important to note, Freud’s
account of both the subject and the social, bears witness to the return of
repressed political presumptions in Freud’s texts. Since, according to
Freud, persons are narcissistically identified with themselves and others,
persons and groups are posited as discreet entities embedded within a
matrix of proprietorial relations. In effect, what this amounts to is the
naturalisation of Western liberal political philosophy. Notwithstanding
the enormous merits of the mode of analysis made available by Freudian
theory, this theory must, also, be contextualised and provincialized. In its
self-elevation to an examination of supposedly universal psychosocial
dynamics, this analysis has simultaneously to be understood as the repro-
duction and generalised imposition of a set of psychosocial dynamics
forged in a highly specific geographical, historical and social context. This
is the context of Western political and economic liberalism, with its
attendant historical expressions of economic imperialism and territorial
colonialism.
Based on this critical rendering of Freudian group psychology, I
believe that its implications for communal life are that, at root, one
community presupposes a community of one—as in the Great Seal of
the United States: E. pluribus unum (‘Out of many, one’). It is this com-
munity of one that enables groups to cohere by forming a constitutive
outside. Defining themselves against those they are not, groups avoid
the internecine warfare of Thomas Hobbes’s Bellum omnium contra
omnes (‘war of all against all’), an ensuing scenario for Freud, insofar as
he considers the principal state of individuals toward one another to be
a hostility born of the narcissism of self-preservation (1956 [1921]:
132). Ultimately for Freud (1930: 111), the maxim Homo homini lupus
est (‘man is a wolf to man’) is the tendency of social relations, not neigh-
bourly bon ami.
Freud’s theory likely strikes many today as disagreeable. In broad-

brush terms, for the left, it reeks of a naturalisation of an (albeit, uncon-
scious) desire for closed communities of unequal, non-democratic
governance, a psychologised apology for class, race or gender domination
that must be swept away to build fairer societies. For liberals, where a
premium is placed on the priority and privileges of the individual over
society and the state, it smacks of a paternalism and demagoguery evok-
ing the cultural memory of the twentieth-century’s horrors—precisely
the backdrop against which Freud was writing.
Since I have raised the relation of individual to collective, it is helpful
now to consider one of the most influential responses from activists as to
how this relationship is articulated; a response Srnicek and Williams cri-
tique as ‘folk politics’. These are those praxes, largely emerging in the
counter-culture of the 1960s, but with important anarchist precursors in
Pyotr Kropotkin’s (2009 [1902]) notion of mutual aid and Murray
Bookchin’s (2015) proposals around libertarian municipalism, popularly
known as ‘prefigurative politics’. In prefiguration, there is a ‘do it your-
self ’ emphasis, the collective cultivation of modes of organisation and
sociality ‘prefiguring’ the kind of society that participants desire to be
realised in the future. Examples of prefiguration include participatory
democracy; mutual and peer support groups; free soup kitchens for the
homeless and under-waged; or the occupation and reclamation of priva-
tised land. Indeed, such initiatives are frequently found together.
Srnicek and Williams are highly critical of prefiguration’s, ‘fetishistic
attachment to localist and horizontalist approaches that […] undermine
the construction of an expansive counter-hegemonic project’ (162).
Instead, they set out a stall for ‘organisational ecology’. In their description,
this would be a web comprising groups of varying scales and differing func-
tions, from political parties, the media, think tanks, universities and trade
unions, to single-issue neighbourhood campaigns and (inter)national pro-
test movements, a vision partly derived from the network-systems theory
of Rodrigo Nunes (2014). Whereas folk politics, with its insistence on
leaderless and non-stratified relations, lacks ‘the strategic perspective to
transform spectacular scenes of protest and broad populist movements into
effective long term action’, organisational ecology would ‘include hierar-
chical and closed groups as elements of the broader network’ (164; 163).1
218 B. Watt
Echoing Oscar Wilde’s reputed waggery that the problem with fight-
ing for socialism is that it takes up too many evenings, Srnicek and
Williams charge prefiguration with unviability as a generalizable strategy,
chiefly on the grounds of sustainability and the practical prospects of
being up-scaled. Issues of feasibility aside, a different question can be
raised: is prefiguration successful on its own terms? That is, does it achieve
a preview in the here-and-now, of a better world to come? Or as Freud
would have it, does it instantiate the dissolution of a hegemonic ego-
ideal, transforming the ‘we’ from a horde into a herd? This is a crucial
question, given the widespread hope that participatory democracy, for
instance, might eventually be adopted by mainstream politics and applied
at either municipal or even state levels.
Whilst I, too, am sceptical about prefiguration, I do not want to argue
for its redundancy; it has its place as part of a pluralistic approach to
strategizing. Personally, I recognise that prefigurative practices are pro-
foundly moving and transformative experiences, a release from a sense of
social and economic oppression, alienation and disenchantment with the
current world. Within the housing movement in London, neighbour-
hood assemblies I have helped establish or been involved with, have been
powerful forums for those facing homelessness to access mutual support,
as well as platforms from which to build resistance and opposition. Here,
I want only to point out that prefiguration, in its well-meaning attempt
to wrest politics from any homogenising, narcissistic groupthink adulat-
ing leaders and ideologies, risks unintentionally fostering a different nar-
cissism: individualism. Ironically, it is this narcissism, I suggest, that is
responsible for the envious rancour frequently dividing individuals and
factions, and for the tyranny of structurelessness haunting prospective
organising. This is ironic because prefiguration is supposed to escape,
rather than reproduce, the selfishness and competitiveness characteristic
of neoliberalism’s atomised selfhood, promoting instead the sense of
shared belonging capitalism erodes. How might this phenomenon best
be accounted for? Why is that individualism and factionalism come to
infiltrate prefigurative political practice?
In Freudian terms, without a common libidinal cathexis supplying a
vertical axis of identification, mutuality between group members is unan-
chored. What might otherwise be love and affinity, is readily reversed into
suspicion and contestation. Many activists, I suspect, will object to my

appraisal as a profound mischaracterisation. They will point out that they
do indeed experience the affinity of which I speak, arguing that
Freudianism’s inability to think beyond stratified modes of belonging is
evidence only of its own regressive tendencies. What is more, they might
reasonably ask: why can’t the struggle itself, function as an ego-ideal? This
is an important objection. And it is one to which I will now turn by con-
sidering the work of activist and academic Jeremy Gilbert. In Gilbert’s
recent Common Ground, we find a significant critique of Freudian social-
ity, that attempts both to overcome the problems of individualism and to
avoid re-positing conditions of social stratification, thereby offering a
defence of precisely the kind of political organising Srnicek and Williams
consider flawed.
Contesting Leviathan Logics

It might seem that Freudian group theory is a psychological collectivism,
albeit a problematically totalising and authoritarian one, given its quash-
ing of difference under sameness. Not so, Gilbert argues in his sustained
reflection on individuality and collectivity, Common Ground (2015).
Gilbert is concerned to dethrone the dominant image of the ‘isolated,
competitive individual [as] the basic unit of human experience’ (viii),
that he rightly regards as the mainstay of the liberal tradition and the
fulcrum of our own, current, neoliberal political and economic r ationality.
It is only by decisively overturning the priority of the individual in favour
of the collective, by theorising the collective as such, in a manner irreduc-
ible to notions of atomised selfhood, that he believes this to be achiev-
able. To this end, Gilbert promotes, ‘a concept of sociality as a condition
of dynamic multiplicity and complex creativity […] against any assump-
tion that collectivity can only be understood in terms either of a simple
aggregation of individuals or of a homogenous monolithic community’
(x). Freud, in Gilbert’s analysis, fails on both accounts.
Taking up Borch-Jacobsen’s critique of Freudian sociality, Gilbert cen-
sures Freud for what he calls, after Hobbes, his ‘leviathan logic’: a ‘relent-
less refusal to allow the possibility that there might be forms of lateral,
220 B. Watt
horizontal, mutual identification and bonding between members which

might be independent of, or prior to, their psychic investment in their
leader’ (66). Because it is impossible, within Freud’s model, for there to
be lateral relations independent of an establishing vertical one, Freudian
sociality necessitates a ‘profound philosophical individualism’ (ibid.). On
Gilbert’s reading, Freud is ‘classically meta-individualist’, conceiving the
social as the sum of its parts, amounting to a quasi-transcendental ‘mega-
individual’, that is indeed a reverberation of Hobbes. In charging Freud
of ‘meta-individualism’, Gilbert is clearing a space to theorise the collec-
tive as collective, which is to say, not the collective as meta-individualistic.
This is highly encouraging. Gilbert’s critique tries to vacate accounts of
the social, like Freud’s, that depend upon an aggregate of discrete entities
or objects in favour of a post-Deleuzian process philosophy. By emphasis-
ing pre-individual relational flows, Gilbert’s thinking extends the promise
that it might lay the groundwork for a challenge to private property and
support practices of mutual aid.
Notwithstanding my enormous respect for Gilbert I am, however,
doubtful that process philosophies offer the resources to negotiate the
problems encountered in activist’s day-to-day work, or that his account
provides adequate foundations for the deconstruction of notions of prop-
erty. Gilbert is a longstanding promoter of participatory democracy and
his proposal for achieving this end, is to mobilise an ‘affect based’ model
of sociality, treating groups as comprised by flows and currents of emo-
tions, feelings, intensities, that are, by definition, horizontal, decentred,
immanent to the social itself and prior to the construction of ‘the
individual’. Although Gilbert does raise numerous pitfalls of left organis-
ing, I remain unconvinced he adequately confronts the antagonism at the
heart of the social identified by Freud. Whatever final evaluations we
might arrive at regarding psychoanalytic theory, Freud’s observation that
communal life is fundamentally shot-through with an ambivalence
imparting on it the characteristics of friction and hostility is, in my opin-
ion, well made and a matter we will return to at the end of this chapter.
The substantial difficulties of organising implied by such antagonism,
strikes me as too easily glossed-over in the rhetoric of affects. By citing
examples of festival and youth music culture to illustrate the ‘feeling
together’ of ‘affective sociality’, Gilbert makes plain that vitalism manifests
itself most clearly in the carnivalesque character of much left-wing activity,
its frequently exuberant party atmosphere, in which the law is temporarily

suspended and, in the words of that most famous of the old English pro-
test ballads, ‘the world is turned upside down’. However, whilst festivals
and street parties provide invaluable and enjoyable occasions for forming
political connections, snubbing social norms, building bonds of affiliation
and trust between activists whilst ‘escaping from oneself ’, I would contend
that they cannot provide adequate platforms for launching effective politi-
cal change. Not only are they exclusionary to many, whose culture, sensi-
bilities, age or health render the carnivalesque an inhibitor rather than an
enabler to political participation, but I would argue that the ‘unity’ of such
moments of ‘togetherness’ is largely illusionary. Mostly, it strikes me that
their function is as a prop for avoiding the guilt around the excesses of
individual gratification. In other words, we find we are returned, from
within Gilbert’s own account, to the problems of individualism.
It is time to consider what the obstacle to overcoming individualism is,
in pushing oneself out from the confines of individuality toward genuine
collectivity. This is necessary so that a genuine philosophical and political
challenge to proprietorial relations can be made and an exploration of
what matrices of mutual aid might consist of can be undertaken. Where
Gilbert and prefiguration currently err, is in placing emphasis on the
erasure or cancellation of the ego, in the striving for the construction of
the greater, collective good. By formulating the ego as a discreet entity
and addressing the object of the ego as the site of difficulties for organising,
the problems of narcissism are left untouched, so that no matter the
extent to which harmonious, lateral relations are desired, the propensity
of groups toward infighting remains operational. To handle this narcis-
sism, we need to recognise that the impediment towards group cohesion
doesn’t hinge on the ego, as present strategies of prefiguration would have
it, rather it turns around the problems of identification which, as Freud
recognised, are already multiple and pre-individual in any case (1921:
161). To simply expunge the ego, on the false grounds that it is a homog-
enous totality, without addressing the multifarious libidinal investments
constitutive of it, would be, as with the left’s carnivalism, to enact a pas-
sive and—doubtless, temporary—suppression of the consciousness of
guilt, leaving everything as it was. We need to return to Freud, then, but
also supplement the Freudian model of sociality with a crucial missing
term, the ideal-ego.
222 B. Watt
Idealising the Ego or Egoising the Ideal?

As a theoretical contribution to the psychoanalytic account of subject
formation, the ideal-ego does not receive a full elaboration in Freud’s
writing, least of all within his group psychology. Rather, it was left up to
Jacques Lacan and others to draw out the divergence between the ideal-
ego and the ego-ideal. As I will mobilise this pair here, the ideal-ego refers
to the ‘self I ideally see myself as’. In the age of social media, we might
imagine this as the ‘self of the selfie’: think, today, of the specular nature
of protest, disseminated over social media and news channels in dramatic
photographs or video footage. In the lexicon of psychoanalysis, this is the
self ‘complete-unto-itself ’, the self of omnipotence and perfection belong-
ing, for the Lacanians, to the dualistic dimension of the Imaginary.
Whereas the ego-ideal, is that third-order Other for whom my ‘perfor-
mances of selfhood’ are secretly enacted, the omni-observant Other, the
Symbolic Order itself whom I wish to please and impress by my efforts at
self-cultivation. The ideal-ego and ego-ideal are, thus, interdependent:
insofar as I strive to better approximate that image I have of my ‘perfect
self ’, my self as ‘yet-to-be-realised Other’, I presuppose the voyeuristic
gaze of that, so to speak, ‘other Other outside myself ’—the Other for
whom the dramas of my self-actualisation are, ultimately, undertaken.
With this distinction in mind, let us consider communities organised
on the narcissistic basis of a community of one. As seen, these communi-
ties might be structured in two ways. Firstly, around the identification of
the individual ideal-ego with a collective ego-ideal, such as in the leader
of a traditional political party. This structuring provides an external van-
tage point, an ‘ideal’, from which to view and measure oneself that is,
simultaneously, not-me but also me. Despite fierce demands for confor-
mity frequently characteristic of such groups, a dimension of alterity is
thereby introduced. Secondly, putatively non-stratified communities,
such as many of today’s social movements, operate with a different narcis-
sism, the narcissism of possessive individualism, where the primary point
of identification is myself. Thus, despite their self-understanding as
champions of difference and diversity they in fact dodge the sacrifice of
having to lose, if only to re-find something of oneself—mitigating, in
effect, against alterity.
It should be stressed, that Freud makes clear no community is purely

organised around a monolithically vertical collective ego-ideal or popu-
lated solely by the lateral jostling of individualised ideal-egos (1921:
161). Instead, not unlike organisational ecology, all communities and,
indeed, all subjectivities according to Freud, are in practice mixed modes,
composed of simultaneously belonging as a ‘component part’ to ‘numer-
ous groups’. Nevertheless, the paradoxes for understanding groups pro-
duced by drawing the distinction between the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal
helps introduce a measure of analytical clarity, within the otherwise
murky problems of why the left encounters such strife in building and
maintaining effective resistance.
Given the interdependence of the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal, associa-
tions attempting to jettison a collective ego-ideal do not succeed; the ego-
ideal is merely repressed. Thus, it is bound to return with a renewed force.
For the return of the repressed ego-ideal, in the guilt-inducing guise of the
critical and self-berating omni-observant Other, I will follow the Lacanians
in reserving the title of the super-ego. This manifestation of the super-ego
as the Law in its paranoid articulation as the punitive, vengeful Other, is
often apparent in left activism as intense self-criticism at personal failings
or ‘never doing enough’, as well as a suspicion and rivalry toward indi-
viduals and different factions. Such self-admonishments and paranoia are
stoked and exploited by the very real experiences of the infiltration of
protest groups by state spies, as well as activists’ anxieties around demon-
strating dissent in the context of near total security surveillance.
Prefiguration, consequently, too often bears witness to the recapitula-
tion of the capitalist modes of relating it wishes to transform. That is,
prefiguration becomes a symptom of neoliberal capitalism, stemming from
the injunction to ‘overcome the ego’. It is an expression of a neoliberal
super-ego. It is, perhaps for this reason, that the meditative and positive
thinking philosophies so popular across an individualised ‘self-care’ cul-
ture, emphasising the dissolution or suspension of the ego, find favour
not only with those seeking respite from neoliberalism but also amongst
enthusiasts of today’s capitalism. Where the dissolution of the ego is priv-
ileged, neoliberalism’s ‘rational’ pursuit of individual gain dovetails with
positive thinking, forming part of the broader social milieu Foucault
derided as the ‘entrepreneurship of the self ’. In our age of supposed
224 B. Watt
emancipation from indenture to this or that ego-ideal, the ego reasserts

itself in the very act of the suspension of the ego itself. By ‘taking a break’
from my ego for a week on my mindfulness retreat, I enact my depen-
dence upon and exemplification of, the very system I am retreating from.
This is not mindfulness: it is mindlessness.
If hostility and suspicion are hazards of communities (supposedly)
solely composed of ideal-egos, whereas communities predominantly
structured around an ego-ideal have a better chance of mutuality and
civility, then the question is how to break this deadlock. How can we
retain the freedom of personal self-determination characteristic of com-
munities valorising individuated ideal-egos, without losing the civility
and coherence, the sense of shared mission and purpose, characteristic of
a group internally identifying with itself because organized around a
communal ego-ideal? This is the tension between a politics of the same
and a politics of difference, of the claims of the particular over the weight
of the universal, a key socio-political conundrum of our times. Following
the analysis we have been pursuing here, I suggest that both the politics
of the same and the politics of difference lapse into an implicitly shared
and divisive conception of belonging because both tarry with an unre-
solved dialectic between ego-ideal and ideal-ego presupposing a reference
to a meta-group, a community of one. The community of one treats com-
munal relations in substantialising and, therefore, proprietorial terms.
Because community remains reified and relations of property are
retained in both versions, they equally tend toward the construction of
divisions encouraging the increased possibility of conflict between fac-
tions. Communities primarily invested in a collective ego-ideal find it
easier to externalise aggression through their animosity toward ‘outsiders’
or those ‘who don’t belong’, freeing them to better recognise their allies
through shared investment in an idealised love object. However, in puta-
tively de-stratified groups of unmoored ideal-egos, because there is no
commonly shared love object, there is a concomitant lack of a common
enemy to act as the lightning conductor for the group’s aggression. Such
cohorts are, accordingly, prey to falling into internal clashes and uncer-
tainty around who their ‘genuine’ allies are. To return to the distinction
between the leader–led party and the leaderless social movement, politi-
cal parties can focus their animosity onto other parties, whereas in
l eaderless social movements defined solely by the cause for which they are
campaigning, aggression often only finds outlet at an interpersonal level,
encouraging suspicious sentiments toward others.
Here, individuals risk vilifying other individuals with whom they
could make alliances, because the return of the repressed ego-ideal qua
persecutory super-ego threatens the sustainability of the ideal-ego. Guilt
demands the preservation of personalised moral integrity over the mis-
trust of an always corrupt or corruptible common purpose. Others in the
community are located as a constitutive outside against which moral
identity is drawn, given that this outside is not conferred in advance.
Insofar as individuals have banded together for whatever purpose, the
group might acquire its own ideal-ego, that is then elevated into an ego-
ideal. From there, the unconscious belief can emerge that the ideal-ego
turned ego-ideal of the association captures the entire leftist-field: the
social movement or protest camp, tacitly regards itself as the vanguard
inhabiting the place of the collective ego-ideal, the particular instantiat-
ing the universal that is capable, in principle if not in fact, of hegemonis-
ing social space. This is most evident in contemporary activist culture,
where longstanding activists or political affiliations, that have possibly
contributed decades to a cause, can be suddenly excluded, no-platformed
or publically shamed by new associations for ‘transgressions’.
Obviously, there is no denying that individuals and political organisa-
tions do, demonstrably, act badly and should, therefore, be denounced.
That said, there is a fundamental issue not to lose sight of here. When
social movements attempt to dispense of the ego-ideal, what is ‘outside’
or ‘public’ and ‘inside’ and ‘private’ are subject to inversion. Frequently,
this means that it is not the outside of capitalism or social injustice that
is battled, but the ‘enemy within’ the movement itself. Within such a
culture, there is only room for unstable alliances to spring-up and quickly
crumble away again, in the repetitive attempt to form and maintain an
outside capable of sustaining an integral moral identity. In the final part
of this chapter, we need to challenge the difficulty posed by the narcis-
sistic group, the community of one, that must posit an outside to main-
tain an inside. My contention is that only by rehabilitating prefiguration
through a radical reappraisal of notions of property can such a challenge
be launched.
226 B. Watt
o Dream of a Love That Is Bodiless:

T
Toward Communitas
Much of the thrust behind Srnicek and William’s Postcapitalism, is an
argument reasserting the importance of the universal as indispensable for
a left-wing populism. In this regard, they are fellow travellers of Ernesto
Laclau who critiques the championing of the particular, associated with
postmodern identity politics, instead arguing for the necessity of the left
to once again take up the task of reinstating the universal as indispensable
for transforming itself into a counter-hegemonic force (e.g. 1996). In the
psychoanalytic language we have been rehearsing here, this is about insist-
ing on supplying an ego-ideal that can construct mass identifications,
great enough in size to contest a population’s identification with the status
quo. Srnicek and Williams provide a historically particular content for the
‘empty’ universal, which are the demands of accelerating capitalism’s capa-
cious and rapacious technologizing to release the workforce into a post-
work world by, as much as currently possible, fully automating the
economy and providing populations with a universal basic income.
Despite the merits of these demands, their proposed organisational
ecology risks sailing headlong into all the old problems of the left, because
it does not sufficiently address the problem of the inverted inside/outside.
Instead, it leaves unchallenged conditions of rivalry and enmity. Even by
casting organisational ecology as a pluralistic web, the logic of the com-
munity of one is sustained with the consequence that, ultimately, their
model will eventually have to decide between two options: either to grasp
the nettle by nominating one group as occupying the vanguard (the ego-
ideal, the hegemonic universal organisation); or to accept, through the
fact of de-stratification with its repression of the ego-ideal the inexorabil-
ity of internecine warfare (the result of super-egoic return).
Srnicek and Williams might protest that I offer a false choice, because
network-theory evacuates such logic altogether. They might point to how
network theory is immanent, open, plastic; inherently resistant to any
totalising construal, because it is a many-layered multi-dimensional con-
ception of the social composed of unbounded and undemarcated flows
and currents, nodes and nodules, flashes of intensities, networks of net-
works and networks within networks, rather than any lumpen aggregate
of discrete identities. It is a heterogeneity not a homogeneity, reflecting

the multicultural, intersectional and identity-plural nature of late-
capitalist societies. But: it is, still, a network; it is, still, a thing.
Whilst network-theories and process philosophies dodge reducing the
social to an aggregate based body politic, I insist they still reify society by
positing a meta-group or mega-individual, albeit an entity-evacuated
one, a body without bodies or, to revert to the language of Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, a ‘body without organs’. I worry this harks on a strain
of romanticism that I can overcome myself, by reimagining myself as a
networked flow, an ever-fluctuating temporary spark of relay in a decen-
tred circuit. Whilst this way of talking admittedly affords significant
descriptive advantages for thinking the globalised internet world, it can-
not really grasp the social as genuinely Other and, what is more, stalls in
moving beyond the descriptive to the explanatory. On this score, I wish
to recall the figure of Narcissus’s Other, Echo: in spurning Echo/his
Other, Narcissus condemns himself to death by adoration of his own,
inverted, immaterial incarnation; his ‘dream of a love that is bodiless […]
that what is but a shade [but] must be a body’.2 To avoid the fate of
Narcissus—to avoid the false premising of the social on the basis of the
individual, the One—we need to disrupt the Freudian logic that stable
groups are narcissistic insofar as they supply a mirror of oneself, a re-
finding of oneself outside of oneself and, therefore, of insulating oneself
from that which is Other. While the social continues to be courted as a
some-thing, it is susceptible to eliciting the multiple projections of indi-
vidual or group ideal-egos, stoking the narcissism of minor differences.
Instead, we need a notion of community that resists the circularity of, ‘I
find in or get back from the social what I project into or give out to it’.
Roberto Esposito’s Communitas (2009) provides us with a highly valu-
able advance in this direction when he explicitly rejects positing the social
as a body: ‘the community cannot be thought of as a body, as a corpora-
tion in which individuals are founded in a larger individual’ (7). Neither,
however, can it be a narcissistic ‘intersubjective “recognition” in which
individuals are reflected in each other so as to confirm their initial iden-
tity’. Nor, as in network-theory, is it ‘the subject’s expansion or multipli-
cation’ (ibid.). Community is utterly uncharacterisable as a ‘thing’; strictly
speaking, it is a ‘no-thing’. Where legend has it that the radical Reformation
preacher, Thomas Müntzer, was executed because he refused to relinquish
228 B. Watt
his belief in omnia sunt communia (‘all things in common’), Esposito

upholds that there is no-thing in common. Instead, ‘the totality of per-
sons [are] united not by a “property” but precisely by an obligation or a
debt; not by an “addition” but by a “subtraction”’, constituting an intense
‘exposure’ of the individual, ‘to what interrupts [any kind of ] closing and
turns it inside out’, ‘push[ing] him into contact with what he is not, with
his “nothing” […] the most extreme of […] possibilities but also the
riskiest of threats’ (6–8).
Esposito’s rejection of property should be heard in its double register:
in the philosophical sense of that which is ‘proper to’ or a ‘quality of ’
someone or something, as well as in the socio-economic relation, the
items or land of so-and-so. Thus, that which is communal is not what we
find outside ourselves that is proper to us all, that in virtue of which we
share, such as an attribute (‘language’, ‘humanity’ or even ‘life itself ’) or
territory (‘neighbourhood’, ‘nation’ or even ‘the Earth’) that we all ‘hold
in common’ and so are united by. Instead, community is what we encoun-
ter that is improper to us, that is not ourselves and that makes us Other
to ourselves, in so doing. As the final sentence of Communitas reads, ‘this
nothing held in common […] is the world that joins us in the condition
of exposure to the most unyielding absence of meaning’ (149).
This model enacts a rupture within the inside/outside, open/closed or
private/public castings of subjectivity and community that we saw to be
constitutive of Freudian sociality, and that I suggested are a source of
much difficulty for political organising on the left. Esposito contrasts
communitas with ‘immunitas’, to strategies of ‘immunisation’, evoked in
the dual medical and juridical senses. Immunisation seals off inside from
outside. Just as the immune system protects the integrity of the body
from invasive pathogens, so diplomatic immunity shelters from prosecu-
tion the official to whom legal exemption is extended or, conversely, com-
pletely expropriates from protection those designated by the state
sans-papier. Esposito exploits the paradoxical tension this involves:
immunity guards against ‘too much outside’, protecting us from perish-
ing for instance, if the body succumbs to a disease, or if a territory is
invaded; however too much immunity, as in an autoimmune disease or
total national protectionism, erodes the very conditions of life itself.
For these reasons, Esposito charges the entire spectrum of contempo-

rary political philosophy as trapped within ‘immunitarian’ models of
community. ‘This means’, he tells us, ‘that community isn’t an entity, nor
is it a collective subject, nor a totality of subjects…rather it is the relation
that makes them no longer individual subjects because it closes them off
from their identity…it is the “with,” the “between” […] the threshold
where they meet in a point of contact that brings them into relation with
others to the degree to which it separates them from themselves’ (139).
Community is a non-reciprocal relation, it is ‘the gift that one gives
because one must give and because one cannot not give’, where there is no
expectation or even possibility of the same being returned in kind (6). In
this unequal relation of debt and the obligation to give, the possibility of
reverting to a community of one, in either its ego-ideal or ideal-ego mani-
festations, is subverted by rendering inoperable the inside/outside binary,
because this binary is premised upon notions of that which is proper to,
that which belongs to or is owned by, a specific individual or community.
‘The subjects of community’, Esposito argues, ‘are united by an “obliga-
tion”, in the sense that we say “I owe you something” but not “you owe
me something” […] precisely expropriat[ing] them of their initial prop-
erty […] of their most proper property, namely, their subjectivity’ (6–7).
Although he does not mention him by name, Esposito’s deconstruc-
tion of proprietorial philosophies of subjectivity, community and poli-
tics, is therefore a direct challenge to the liberal tradition of political
philosophy beginning with John Locke. Famously, Locke argued that
claims of ownership are justified insofar as subjects are initially self-
owning and can, therefore, rightfully claim possession of that which they
labour upon: ‘The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may
say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that
nature hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed his labour with, and
joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property’
(1980 [1690]: 19, Locke’s emphasis).
Most obviously, of course, this applies agriculturally, to land that is
cultivated. However, as per the history of colonialism and the slave trade
upon which much of the Western industrial revolutions were built, this
philosophy affords justification for the seizure of the territory of others
230 B. Watt
and the debasing transformation of people into tradable commodities.

Esposito’s thinking contends with Lockean notions of primordial self-
ownership, providing philosophical cover for economic and political pro-
grams of appropriation. In later works, Esposito has explicitly linked
community as this ‘lack of one’s own’ (2012: 29) with Freud’s myth of the
primal horde and Lacan’s understanding of subjectivity as manqué à être
(lack of being), recovering in sociality a grounding not, pace Freud, in
narcissism, but in melancholy: ‘Melancholy is not something that com-
munity contains along with other attitudes, postures, or possibilities but
something by which itself is contained and determined’ (28). For Esposito,
community therefore cannot be conceived as an entity in which there is a
narcissistic re-finding of oneself outside of oneself, something that belongs
to us because we belong to it. Instead, it is that in which we are always in
search of, an empty and negative space in which we lose ourselves.
How though, we must now ask, can Esposito’s position be translated
into political practice? At this stage, it should be clear how useful Esposito’s
thought around the gift relation is, for providing renewed emphasis and
urgency to traditional anarchist preoccupations with practices of mutual
aid and demands for the dissolution of economic relations of private
property. For activists, Esposito’s philosophy of community provides a
plausible response to the tyranny of structurelessnes, a way of interrupt-
ing the narcissistic ego-ideal/ideal-ego dialectic, whilst for tacticians and
strategists, community so construed implies a clear political objective. By
insisting on the priority and alterity of the community with respect to the
individual, engendering the work of opening ourselves up to what we are
not, Esposito unsettles Freudian sociality, dependent upon finding some-
thing of ourselves reflected in the social.
This however raises a difficulty. Does the gift relation, as Esposito out-
lines it, escape slipping back into the dynamics of ideal-ego to ideal-ego
relations? As his account stands, it would appear the gift relation is cast
in exclusively horizontal terms. Perhaps the key is forestalling debt and
the non-reciprocal gift exchange from exclusive distribution along an
axis of lateral relations, by acknowledging rather than repressing the
super-egoic dimension present in the obligation to give with no anticipa-
tion of a return. Linda Weir (2013) has made a similar suggestion in her
critical reading of Esposito, by proposing Esposito re-introduce Marcel
Mauss’ (2001) fourth and under-discussed relationship of gift giving, the

obligation to give to the gods. Formulated under these sorts of condi-
tions, the gift relation may avoid falling so heavily prey to rivalry and the
narcissism of minor differences—such as in the potlatch, where gift giv-
ing is competitive—whilst converging upon a simple, unified and uni-
versalisable praxis. This is the praxis that would be most subversive of the
logic of capital and consistent with a notion of community beyond the
community of one; it would be pursued at the micro-political level
through an ethics of mutual aid, and at the macro-political level through
full-scale political struggle—that is, the abolition of property. Calls for
the abolition of private property and the instatement of a gift economy
are anything but new. As already noted, the destruction of private prop-
erty comprises the keystone of anarchist and Marxist political philoso-
phies. The gift economy, especially, is not without significant challenges,
both conceptually as Jacques Derrida (2008) has shown in his reading of
Mauss, as well as practically as Weir has indicated with respect to
Esposito. These are very real difficulties and I would not seek to ‘immun-
ise’ myself against them.
My attempt to analyse some of the problematic psychodynamics
encountered by activism and social movements has led to the proposition
that the struggle against property should be the pivot around which the
activities of the left turn, the primary target of its struggles. Not everyone
will agree, either with my analysis of the psychodynamics of activism, or
with the conclusions that I have drawn from that analysis. Further work
must critically examine the conceptual problems that my analysis has
given rise to, whilst providing the substantive details of what such a gift
economy might look like and how it might practically function. One
place this might start would be with an engagement with Freud’s well-
known scepticism towards the emancipatory prospect of the abolition of
property. In Civilisation and its Discontents, he seeks to disabuse the
naiveté of the ‘communists [who] believe that they have found the deliv-
erance from our evil’, through their faith that human beings are primor-
dially ‘good and well-disposed to [their] neighbour’, were it not for the
regrettable ‘intrusion of private property’ that ‘has corrupted [their]
nature’. Freud’s argument is, simply, a restatement of his pessimistic view
that Homo homini lupus est (man is wolf to man). For Freud, even were all
232 B. Watt
inequalities levelled—‘all wealth held in common’—the ‘human love of

aggression’ would persist (1930: 112–113). As Freud believes, it is suffi-
cient only to recall the aggressiveness that reigned amongst what he calls
‘primitive’ pre-propertied human beings, the rage of the infant, or the
jealous sexual possessiveness of lovers, to realise the truth of this.
It is important to stress, therefore, that I agree with Freud that there is
no conquering of aggression or placating of antagonism toward one’s
neighbour, just as there can be no final reckoning with the problems of
guilt. And, to be clear, my appeal to Esposito’s recasting of community is
not an attempt to offer a model of sociality that evades the difficulties of
communal life. Rather, it is an attempt to reorient discussions of com-
munity away from reifying, narcissistic notions of the communal towards
an emphasis on a melancholic foundation to community, as that which is
lost and that which is not held in common. Such a definition does not
aim to offer a rationale for a ‘fairer’ redistribution of property, but enacts
a call for continual engagement with the always incomplete political,
ethical and intellectual work that is the struggle against property as such—
in all its ontological, legal and economic modalities.
It is my twofold hope that this recasting—or ‘negativising’—of com-
munity, starts the work of clearing a space for a rapprochement between
psychoanalysis and anarchist political philosophy and practice, whilst also
offering some points of orientation for the left more broadly. By develop-
ing praxes that annul propertied relations through the non-reciprocal
exchange of gifts, my personal hope is that activists can find renewed
impetus for searching for conditions under which class and other alienat-
ing social distinctions might be eroded, along with the principle under
which dominant cohorts can maintain control of the economy and com-
mand over social and cultural capitals. By reading Esposito’s privileging of
an obligatory gift relation as proposing rather than decisively annulling the
ideal-ego/super-ego, social movements might begin to search, not for
ways to banish human aggression amongst their members with hollow
proclamations of tolerance and inclusively but, rather, to restore the bonds
of love and identification Freud regarded as constitutive of group rela-
tions. In the non-reciprocal gift relation, a relation of lack and not-having,
we can possibly begin to catch sight of a mode of togetherness through
which activists might found associations and programs of social care for
the precarious and disenfranchised within the all-pervasive capitalist

order, associations socially striving toward Lacan’s famous and paradoxical
formulation of love, to ‘give what you do not have’ (2015: 129).
Notes
1. There are many unanswered questions in Srnicek’s and Williams’ presen-
tation of organisational ecology as an alternative to prefigurative strategies
of left political organising. In particular, I wonder if organisational ecol-
ogy is the updated vernacular for a melancholy refusal to mourn the old
Leninist saw of establishing ‘dual power’, a disavowal of the lesson from
Michel Foucault that in ‘political thought and analysis, we still have not
cut off the head of the king’ (1976: 89), redirecting the labour of our
thought and action to the diffuse and multiple operations of power, where
‘there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and
ruled’ (ibid.: 94). It would, however, be unfair to portray them as feigning
a full elaboration, which we can only hope is forthcoming in publications
that will further enrich their fine and significant contribution to left
thinking.
2. The translation is Allen Mandelbaum’s (1993: 94).
References
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Bookchin, M. (2015). The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of
Direct Democracy. London and New York: Vesro.
Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1988). The Freudian Subject. Trans. C. Porter. Stanford:
Standford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2008). Given Time: Counterfeit Money: Counterfeit Money Vol. VI.
Trans. P. Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Esposito, R. (2009). Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Esposito, R. (2012). Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics.
Trans. R. N. Noel Welch. Fordham University Press.
234 B. Watt
Foucault, M. (1976). The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume I.

Trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin.
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com/joreen/tyranny.htm
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Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XVII). Ed. and Trans. J. Stratechey.
London: Vintage.
Freud, S. (1930). Civilisation and Its Discontents, in (1961) Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XXI). Ed. and Trans. J. Stratechey. London:
Vintage.
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Individualism. London: Pluto Press.
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Trans. I. McKay. London.
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(1960–1961). Ed. J.-A. Miller, Trans. B. Fink. Cambridge: Polity.
Laclau, E. (1996). Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics? In
Emancipation(s). London: Verso.
Locke, J. (1980 [1690]). Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing.
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Mauss, M. (2001). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Ancient
Societies. Trans. W. D. Halls. London: Routledge.
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Barry Watt is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice, a doc-

toral candidate in Sociology at the University of Roehampton, and community
activist and organiser in East London. He trained at The Site for Contemporary
Psychoanalysis, and read Philosophy at Durham and Warwick Universities.
10
Neurotic and Paranoid Citizens
Stephen Frosh
Scrivening
There has been much fuss made in recent years of Herman Melville’s
(1853) story, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, with Bartleby’s
stock response to all requests, ‘I would prefer not to’, being presented
variously as the beginning of radical revolt against neoliberalism, or the
embodiment of what that revolt could be—a kind of Great Refusal. Hardt
and Negri (2000), in Empire, take the former view: for them, Bartleby’s
refusal is a way of obstructing power, but it does not create anything new.
It is simply the first stage in a liberatory politics, clearing the ground or at
least freeing the citizen from capitalism’s grip; the work of radical revision
is still to come. Slavoj Žižek, however, gives Bartlebian refusal a much
higher status. For him, it is a principle of active resistance—not just refus-
ing to comply with the conformist agenda, but also disrupting it in the
name of something more. Comparing his own position with that of
Hardt and Negri, Žižek comments:
S. Frosh (*)
Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London,
London, UK

236 S. Frosh
[For] HN [sic], Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ is interpreted as merely

the first move of, as it were, clearing the table, of acquiring a distance
toward the existing social universe; what is then needed is a move toward
the painstaking work of constructing a new community—if we remain
stuck at the Bartleby stage, we end up in a suicidal marginal position with
no consequences…. From our point of view, however, this, precisely, is the
conclusion to be avoided: in its political mode, Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer
not to’ is not the starting point of ‘abstract negation’ which should then be
overcome in the patient positive work of the ‘determinate negation’ of the
existing social universe, but a kind of arche, the underlying principle that
sustains the entire movement: far from ‘overcoming’ it, the subsequent
work of construction, rather, gives body to it. (Žižek 2006, p. 382)
And further (Ibid.), ‘Bartleby’s attitude is not merely the first, preparatory,
stage for the second, more “constructive,” work of forming a new alterna-
tive order; it is the very source and background of this order, its permanent
foundation’. And finally, in the (in)famous last lines of his book Violence,
Žižek offers a blueprint for political action that is not so much anti- or
nonviolent in the manner that, for example, Judith Butler (2009) pro-
motes; it is rather, a process of complete disavowal, of negating the violence
of the political system so that it cannot touch the human subject at all. By
now, it seems, the subject has become a site of absolute withdrawal:
Better to do nothing than to engage in localised acts the ultimate function

of which is to make the system run more smoothly (acts such as providing
space for the multitude of new subjectivities). The threat today is not pas-
sivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’, to ‘participate’, to mask
the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘do some-
thing’: academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly
difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw… If one means by violence a
radical upheaval of the basic social relations, then, crazy and tasteless as it
may sound, the problem with historical monsters who slaughtered millions
was that they were not violent enough. Sometimes, doing nothing is the
most violent thing to do. (Žižek 2008, p. 183)
This sounds pretty bad: Hitler and Stalin were not violent enough.
Fortunately, elsewhere (for instance in a response to a review in the British
periodical, the New Statesman), Žižek has clarified his position as a more
contingent one, which adopts Bartleby as a preferred tactic rather than an

absolute. ‘There are situations’, he writes, stirred up by being read as cal-
lous, ‘where it is better to do nothing (since our engagement just strength-
ens the system)—sometimes I refer to this as the Bartleby-politics; there
are situations where we have to engage in a strong global act (like the
struggle to defeat Fascism); and there are situations where one should
engage in modest local struggles’ (Žižek 2015). Even in the Violence quo-
tation he qualifies his promotion of ‘doing nothing’ as applying ‘some-
times’. This should be taken seriously, or else there is a danger of
misrepresenting Žižek as a total cynic, which clearly he is not however
much he likes to disrupt predictable positions. Bartleby is an ideal in the
context of neoliberalism’s massive pressure towards action, the ‘do some-
thing, however violently damaging’ that characterised the official
American response to 9/11, for example. Faced with this pressure there
may even be a link with the aforementioned nonviolence that Butler
(2009) presses for—a nonviolence that is itself ‘violent’ in the sense of
difficult and necessarily forceful, a nonviolence that is much harder to
achieve than is the almost reflex-like violence that every hurt seems to
demand. That is to say, qualified as Žižek makes it by the frequent neces-
sity to abandon the position of ‘I prefer not to’ when faced with the actual
contingencies of political reality—the many situations in which either a
‘strong global act’ or ‘modest local struggles’ are called for to resist actual,
urgent wrongs (and Žižek gives several examples of these in relation to his
own political involvements)—Bartleby might still stand as a riposte to the
pressure to comply, to buy into the governing ideology and its practices.
Žižek entertainingly and correctly points out that many of the appar-
ently resistive acts in which people engage are then (or already) colonised
by late capitalism in its astonishing capacity to make profit out of every-
thing, even its own internal contradictions. For example, ‘the multitude
of new subjectivities’ referred to in one of the quotations above shows just
how versatile the existing system can be. We are, as Žižek has told us many
times, now compelled to enjoy, in all the multifarious ways we might
wish; there is no real constraint, no single way in which we have to be
coercively formed as a normative subject; yet (as Hardt and Negri 2000,
also insist) all these multitudinous subjectivities are subject to the big
constraint of the neoliberal market, which we buy into almost simply by
238 S. Frosh
breathing. Gendered, racialised, sexed, aged, diasporic or nationalist, local

or global: all these subjectivities have their appeal and their objects of
consumption, every one of them can become a market. And then there is
the way that ‘academics participate in meaningless debates’—a nice state-
ment from the famously prolix philosopher. Still, he has a point: even the
endless production of critical texts serves the market, and neoliberalism
need have no worries about it.
Nevertheless, there is something to be said against the advocacy of dis-
engagement: one might, for example, want to speak out against genuine
terror. If the fashion for Bartleby can be accepted as more than an empty
pose or piece of incitement, it still needs contextualising, its contingencies
need to be drawn out and its possible downside needs to be articulated.
For Žižek, it has genuine revolutionary potential; and one can see perhaps
how ‘indifference’ of the kind he describes can be a form of resistance,
because the subject is not responding either to the seductive appeal of the
big Other or to its threat. We are called to fill a lack, and a response is
demanded of us; we should be enthusiastic to do so, we should—obvi-
ously—go shopping to counter terrorism. In this context, indifference to
the call seems like it could indeed be resistive. But there is also the possi-
bility that, either in general or under certain conditions, indifference rep-
resents the wrong kind of resistance, the other side of the ‘I’d prefer not to’
that is found in psychoanalysis when the patient knows what has to be
done, but backs away from it. ‘Ok, I have seen where this is going, and it
is too far for me. Leave me alone.’ This is not so much the ‘I would prefer
not to’ in relation to action, but ‘I would prefer not to know’. And again,
there is the problem of indifference to various forms of injustice. Is indif-
ference to political context, to suffering and loss, a dangerous kind of
denial? The relationship between political and psychoanalytic forms of
resistance is a key issue in unravelling this. As has been noted many times,
most impressively perhaps by Jacqueline Rose (2007), the relationship
between these two different modes of resistance is complex, perhaps even
opposed. One might even say that at times resistance of the psychoana-
lytic kind has to be overcome for resistance of the political variety to be
activated. This is because psychic resistance is characterised by a closing of
what should be an open space of inquiry. Indeed, the notion of the ‘psy-
chic’, with its implication of being open to influences from outside and
in, of registering uncomfortable messages from speakers who were

assumed to be quietened, is precisely what we might want to call on when
considering the sources of active resistance to injustice. We need to hear
and see the troubles that are often deliberately hidden from us; we need
to allow them their voices and their apparitional materialisations. Or as
Butler (2011, p. 102) describes it (drawing on Walter Benjamin), these
lost consciousnesses need to be allowed to ‘flash up’ as a moment of
reminder, a breaking through of that which was occluded in history, but
can now be recovered as a potentially revolutionary agent. But to make
this possible, something has to be open in the mind and in the culture.
Rose (2007, p. 21) names the opposition: ‘If in political vocabularies,
resistance is the passage to freedom, for psychoanalysis, it is repetition,
blockage, blind obeisance to crushing internal constraint.’ The closing of
the mind is what is being evoked, ‘the mind at war with itself, blocking
the path to its own freedom and, with it, its ability to make the world a
better, less tyrannical, place’ (Ibid.).
Psychoanalysis reveals something important here. This is that there are
conditions under which political resistance is made impossible by the
active psychological resistance to knowledge—to the ‘unknown knowns’,
the things that are often right there in front of us in terms of injustice,
but cannot be seen or named because they are simply too painful, or
because the responsibility they demand of us is too much to bear. Under
such circumstances, ‘I would prefer not to’ has a kind of culpability
around it, however easy it might be to understand and forgive. ‘I would
prefer not to’ because it is too dangerous (for example, those who do not
stand up against violent political oppression); ‘I would prefer not to’
because I simply have to protect those who are dependent on me and my
continued well-being; ‘I would prefer not to’ because I am too uncertain,
too unclear, too anxious. These are not necessarily blameworthy ‘I would
prefer not tos’, but neither are they the acme of political resilience, as
Žižek thinks, in the ideal resistance situation, Bartleby might turn out to
be. It could also be the case that the forces stacked against resistance and
in favour of ‘I would prefer not to’ are themselves part of the coercive
system; that is, rather than it being disruptive, perhaps ‘I would prefer
not to’ can also ‘make the system run more smoothly’.
240 S. Frosh
If we might at times understand ‘I would prefer not to’ as a statement

about knowledge, and if this can be a reflection on how certain kinds of
knowledge cannot be ‘acknowledged’ because they are too disturbing,
then we are in the realm of anxiety, which is a key notion for psycho-
analysis—indeed, for Lacanians, anxiety is the only trustworthy emotion.
So what we might be describing is a situation in which anxiety is mobil-
ised as a way of not knowing something precisely so that ‘I would prefer
not to’ becomes a justifiable position; and we might also be starting to
think about how such psychoanalytic resistance could be overcome in
order to make ‘I would prefer (not) to’ become a more principled choice.
Neurotic Citizens
Many types of citizen have been imagined through the lens of psycho-
analysis, as well as through other modalities. The best known was the
‘narcissist’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Lasch 1979), whose manipulative,
managerial characteristics were ideally suited to the competitive and
surface-fixated domain of American culture, but whose ‘inner world’ (if
one can use this British School formulation out of context) was consti-
tuted by rage, emptiness and insecurity. The nostalgic lament of the nar-
cissist for an imagined, lost terrain of secure fathering as well as concerned,
containing mothering, is something that has remained in cultural appli-
cations of psychoanalysis to this day; as seen, for example, in Žižek’s for-
mulation of contemporary society as lacking a Big Other and therefore
filled up with multiple substitute Big Others, none of them sufficiently
Big to fill the void. In his examination of Žižek’s thinking on capitalism,
Jason Glynos (2001) describes in detail this process of uncovering the
absence of the Big Other and the panic into which this throws the sub-
ject. There are various lines of argument here, but the one that Glynos
draws out is the Lacanian idea that for the subject to be a subject of
desire, there has to be some kind of resistance in the system—this being
the function of traditional authority, instantiated in the Big Other. Once
desire is achieved it is no longer desire; it rather exposes the subject’s emp-
tiness and leaves it flapping around seeking other unattainable desires to
mollify its anxieties, to act as the channel for its urges and impulses.
The Big Other, manifested in its Oedipal form, at least imposed a sense
of regularity on the thwarting of desire, keeping the whole symbolic sys-
tem in motion. The gradual erosion of this Big Other by the expansion of
a multifarious and anonymised global capitalism, has two major effects.
On the one hand, it creates a mode of ‘pan-reflexivity’ in which nothing
can be trusted and everything has to be worked out, a process that gener-
ates immense anxiety. On the other, non-opposing, hand, this process
also reflects the necessity of a constant re-creation of desire, through
which capitalism makes itself grow. That is, it is through the constant
non-fulfilment of desire that desire is perpetuated (once fulfilled, the sub-
ject disappears into death, and so on). As we seem to get close to fulfilling
desire, anxiety increases: what will happen when we finally reach our
goal? Glynos (p. 90) gives the long version of this as follows.
The capitalist erosion of the big Other’s efficiency, therefore, throws the
subject of desire into a panic. When symbolic authority qua prohibition
gives way to a more permissive society, when objects of desire are more
readily available and less subject to social prohibition (you are free to invent
your own marital and/or sexual arrangements, however perverse these
might appear; others will tolerate your actions and opinions), the social
subject comes that much closer to realizing its desire. But, as our account
of desire made clear, I hope, this proximity to fulfilment simply arouses
anxiety. Why? Because it threatens to extinguish the subject as a subject of
desire: a subject of desire sustains itself only on condition that its ultimate
object of desire remains inaccessible. Thus, the structural consequence of
the growing collapse of symbolic efficiency is not a healthy burgeoning of
pleasurable experiences and increased well-being. Instead, it is a desperate
attempt to cling to this kind of subjectivity by making the big Other exist.
Anxiety is crucial for this procedure, but there is also a profoundly para-
noid element in it, into which the anxiety feeds. As the Big Other is less
and less prominent and the possibility that the subject will come face to
face with its desire becomes more imminent, so capitalism interferes in
order to ensure that consumption continues (you need to promise
fulfilment and then fail to deliver, whilst keeping the promise plausible,
or there will be no seeking for more capitalist goods); but also, so the
subject invents an array of substitute Big Others both to explain the con-
tinuing dissatisfaction in culture and to relieve the anxiety of responsibility
242 S. Frosh
for this. Glynos (p. 97) notes, ‘In sum, then, what is most traumatic is not
that I am subject to the rule of the big Other, to the Master. All our com-
plaints and appeals to justice conceal their true function, namely to main-
tain the big Other and the jouissance it makes possible for us. Far more
traumatic is the possibility that the big Other does not exist. This is ulti-
mately what we cannot accept as subjects of desire and this is ultimately
the reason for our ready recourse to fantasies of the “Other of the Other”
who “steal” our enjoyment.’ Racism is rooted here, as are other fantasies
of persecution and hate; we substitute for the eroded Big Other a set of
others who have stolen it away—stolen our pasts and our futures, our
received wisdoms and our traditions, our national treasures and our colo-
nial entitlements. That is, the citizen of this kind of late of capitalism is
not so much narcissistic (though such elements are present) as paranoid.
As others have pointed out (e.g., Mythen 2014), this psychoanalytic
construction of the anxious citizen is at variance both with Foucauldian
(termed by Mythen ‘prudential’) and with Beckian ‘political’ citizens. It
has resonance, however, with another contemporary citizen, the ‘neurotic
citizen’ of Isin (2004). The concept of the neurotic citizen arises as part of
the ‘turn to affect’ (Wetherell 2012) that has seen the emotional, affective
subject inserted into the commonly rationalistic discourse of much politi-
cal and social theory; in this way, it combines with the development of
queer and postcolonial studies, with their analyses of the differential impact
of power as it ranges over specific bodies, especially vulnerable ones (Ahmed
2004). For Isin (2004), the generalised contemporary subject is positioned
as a subject of anxiety, always dissatisfied and living in fear of catastrophe.
This ‘neurotic citizen’ is produced as such by governing practices that are
not solely operating in the Foucauldian realm of biopower, nor with ratio-
nal assumptions about risk, but rather treat the subject ‘as someone who is
anxious, under stress and increasingly insecure and is asked to manage its
neurosis’ (p. 225). The neurotic subject, Isin claims (Ibid.), ‘is one whose
anxieties and insecurities are objects of g overnment not in order to cure or
eliminate such states but to manage them.’ Citizenship becomes a space for
the appeasing of anxieties that have themselves been promoted as part of
the process of governing; or to take this discussion back into the Lacanian
territory addressed earlier, it suggests the presence of a subject saturated
with the anxiety of being on its own, of not having a secure ‘base’ of author-
ity and reliability on which to depend. This neurotic subject can be seen in
many areas: Isin includes panics over the economy, bodies, borders and
networks, and also, tellingly, the ‘home’, which becomes a site of surveil-
lance and unendingly inadequate reassurance about security.
I am sceptical of claims that the subject concerned with home security has
simply emerged in reaction or response to surveillance and security indus-
tries. Rather, such industries may have already found a subject who has
become increasingly anxious about home security. The surveillance and secu-
rity industries may have accelerated such anxieties but to claim that there is a
causal relationship neglects various other domains through which the subject
has been increasingly governed through its neurosis. (Isin 2004, pp. 230–231)
This is one explanation about why people do not resist the encroaching of
the surveillance society. Surveillance, which in many contexts may be—
or ought to be—understood as a pernicious impingement on freedom, is
not treated in such a ‘paranoid’ way precisely because the neurotic citizen
is already paranoid, constructed as such by other elements of the culture,
in which the frustrations and disappointments of promised but unmet
desire are understood as due to others’ plots. We are at risk because others
are out to get us; the surveillance cameras and Internet interceptions are
then modes of reassurance (the naivety of ‘If I have done nothing wrong
it doesn’t matter if my privacy is invaded’ can be breathtaking) rather
than pernicious modes of governance. ‘The neurotic citizen’, writes Isin
(p. 232), ‘is not a passive, cynical subject but an active subject whose
libidinal energies are channelled toward managing its anxieties and inse-
curities. The neurotic citizen actively mobilizes affects and emotions and
governs itself through them’. Moreover, using a different vocabulary but
making a similar point to the one above, concerning how the failure of
the Big Other produces paranoid and racist readings of the social world:
The neurotic citizen feels that it is just a matter of justice that nothing
adverse should happen to it and that it should not suffer from anxiety.
While the neurotic citizen may extend its sense of justice to others and it
can be just as concerned about injustice towards others as itself, its neurotic
justice also operates with a reversed logic. The neurotic citizen responsibil-
izes others for any adversity that may have overtaken them. The neurotic
citizen misrecognizes the misfortune of others as their own making. (Isin
2004, p. 233)
244 S. Frosh
The neurotic citizen is made to feel entitled in a social world that seems
to offer everything—hence, its desires are apparently open to fulfilment,
yet somehow never get fulfilled, as capitalism rattles on with its frustra-
tions that are aimed at producing endlessly new desires. But if it is not
obvious how this process works, if the citizen is left in an affective state of
frustration and yet there is no reasonable explanation for this, then what
is encouraged is a state of mind in which it is others who are blamed, in
which there is something fishy at work beneath the surface of the system
itself. This ‘system’, however, is so complex, that the neurotic citizen falls
back on blaming specific others for things that should be laid at the door
of the actual Big Other; that is, the neurotic citizen is also the paranoid
citizen, seeing plots and belittlements and thefts all around.
There are some distinctions worth making between the different mani-
festations of anxiety in for example the hysterical and the paranoid sub-
ject. Given the hysterical subject’s deeply engrained uncertainty and
propensity to seek reassurance through constantly asking redundant
questions (‘Who am I?’, ‘Do you love me?’, ‘Why do you love me?’) and
searching for someone who can answer these questions, there is, as Paul
Verhaeghe (1997) avows, an escalating situation under conditions of
uncertainty: as the hysteric searches more desperately for a Master, so the
paranoid needs to be bolstered more and more by a community of fol-
lowers. Verhaeghe (1997, p. 68) comments, ‘Based on this description of
the hysterical and the paranoid subject, it is obvious that they form a
perfect match; the hysterical divided subject is looking for a big Other
without a lack, who knows for sure; the paranoid subject is looking for
followers and believers.’ It may be that this is related to recurrent sup-
posed ‘crises of leadership’; that is to say, it is a variant of Wilfred Bion’s
(1961) suggestion that any group worth its salt will throw up its most
disturbed member as a leader. Verheaghe certainly follows in the psycho-
analytic tradition evidenced in many of the writers sampled here, of see-
ing the source of this anxiety as the collapse of traditional authority and
the failure to find a secure replacement for it. ‘[T]he biggest problem
today, and not only for the hysterical subject’, he writes (p. 69), is ‘that
the symbolic father function itself has become questionable, that its guar-
anteeing and answer-providing function is no longer very convincing, to
say the least. As a consequence, the number of hysterical subjects who are
on the run, looking for a new master, keeps on increasing, thus creating
opportunities for the paranoid subject’. The paranoid state of mind is one
that is always threatening to collapse into itself as the panicked elements
of the psyche, projected outwards, threaten to return. Without a safe ves-
sel to contain them, if we can adopt Bionian terminology for a moment,
they need more and more shoring up; hence the search for constant con-
firmation of the paranoid worldview.
What is ironic here is that this paranoid state of mind is in many
respects justified: in a surveillance society, it is truly the case that the
Other is watching us, making demands on us, constantly demanding
reassurance. I have quoted elsewhere (Frosh 2016) Lauren Berlant’s take
on this, and her compelling description of what it means to be a subject
under the conditions of surveillance: ‘[Every] moment of everyday life is
now an audition for citizenship, with every potential “passer-by a cul-
prit”’. In the security state, no one knows when the citizen’s audition for
citizenship is happening, through what channels, and according to what
standards’ (Berlant 2011, p. 240). Amongst the examples of resistance
that she gives are a variety of artistic responses to the ‘cruel optimism’ of
a social world that obstructs and betrays the very things that it prom-
ises—a state that in different ways is also described under the various
headings of desire and neurosis captured previously. ‘Located in tradi-
tions of silent protest’, she writes (p. 228), ‘this art aims broadly to remo-
bilize and redirect the normative noise that binds the affective public of
the political to normative politics as such’. There are many details of this
that would be worth following closely, in particular Berlant’s highly evoc-
ative and even musical evocation of what she calls ‘ambient art’. However,
what I want to respond to here is a set of questions that Berlant asks that
touch on the issue of passivity and indifference as a mode of political
resistance, taking us back to the questions with which this chapter began.
She comments and asks (p. 231), ‘All politically performative acts of vocal
negation are pedagogical, singular moments inflated to embody some-
thing generally awry in the social. But what kinds of things might it
reveal about politics and the political to be driven to negate one’s own
political voice?’ She answers in terms of similar ambiguities and alterna-
tives to those described earlier, between moments when apparent indif-
ference might be a defensive withdrawal and those when the ‘I would
246 S. Frosh
prefer not to’ might nevertheless be an act of genuine political resistance.

And she asks (pp. 231–232): ‘When is public withdrawal a gesture seek-
ing to sustain attachment and attain repair, and what does that have to do
with trying to incite conscience in others, forcing them to experience
affectively the political condition of being out of control in the middle of
managing the world?’ Berlant’s concentration on sound-art is apposite, as
it suggests that there are certain kinds of refusal, whether through silence
or interruptive noise, that might dramatise the paranoia-inducing ele-
ments of contemporary politics—speaking back truth to power, as radi-
cals once advocated. ‘The question to which the artists return repeatedly,
in different ways, is how to turn the noise of attachment to the political
into interference with the parts of it that have made politics as such seem
to so many like a ridiculously bad object choice’ (p. 232). The additional
question that this raises is what it means to be silent in the face of an
oppressive reality and what is now routinely identified as a culture of
precarity (Butler 2004). When is the progressive refusal of ‘I would prefer
not to’ the marker of a new mode of being, and when is it recriminative
withdrawal?
Silencing the Prosecutor
This section comes back to the issue of indifference through a counter-
example to Bartleby, dating from approximately the same period but
under-used in the literature on human dignity and the possible responses
to suffering. The work is Isaac Leib Peretz’s (1894) Bontsha the Silent, one
of the most famous stories by one of the greatest Yiddish writers.1 Bontsha
is the quintessential suffering nobody, not even a saint, just someone so
passive and hopeless that he expects nothing of the world and never chal-
lenges even the worst abuses. The story opens with his death and with
one of the most astringent first lines in literature: ‘Here on earth the
death of Bontsha the Silent made no impression at all’ (p. 223). We are
not initially even told how he died, only that ‘Bontsha was a human
being’—which is left standing either as a summary or as a source for
what is to come, setting the tone of an irony that is often missed in
‘folksy’ readings of the story. ‘Bontsha was a human being; he lived
unknown, in silence, and in silence he died. He passed through our

world like a shadow’ (p. 223). The founding of this sentence in ‘human
being’ is an unsettling one: is it a statement about Bontsha, who should
have been recognised as a human being, or a summary statement about
all humans, who live unknown and in silence? In any event, Bontsha
himself is amongst the poorest of the poor, neglected, abused, unwanted
and most of all, anonymous.
When Bontsha was brought to the hospital ten people were waiting for
him to die and leave them his narrow little cot; when he was brought from
the hospital to the morgue twenty were waiting to occupy his pall; when he
was taken out of the morgue forty were waiting to lie where he would lie
forever. Who knows how many are now waiting to snatch from him that
bit of earth? In silence he was born, in silence he lived, in silence he died—
and in an even vaster silence he was put into the ground. (p. 224)
At this point, however, having established Bontsha’s suffering and his

silence, the story shifts. ‘In Paradise the death of Bontsha was an over-
whelming event’ (p. 224). Trumpets sound, angels celebrate and dance
with joy, Father Abraham welcomes Bontsha with open arms, God
Himself is apprised of Bontsha’s arrival. The routine trial that a new soul
is put through, with defending and prosecuting angels arguing his inno-
cence and guilt, is used by the defending angel to summarise the actual
trials of Bontsha’s life on earth and his perfect refusal to complain. It is
this refusal—Bontsha’s silence in the face of every attack on him, his con-
tinuing lack of remonstrance directed either at people or at God—that
makes him in the eyes of Heaven such a saint and draws an explicit paral-
lel with the suffering of Job. The bulk of the story is given over to the
defending angel’s account of Bontsha’s vicious treatment at the hands of
all around—his parents, his wife, his son, his employer—and to his silent
acceptance. So obvious is it to the court that this is the greatest holiness,
even the prosecuting angel gives up his right to make accusations. ‘And
finally, in a very soft voice, that same prosecutor says, “Gentlemen, he
was always silent—and now I too will be silent”’ (p. 229). At this point,
the judge reaches out lovingly to Bontsha in his own closing statement.
248 S. Frosh
My child… you have always suffered, and you have always kept silent.
There isn’t one place in your body without its bleeding wound; there isn’t
one place in your soul without its wound and blood. And you never pro-
tested. You always were silent. (pp. 229–230)
The judge then offers Bontsha his reward (p. 230): ‘There in that world,
that world of lies, your silence was never rewarded, but here in Paradise is
the world of truth, here in Paradise you will be rewarded…. For you there
is not only one little portion of Paradise, one little share. No, for you
there is everything!! Whatever you want! Everything is yours!’
Taken at face value, Bontsha the Silent is a familiar moral tale, showing
both Jewish and Christian influences, in which the unquestioned and
faith-filled suffering of a soul in this ‘world of lies’ is rewarded in the
world to come. It takes its place as an instance of comfort and longsuffer-
ing hope offered to victims and the oppressed: nothing can be done to
relieve injustice and suffering here, but there will be found the reward that
will come to those who put up with it without renouncing their religious
beliefs or their integrity. As such, the quietude of Bontsha is emblematic
of a long line of suffering saints and messiahs; this is non-resistance in its
ultimate, holy form; or rather, it is the silent resistance to the violence of
the earthly Real from a being that knows what real truth is. The story has
certainly been read in this way, but there is plenty of evidence in the text
that this is not what the secular, socially radical Peretz had in mind. More
importantly, if we can read such stories as imaginative interventions into
psychosocial life, it is a different political message that stands out.
At one level, there is the character of Bontsha himself. He is not in fact
a saint, suffering for the sake of a deeper truth. His dreams are simple and
material. Standing in the rich surroundings of Paradise and thinking
there must be a mistake, he remembers what he dreamt about whilst
alive: ‘How often, in that other world, had he not dreamed that he was
wildly shovelling up money from the street, that whole fortunes lay there
on the street beneath his hands…’ (p. 225). He has the same material
wishes as the people who trick and abuse him; he simply is too ineffectual
to enact his desire. He is too easily despised: his employer, having mar-
ried Bontsha off, ‘himself provided a child for Bontsha to look after’
(p. 228); he never protests about this, or about the child himself who
throws Bontsha out of his own house. His passivity here is foolish and
not principled; there is no suggestion that he somehow sees the necessity
for his suffering, only its inevitability. He has no expectation of reward
and even in heaven he is so sure there has been a mistake that he can
barely listen to what is happening. But more significantly, there is the
famous end of the story, which is framed by two moments of bitterness.
In the middle of his speech of praise for Bontsha’s silence, the judge lets
something slip:
There, in that other world, no one understood you. You never understood
yourself. You never understood that you need not have been silent, that
you could have cried out and that your outcries would have brought down
the world itself and ended it. You never understood your sleeping strength.
(p. 230)
Does that lack of ‘understanding’ deserve reward? Suffering as he did,

Bontsha could have brought an end to the injustice of the ‘world of lies’,
but failed to do so; one moment of crying out (it is a Jewish tradition in
itself to argue that humans need to take action before God will intervene)
might have produced revolutionary change. The hint here is that the
apparent humility and ‘indifference’ of Bontsha is actually a disastrously
lost opportunity to bring about real change. And then come the last lines,
describing Bontsha’s finally awakened desire, his response to the insis-
tence of the judge and all the heavenly court that he can take anything he
wants as his reward, that ‘Everything in Paradise is yours’.
‘Really?’ Bontsha asks again, and now his voice is stronger, more assured.
And the judge and all the heavenly host answer, ‘Really! Really! Really!’
‘Well then’—and Bontsha smiles for the first time—‘well then, what I
would like, Your Excellency, is to have, every morning for breakfast, a hot
roll with fresh butter.’
A silence falls upon the great hall, and it is more terrible than Bontsha’s
has ever been, and slowly the judge and the angels bend their heads in
shame at this unending meekness they have created on earth.
Then the silence is shattered. The prosecutor laughs aloud, a bitter laugh.
(p. 230)
250 S. Frosh
There are no doubt many ways to interpret this, but it is very hard to see
it as approving passivity and silence. As in some other great Yiddish texts
of roughly the same period and provenance, for example An-Sky’s play
The Dybbuk (An-Sky 1920; Frosh 2013), Bontsha the Silent references an
ambivalence about the loss of a culture that bought into religious prom-
ises (that the world to come would provide full recompense for suffering
in the here and now) which both provided comfort and sustained injus-
tice. Bontsha is rewarded under this ‘old system’ for his acceptance and
withdrawal, for his lack of resistance; but he should have spoken out: he
could have ‘brought down the world itself ’ (in another translation,
brought down the walls of Jericho). And at the moment of choice, when
he can have anything, all he can think of is his hot roll and butter. There
is no grandeur of a revolutionary vision here, no stirring of anger or ideal,
just an ‘unending meekness’ that leaves everything as it always has been.
There is no route through to rebuilding the broken Symbolic, to redeem-
ing a world that fails to keep its promises; the prosecutor’s ‘bitter laugh’
seems to be one of those utterly demoralising evocations of the void that
leaves us nothing to hold onto.
Speaking
Bontsha the Silent is, perhaps ironically, a counterweight to Bartleby, the
Scrivener in its rejection of the silent withdrawal and refusal that the latter
seems to promote, and that has been taken as a model of resistance under
some circumstances. Adopting the Bartleby state of mind may at times be
a way of becoming aware of how we are manipulated into being compli-
ant with the desire-inducing tactics of global capitalism; but it can also be
a means of refusing engagement when it is most needed. Perhaps this is
partly a product of culture and history: Peretz and his Jewish readership
knew only too well the actualities of personal and communal suffering
and their bitterness was based on this real and prolonged experience.
Peretz’s story both evokes this sympathetically (it is not difficult to feel in
alliance with Bontsha, even if one is also rapidly alienated by his shallow-
ness) and castigates those who refuse to resist. It is as if the possibility of
resistance, of speaking out, is not realised by those who are silent in the
face of, or have been silenced by, the violence of the social word.
Withdrawal is a psychological mode of survival—Bontsha gets by through
the strategy of closing down awareness of what might be: ‘You never
understood yourself. You never understood that you need not have been
silent’. The cost, however, is high, because overcoming psychological
resistance through ‘understanding’, however hard it might be to tolerate,
is a necessary precursor to, or aspect of, ‘bringing down the world’.
Without such understanding, nothing can change.
In the face of the overwhelming anxiety that is produced by the decline
of the symbolic and the failure of the Big Other that at times (in reality
or fantasy) bound communities together, withdrawal is understandable.
Nevertheless, it produces a mode of compliance with neurotic citizenship
that can be narcissistic, hysterical or—perhaps most pervasively—para-
noid. Under such conditions, perhaps we should go back to the idea that
the neurotic citizen submerged in anxiety might be a less good model
than the melancholic citizen who despite being fixated on the past has at
least some capacity to reflect on suffering and loss. It is important not to
idealise this: it is quite clear that the melancholic consciousness is not in
itself an unproblematically radical one, despite the many moves to
uncover revolutionary possibilities in the melancholic preservation of
‘lost objects’ (Frosh 2013, 2016). Melancholia is rooted in foreclosure
and denial of loss, so this is not the model one might want to adopt for
truth-telling or active resistance. What melancholia does allow, however,
is a glimmering awareness of the return of repressed ideas. At the indi-
vidual level, if one can move through melancholia towards a conscious-
ness of loss and a growing capacity for grief directed at that loss, rather
than at the ego itself, then memory and history becomes possible. Bontsha
‘forgot each present moment as it slipped behind him to become the past’
(Peretz 1894, p. 229); recovering this past, as he begins to do when listen-
ing to the defending angel, is the first step towards becoming aware of
one’s desire, and potentially acting upon it. Bontsha does not manage this
in anything but the smallest, most shameful way; but Peretz’s purpose
here is not to attack the process of recovery, but rather the lack of ambi-
tion that his suffering community had shown in resisting ongoing oppres-
sion and articulating its own desires.
252 S. Frosh
In the midst of all this, there is the issue of speaking out. Bartleby ‘pre-
fers not to’ but gives no reason; Bontsha is ‘silent’. The hysterical subject
speaks all the time, but only to ask empty questions. The paranoid subject
gives answers constantly, all of them amounting to accusations and defen-
sive denials. The melancholic subject is incapacitated from speaking by
the refusal to countenance the reality of loss; breaching this particular
defence involves an act of speaking ‘fully’ about the loss itself. The oppo-
site of silence, according to Peretz, is to ‘cry out’; this has always to be the
first step in recognising that something is hurting, and that something
has to change.
Notes
1. One difficulty with using this source is that the various translations of
Bontshe Shvayg into English differ quite markedly, including in the
nuances of the all-important last lines. I have used the best-known transla-
tion, by Hilde Abel, from Howe and Greenberg’s (1954) collection.
However, as Leonard Prager notes, this translation has been criticised
both because of Abel’s ‘“filling out” meanings and explaining, and her
omitting descriptive and other details’ (see http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/
tmr03/tmr03013.txt).
References
Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
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Writings. (Edited by D. Roskies). New York: Schocken, 1992.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. London: Karnac.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life. London: Verso.
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Butler, J. (2011). Is Judaism Zionism? In E. Mendieta & J. Vanantwerpen
(Eds.), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia
University Press.
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Palgrave.
Frosh, S. (2016). Relationality in a Time of Surveillance: Narcissism,
Melancholia, Paranoia. Subjectivity.
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Symbolic Faith, or, Zizek’s Anti-Capitalism. Paragraph, 24, 78–110.
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Schocken.
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London: Palgrave.
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Treasury of Yiddish Stories. New York: Schocken, 1954.
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London: Sage.
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Stephen Frosh is Pro-Vice-Master and Professor in the Department of

Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has a back-
ground in academic and clinical psychology and was Consultant Clinical
Psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic, London throughout the 1990s. He is the
author of many books and papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanaly-
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11
Narcissism, Melancholia
and the Exhaustion of the ‘Journeying’
Subject
Anastasios Gaitanidis
In this chapter, I intend to trace the development of Freud’s thought from

the importance he initially placed on successfully mourning the lost other
and restoring the subject’s narcissism to his later emphasis on melan-
cholic identification with the lost other as the basis for the construction
of the subject. I will suggest that Freud never really abandoned his belief
that the process of mourning has to come to an end and, thus, criticise
Judith Butler’s insistence that endless mourning as the inevitable out-
come of melancholic identification signifies a new ethical relationship to
the lost other. I will then problematise Butler’s employment of this form
of endless mourning as a foundation for a new kind of community and
offer through my analysis of Homer’s Odyssey and its various contempo-
rary manifestations (e.g., James Joyce’s Ulysses and Don DeLillo’s
Cosmopolis) an ‘alternative’ type of subjectivity that is currently ‘exhausted’
from its endless journeying.
A. Gaitanidis (*)
Department of Psychology, University of Roehampton,
London, UK

256 A. Gaitanidis
Narcissism, Mourning and Melancholia

In a previous work (see Gaitanidis 2012), I argued that in his paper ‘On
Narcissism: An Introduction’ Freud attempts to preserve the value of the
object for the subject’s activity through his notion of ‘object-love’. To be
more precise, Freud begins this paper by defining the notion of primary
narcissism as the initial investment of libido in the ego, an investment
Freud termed ‘ego-libido’ and linked to ‘the instinct of self-preservation’
found in ‘every living creature’ (p. 74). As a component of ego develop-
ment, primary narcissism governs the formation of later attachments to
others, transforming ego-libido into what Freud called ‘object-libido’
(p. 76). In achieving a more developed type of selfhood, the subject forms
attachments outside the self and constructs a self-image conditioned by
an outside world of others and objects. As Freud puts it:
[…]we are impelled [to attach libido to objects] when the cathexis of the
ego with libido exceeds a certain limit. A strong egoism is a protection
against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we
may not fall ill. (p. 66)
According to Freud, therefore, the narcissistic constitution of the subject

explains how a type of self-love could be developed that yields to object-
love and gives rise to an image of the self that can derive pleasure though
appreciating the value of the object.
However, I also argued using the work of Donovan Miyasaki (2003)
that Freud’s account of object-love cannot provide a secure basis for the
appreciation of the uniqueness and independence of the object. This is
because, although the subject values the object, it still only values it as an
object of its own activity and always in relation to its own sexual aim. If
this aim is not satisfied, then the object will have to be abandoned and
replaced with another one. In other words, the object can only be valued
given the continued attachment of that object to the subject for the pur-
pose of the sexual aim. The other cannot be valued in its absence to, or
independence from, the subject.
For this reason, although object-love indicates an erotic bond, it still
takes the form of a relation that lacks mutuality and reciprocity. The
subject needs and will form an attachment to a sexual object—but it does
11 Narcissism, Melancholia and the Exhaustion... 257
not value the sexual object as a subject. The fact that the object may also
desire or receive satisfaction is irrelevant to the subject’s satisfaction,
which is always an object qua object. In this respect, Freud’s account of
object-love implies that the subject loves the object less for its uniqueness
and separateness, and more for its ability to contract the subject’s own
narcissistic abundance, that is, to embody and reflect back that part of
itself it has invested in the object. Freud seems to suggest that the people
we love are imminently replaceable and that we necessary fail to appreci-
ate exactly how other they are.
It is this account of the subject’s relation to the object that certain theo-
rists (e.g., Tammy Clewell 2004) identify as problematic in Freud’s analy-
sis of the process of mourning in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). In
this paper, Freud seems to promote a vision of a subject that attempts to
restore its narcissistic unity by neutralising the enduring pain of loss
through the realisation of the irrelevance of the lost other for its own sat-
isfaction and the acceptance of consolation in the form of a substitute for
what has been lost. In this respect, the work of mourning is portrayed as
returning the subject to itself through a process of detachment and repu-
diation of the lost other and reinvestment of its energy in new relation-
ships. In other words, the lost other is perceived as standing in opposition
to the successful restoration of the narcissism of the mourning subject as
the latter’s inability to abandon its emotional ties to the lost other could
lead to a pathological form of mourning—that is, melancholia.
In terms of narrative structure, Freud’s 1917 theory of mourning can
be perceived as an epic story of homecoming—the subject’s long journey
back home (i.e., the subject’s return to itself ). This epic story is none
other than Homer’s Odyssey. The hero of this story is Odysseus who
encounters various temptations and losses during his journey, but he is
only temporarily affected by them as he is able to control his desires and
pull himself out of the depth of his despair by ‘standing firm’, using his
cunning and maintaining the singularity of his focus: the return to Ithaca,
the reunification with his son, Telemachus, and wife, Penelope, and the
re-appropriation of his throne. Odysseus is tempted by, but does not suc-
cumb to, the seductive song of the sirens or the beauty and magic spells
of Circe; he is saddened, but not overcome by the loss of his comrades
and friends—he is able to leave them behind twice (initially when they
actually die and again when he visits them in Hades—the underworld)
258 A. Gaitanidis
forming thus new relationships on his way, which he will use as a means
to achieve his ultimate end: the restoration of himself as a ‘royal’ subject.
It is not a coincidence, therefore, that Adorno and Horkheimer in their
‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (1944) regarded Odysseus as the prototype
of the bourgeois monadological subject as he is able to sacrifice parts of
himself that tie him to others in order to fiercely preserve his indepen-
dence and survive in a world where the other (lost or not) is perceived as
a rival/competitor and an obstacle to one’s success—in this case, return-
ing home, the long journey back to one’s self.
However, in spite of his emphasis on the narcissistic restoration of the
mourner’s self, Freud already indicates in 1914 that narcissism—either as
a primary investment of the self or as a secondary journey back to the
self—does not necessarily imply the absence of all ties to others. After all,
one’s narcissistic mastery cannot be achieved without others recognising
one as a ‘master’ (as Odysseus is unable to regain his mastery and throne
without the recognition and help of his old servant, son and wife). In
addition, Freud believes that the child’s narcissism comes into being only
by way of the detour of the parents’ projections, so that the child can
locate its centre in itself only through such projections. As Jean Laplanche
(1976) puts it, ‘It is in terms of parental omnipotence, experienced as
such by the child, and of its introjection, that the megalomania and the
narcissistic state of the child may be understood’ (p. 79). The sovereignty
of ‘His Majesty the Baby’ can be constituted and affirmed only by its
loyal servants.
These realisations together with Freud’s view that the ‘stuff’ that the
self is made of—its foundations, brick and mortar—consist mainly of
‘abandoned object cathexes’, that is to say, any-one (or any-thing) whom
the subject once loved and lost, led him to introduce a new theory of
mourning in The Ego and the Id (1923), which significantly challenged
his earlier one. More specifically, in this work Freud re-examines the
dynamics of melancholic identification and admits that he ‘did not
appreciate the full significance of this process and did not know how
common and how typical it is’ (ibid., p. 28). He thus decides to aban-
don the concept of primary narcissism (i.e., the initial investment of
libido in the ego), arguing that the newly defined ‘id’ must be seen as the
initial reservoir of libido (and not the ego as he proposed in 1914) from
which cathexes can be sent out to objects, leaving thus the ego with no
independent energy sources of its own. He also suggests that the ego not
only chooses objects that resemble itself, but also models itself to a large
extent upon its earliest objects. Specifically, it originates in identifica-
tions with objects that were cathected by the id, and then lost. Another
way of putting this is that the ego is formed by loss of intensely loved
objects and by identifying with and taking in the lost objects as part of
itself. What Freud now understands is that this identification process
provides ‘the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects’
(ibid., p. 29). In this respect, this process also becomes an important
condition for constituting the self. It is by internalising the lost other
through the work of melancholic identification, Freud now claims, that
one becomes a self in the first place.
One can imagine how Freud’s new theory produces a twist at the end
of Odyssey’s narrative: when Odysseus returns home, he is not the same
anymore—he is not simply restored to his former ‘glorious’ self without
his past experiences changing him. All of his encounters with others, his
losses, temptations and obstacles have left an indelible mark on him. He
cannot deny his continued attachment to the women he loved and left
behind (Circe and Nausicaa), he cannot forget the death of his comrades
and, most importantly, he cannot erase from his memory the sublime
song of the sirens (is it even possible that someone could listen to this
song and then manage to forget it?). He is deeply changed by these expe-
riences, as he is now constituted by the traces of the people and things he
loved and lost—it is almost impossible to eliminate the traces of these
others, to return back to a sense of self that is not affected and changed
by them.
However, in spite of this impossibility, Freud still insists on the impor-
tance of the ego’s independence and strength. The ego may be nothing
more than ‘the precipitate of abandoned object cathexes’ and thus its
autonomy may be severely limited, yet through its control of motility, its
development from ‘obedience to drives’ to the ‘curbing of drives’, and its
transformation of ‘the object-cathexes of the id into ego structures,’ it
appropriates some of the id’s energy for its own purposes (1923, pp. 55–56).
Indeed, for Freud ‘psycho-analysis is a tool which should make possible
the ego’s progressive conquest of the id’ (ibid., p. 56). In this respect, Freud
260 A. Gaitanidis
is still wedded to the enlightenment project (Descartes, Kant, etc.) through

his belief that the main objective of psychoanalysis is to strengthen the ego
through the progressive withdrawal of our irrational investments and the
consequent enlargement of our capacity to reason.
Yet, if the main objective of psychoanalysis is to strengthen the ego,
then the attachments to the loved and lost others that seem to generate
most of the ego’s vulnerability need to be gradually left behind. Although
these attachments are transformed into ego structures through the pro-
cess of melancholic identification, mourning has to come to an end as the
ego still needs to detach itself from the source of its vulnerability—that
is, its bond with the loved and lost other—and replace it with a different
type of bond: the identification with the rival, Oedipal object. It is this
identification with the rival that Freud seems to consider as governing
‘normal’ subject formation and not so much the melancholic identifica-
tion with the lost love object (see Freud 1923, pp. 32–33). As always,
Freud presents us with a complicated view of self-formation: we are both
dependent for our survival (due to our ontological helplessness—hilflo-
sigkeit) and the constitution of the self on others—which makes us vul-
nerable to their loss—and also prioritize our identification with the rival
as a way of strengthening and protecting ourselves against being over-
whelmed by this vulnerability.
J udith Butler: The Melancholic Subject

and Community Politics
What form might our personal and communal life take if we prioritise
vulnerability over ego strength and independence? This is a question that
the philosopher Judith Butler attempts to answer in a series of published
works starting with her 1997 book The Psychic Life of Power moving to her
2003 paper ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, and then to her 2004 book
Precarious Life. In all of these works she deeply engages with Freud’s afore-
mentioned claim that the internalised lost other becomes a necessary con-
dition for the establishment of self since she uses this type of melancholic
subjectivity as the basis for gender and community politics. In recognising
that the subject cannot abandon its emotional ties to others without
undermining the very constitution of its self, Butler argues that Freud’s
notion of ‘melancholia’ shows that the subject may affirm the continua-
tion of its bonds to those loved and lost others as a condition of its own
existence. As a result, Butler believes that melancholia is in direct opposi-
tion to narcissism and the strengthening of the ego. As she puts it:
Narcissism continues to control love, even when narcissism appears to give

way to object-love: it is still myself that I find there at the site of the object,
my absence. In melancholia this formulation is reversed: in the place of the
loss that the other comes to represent, I find myself to be that loss, impov-
erished, wanting. In narcissistic love, the other contracts my abundance. In
melancholia, I contract the other’s absence. (1997, p. 187)
It seems that for Butler, melancholia provides an antidote against the

omnipotent narcissistic illusion of self-mastery and independence as it
resists the fantasy of full recovery of one’s self after the loss of a loved
other. Melancholia can thus establish an ethical relationship with the
other against the subject’s desire to preserve its ‘narcissistic’ unity by
emphasizing the continuity and intensity of our emotional attachments
to lost others. Butler illustrates this point in the following excerpt, which
is worth quoting at length:
It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a
‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what com-
poses who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only
mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without
you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do
not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’
only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps
what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a
relationality that is neither merely myself nor you, but the tie by which
those terms are differentiated and related. (2003, p. 12)
What is crucial to understand here is that melancholia reveals not only

that we are constituted by our relations to others but that we are also
gripped and undone by these relations. What melancholia displays is that
262 A. Gaitanidis
the stories we try to tell about our losses, the accounts we give of our
mourning, necessarily falter. We might strive like James Joyce to create a
modern-day Odyssey, a narrative composed of metaphors, symbols, ambi-
guities and overtones that gradually link themselves together so as to
establish a way of ordering and controlling the immense, destabilising
impact that our losses produce in us, but our narratives will remain
unstable, incomplete and frail. Indeed, we might try like Leopold Bloom
(Joyce’s (1922) anti-heroic Odysseus) to use our fluid capacity to
empathise with others—a modern-day equivalent to Odysseus’s capacity
to adapt to a wide variety of challenges—so as to preserve everything that
is lost, to resurrect and redeem the lost other and the past, but our
attempts will necessarily fail. This is because we will never be able to
locate exactly what we have lost ‘in’ the other, what it is ‘in’ the other that
we mourn. Thus, we will never be able to fully narrativise and re-present
the lost other.
As a result, since it is impossible to fully represent the lost other, the
work of mourning can never be brought to an end. It remains unfinished
and endless, that is to say, melancholic. This melancholia can produce a
different kind of politics based on a new kind of community, a commu-
nity that does not aspire to create a strong, unifying identity but one
whose members realise they are inextricably linked to each other because
their lives (all lives) are inevitably precarious and subject to loss and
mourning (Butler 2004). In other words, their bond is established
through their awareness of the ‘vulnerable’ relational web of their griev-
able lives. Such relational engagement, which takes into account the risk
of loss, injury, violence and privation everyone experiences generates an
ethical community which is open to the pain of others and not one that
needs to project and impose its strength onto others so as to defend
against the breaching of its vulnerable narcissistic boundaries.
Critique of Butler’s Position

There is a lot to be said about the significance of this communal politics,
which is based on a new kind of collectivity that prioritises our ethical
responsibility to each other generated by our common experience of loss.
As a psychoanalytic therapist and social theorist, I welcome the idea that

our experience of loss and mourning should be central to any therapeutic
work or social project.
However, I cannot help wondering whether melancholia can provide
the necessary moral ground onto which new communities should or
could be built. First, there are many traps and dangers in melancholia
that can actually negate this possibility. For example, people who are mel-
ancholic may often exhibit inordinate amounts of self-blame. Freud
(1917) refers to the litany of ‘self-accusations’ (pp. 246–247) that melan-
cholics present with. They have also a tendency to isolate themselves and
believe they are the only ones who experience pain over the loss of the
loved one. As Julian Barnes (2013) explains in his novel ‘Levels of Life’:
Mourning can also become competitive: look how much I loved her/him
and with these my tears I prove it (and win the trophy). The griefstruck
demand sympathy, yet, irked by any challenge to their primacy, underesti-
mate the pain others are suffering over the same loss. (p. 112)
In this respect, it is not only ‘love that tears us apart’ (to paraphrase Joy
Division’s famous song). I think that if Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s lead
singer and songwriter, was still alive today, he would call his song ‘melan-
cholia will tear us apart again’. In many respects, melancholia, like love,
tears off the masks we cannot live with and the ones we cannot live with-
out—and, thus, does not allow us to efficiently work with others in com-
munal settings.
Second, although working through loss is important, our capacity to
experience pleasure is equally (if not more) important for psychoana-
lytic therapy and politics. For this reason, I doubt whether this endless
mourning/melancholic process is indeed as important as Butler claims
it to be. When this process is not introduced together with an apprecia-
tion of pleasure, it produces a narcissistic illusion of permanence. In his
1916 paper ‘On Transience’, Freud argues that it is impermanence that
bestows value to the object; realising that the object is transient renders
it beautiful and generates our desire for it. In contrast, the fantasy of an
endless relation to the object is itself an attack on the possibility of
pleasure.
264 A. Gaitanidis
This appreciation of transience, Freud claims, is the outcome of one’s

attitude to mourning. Inability (or unwillingness) to mourn leads to fear
of experiencing pleasure, which amounts for Freud to an inability to live.
Mourning is necessary as it makes more life possible. But it also requires
of us to mourn the notion of permanence. I wonder whether Butler
through her emphasis on melancholia has implicitly (one might say
unconsciously) transferred her loyalty from the permanent to mourning
itself. As if she is trying to convince herself, that if nothing else lasts,
mourning can. As all of the other universal categories and concepts—
autonomy, equality, self-determination—have either failed or have been
proven to be ineffective, the only universal that remains is mourning. The
continuity of one’s life, one’s subjectivity, one’s community, the reliable
certainty, could be found in mourning. Pleasure is also unreliable and
uncertain—it is only mourning that can provide a stable ground.
I often think that Butler is a crypto-romantic. To be more precise, she
occupies the inverse side of the romantic desire to make things whole, to
totalise. As she often totalises the impossibility of totalisation, she seems
to negatively reinforce the idea that the desire for totality constitutes the
only horizon of human thought. I believe that it is only because she
secretly starts from the premise that the other should be made whole, that
she experiences the impossibility of this wholeness as an endless disap-
pointment and mourning. If she truly believed that the other is incom-
plete and transitory then her experience of mourning the loss of the other
would not be endless, that is, melancholic. In other words, Butler’s posi-
tion cannot take into account the fact that the other is incomplete from
the beginning and the melancholic appropriation of his/her loss cannot
compensate for this original incompleteness (See Žižek (2000) for a thor-
ough critique of Butler’s position.).
I also believe that Freud’s later theory of mourning does not contra-
dict his earlier one but instead amplifies it. Mourning still comes to an
end but not when we renounce completely our emotional ties to the
other, but when we relinquish our desire to internalise him or her as
ideal—that is to say, we effectively mourn our loss when we internalise
the other as imperfect (that is, both good and bad) and incomplete.
This of course implies that we have already accepted ourselves as not
ideal and perfect.
This is the reason behind Freud’s insistence on the importance of

Oedipal identification in the construction of the self, in spite of his reali-
sation of the prominent role of melancholic identification with the lost
other. It is only when we realise that although our primary loved others
might mean the world to us, we might not mean the world to them (that
they have other interests apart from us) that we are able to renounce our
omnipotent desire to control them and acknowledge their separateness
and eventually come to terms with their loss. It is only when we acknowl-
edge that we do not mean the world to our primary others—and mourn
the loss of ourselves and them as ideal—that the world becomes available
to us as a place that we can find substitute pleasure and satisfaction.
As with everything in psychoanalysis there should be a delicate dialec-
tical relationship between holding on and letting go, between loss and
pleasure, between life and death, between memory and forgetting. One is
reminded here of Adorno’s (1999) statement that ‘all reification is a for-
getting’, which is immediately followed by ‘however, the notion of reifi-
cation should not be reified’ (p. 321). If, according to Freud and Breuer
(1893–1895), ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (p. 7), it is not
because they have genuinely forgotten the past; it is because they don’t
remember what it is they keep alive through their everyday acts of com-
memoration. It is because they have forgotten to remember how to for-
get. Remembering and forgetting, like life, love and loss are intimately
interconnected.
From this perspective, we can see Freud’s insistence on the importance
of melancholic identification not as a new ethical relation to the lost
other (as Butler suggests) but as a form of stagnation and regression—
that is, a subject so over-determined by the fear of losing anything that he
is unable to move on, feeling trapped within a world (and its correspond-
ing form of subjectivity) that is essentially non-erotic and death-driven.
This leads to a form of endless mourning that accentuates the subject’s
desire to find permanence in the process of mourning itself as the world
becomes frightening and inhospitable and refuses to offer either the pos-
sibility of ‘homecoming’ or the prospect of anything new that could
bring the process of mourning to a spontaneous end. From this point of
view, Butler’s employment of endless mourning as a basis for building a
new kind of community is highly problematic as it seems to validate and
266 A. Gaitanidis
hypostatise (instead of criticising) the social conditions which produce

this type of melancholic subjectivity.
This form of subjectivity is portrayed in Don Delillo’s (2003)
Cosmopolis—a postmodern version of Odyssey. Eric Packer, the billion-
aire anti-hero of the novel, is haunted by ‘the stirs of a melancholy’, resi-
dues of humane memory that stimulate him to take a trip across
Manhattan to the old-fashioned barbershop he went to as a child with his
father. He, like Odysseus, has several obstructive and supportive encoun-
ters during his cross-town trip, but there is an overwhelming absence of
struggle against or connection with them as they mostly take place within
the confined, surreal space of a limousine filled with television monitors
and computer screens. More importantly, Packer’s desire to return to a
place that reminds him of ‘home’ (i.e., the barbershop) is constantly
undermined by his intense wish to meet the person who stalks and threat-
ens to murder him. In this sense, Cosmopolis provocatively demonstrates
the truth that was already implicitly present in Odyssey—the drive for
self-preservation contains its opposite: self-mutilation. As David Foster
Wallace (1999) puts it in his paper ‘Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness
from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed’: ‘[…] the hor-
rific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is
inseparable from that horrific struggle’ (p. 821).
However, in Odyssey the possibility of ‘homecoming’ animates
Odysseus and is fulfilled at the end, whereas in Cosmopolis this possibility
is utterly denied—Packer is doomed to endlessly roam the streets of
Manhattan hoping to find his only salvation: death. In this sense, Packer
represents the postmodern melancholic subject who endlessly mourns
the absence of ‘home’ (or any type of safe haven) resorting only to the
empty desire to gain (incorporate) ‘everything’ and lose nothing—only to
end up losing the world (and himself ).
Yet, the solution is not to embrace the postmodern verdict that ‘our
endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home’ (Wallace
1999, p. 822), or to optimistically hope for a safe return ‘home’—that is,
to return to an Odysseus-like subjectivity by accepting Freud’s early
account of mourning. The latter solution could lead to the nostalgic res-
titution of the bourgeois monadological subject that stands opposed to
the world in his narcissistic enclosure. What I suggest is that we should
attempt to simultaneously preserve and negate this notion of mourning
and the ideas of ‘home’ and ‘monadological subject’ implied by it—to

demonstrate our allegiance to it at the time of its decline. This will also
lead us to the configuration of a new type of subjectivity/community—
not one that obsessively clings to a nostalgic attempt to resurrect what is
lost so as to satisfy its narcissistic ends and preserve its identity, but one
that refuses to appropriate all the past losses for its own purposes. This is
because it wants to honour their alterity, but is unable to do so because it
is currently ‘exhausted’ from its endless travels and needs to stop and rest
so as to find the necessary time to process its failure to reach its final des-
tination (and to rethink the very idea of ‘final destination’ itself ). I think
there is a hint of what I mean in the following excerpt by Wallace (1999):
You can ask them to imagine his [Kafka’s] stories as all about a kind of door.
To envision us approaching and pounding, not just wanting admission but
needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation
to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door
opens… and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all
along. Das ist komisch. (p. 822)
This seems to imply that the only journey we need to take at present is to
stand still and realise that our point of arrival has always already been our
point of departure—it has been with us all along. In this sense, we will
stop employing desperate energies to create heartbreakingly well-meaning
and symbolically arresting oppositional communal movements that then
‘exhaust’ themselves as they repeatedly hit the capitalist stone wall. Of
course, not all opposition to the current social structures is ineffective, but
if we do not want our voices to be reduced to loud but merely cathartic
protests and symbolic gestures we need to stop and think carefully about
what needs to change which, perhaps, is the very idea of change itself.
References
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1928–1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Anastasios Gaitanidis is a senior lecturer in Counselling Psychology,

Counselling and Psychotherapy and member of the Research Centre for
Therapeutic Education (RCTE) at the University of Roehampton. He is also a
psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice and a member of The Site for
Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has published several articles on psychoanal-
ysis and psychotherapy in peer-reviewed journals and he is the editor of two
books: Narcissism—A Critical Reader (2007) and The Male in Analysis—
Psychoanalytic and Cultural Perspectives (2011).
Index1
NUMBERS & SYMBOLS Adorno, T. W., 53, 95, 112n1, 215,

9/11, 98, 237 216, 258, 265
1960s & 1970s, 55 Affective politics, 26
Affect regulation (Schore, 1994), 42
Agamben, Giorgio (The Coming
A Community), 20, 21
Abbott, Tony (Australian Prime Aggressiveness/aggressivity/aggression,
Minister), 165 67, 93, 106, 121, 140, 202,
Abraham, Karl, 34n1, 201, 247 203, 205, 212, 224, 225, 232
Action, 7, 10, 11, 20, 32, 33, 67, 68, Ahmed, Sara, 12, 13, 169, 172, 174,
74, 130, 146, 155, 172, 174, 176, 180n18, 180n20,
181n27, 186, 187, 194, 195, 181n22, 242
204, 205, 217, 233n1, Algerian War of Independence, 185,
236–238, 241, 249 199
Activism, 25, 32, 71, 185, 211–233 Algeria’s Front de Libération Nationale
Act of Recognition (Australian law (FLN), 186, 192, 194
passed 2013), 165, 170, Alignment (disalignment), 12, 18
179n10 Ambiguity
Adler, Alfred, 15, 16, 18, 35n8, of the lost object, 7
35n10, 198 ordinary, 7
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote notes.

1

Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63829-4
270 Index
Ambivalence Band of brothers, 22

definition, 220 Baraitser, Lisa, 17
love and hate, 6, 12 Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’
Anaclisis/anaclitic, 34n2 (Melville, Herman), 33, 235,
Anarchist philosophy, 32, 214 236, 238–240, 246
Anderson, Benedict, 19, 166 Bartleby, the Scrivener (Melville,
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 35n10 Herman), 235, 250
Anonymity, 30, 84n1, 124, 129, Bataille, Georges, 36n12
131, 132, 140 Bauman, Zygmunt, 19
Anthropology, 22, 151, 152, 192 Becoming (self becoming), 7, 12,
Anti-colonial resistance, 185 192, 250, 251
Anxiety, 18, 25, 26, 33, 44, 52, 53, Belonging, 11, 20, 104, 123, 166,
58, 59n3, 66, 77, 95, 122, 179n15, 218, 219, 222–234
123, 125, 151, 181n25, 194, Benjamin, Jessica, 94, 96
197, 200, 223, 240–244, 251 Berlant, Lauren, 27, 245, 246
Armstrong, D. & Rustin. M. (Social Bersani, Leo, 3, 23, 24, 28, 36n14
Defences against Anxiety), 53 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’
Artists (musicians and actors), 52, (Freud, 1920), 38, 127, 208
82, 192, 245, 246 Bhabha, Homi, 193, 194
Assomption, 147 Bick, Esther, 43
Aufhebung (sublation), 196, 207n6 Big Other (the), 33, 139, 238,
Australia (so-called), 31, 161–173, 240–243, 251
175–178, 178n3, 179–80n16, Bilda-Joinville psychiatric hospital,
179n7, 179n10, 179n15, 190
180n17, 181n24 Binary (logic), 5, 34n2, 191, 229,
Australian constitution (as a 233n1
document of mourning), 177 Biologism, 47
Australian Defense League, 168 Bion, Wilfred, 41–43, 45, 47, 48,
Authority, 7, 18, 21, 53, 76, 162, 50, 244
163, 167, 175, 177, 213, Biopolitics / biopower, 242
240–242, 244 ‘Black Process’ (Australia), 31, 163,
Auto-erotic drives, 145 165–170, 173, 176–178,
Autonomy (autonomous self ), 92–97, 179n7
100, 108, 111, 259, 264 Black Skin White Masks, 32, 185,
Awkwardness, 27, 80 186, 188, 193, 194, 197–199,
206n3
Blanchot, Maurice, 36n12
B Body
Bainbridge, C., 91, 97, 98, 109 bodily limit, 30, 146
Balint, Michael (1960), 68 body boundaries, 13
Index
271
Body (social), 227, 236 Colonialism, 31, 186, 187, 216, 229
Bonds of love, 232 Colonial oppression, 185, 187, 199
Bontsha the Silent (Peretz, Isaac Leib), ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’
33, 246, 248, 250 (Fanon), 32, 186, 199, 205
Borch-Jacobsen, M., 216, 219 Common ground (uncommon
Border, 3, 10, 19, 21, 26, 29, 30, ground), 10, 11, 14, 219
146, 147, 166, 193, 243 Commoning, 25
Border-anxiety, 26 Commonwealth, 56
Border-concept, 26 Communism, 36n16
Borderline personality, 44 Communitas, 18, 226–233
Boundary (‘variable boundary’), 10 Community
Bourgeois monadological subject, building, 25, 34
258, 266 community of one, 32, 211–233
Brown, Wendy, 18 ethics of, 22
Bureaucracy, 94, 95, 103 politics, 20, 21, 26, 32, 33
Butler, Judith, 3, 9, 10, 34, 72, 236, Comte, Auguste, 18
237, 239, 246, 255, 260–267 Constitutive outside, 11, 216, 225
Consumerism, 94, 101, 103, 112
Consumption, 72, 74, 238, 241
C Counter-public(s), 24–26
Calhoun, Craig (1998), 36n15 Cover-up, 163
Capitalism, 29, 33, 46–49, 59n6, Creative narcissism, 57, 58, 68
91–113, 213, 218, 223, 225, Crimp, Douglas, 9
226, 235, 237, 240–242, 244, Crisis of masculinity, 92, 97
250 Cross-cultural critical psychiatry, 191
Cardinal points, 10, 11, 14–18 ‘Cruel optomism’ (Berlant, Lauren ),
Castration complex, 151, 153 245
Charismatic leadership, 215 Cultural capital, 179n16, 232
Cheng, Ann Anlin, 9, 34n5 Cyber-communities, 77–81
Citizenship, 19, 56, 108, 179n12, Cyber-identities, 76, 77
242, 245, 251
Civilization and its Discontents
(Freud, 1930), 196 D
Class (social), 97 Daemonic repetition(s), 6
Clinic / clinical, 2, 8, 13, 28–31, 52, Dale Farm, Essex (Tyler, Imogen),
59, 59n1, 59n3, 81, 83, 92, 25
99, 119, 120, 122, 123, 129, DeArmitt, P., 3
140, 145–159, 185, 187, 190, Death (preoccupation with), 123
192, 194, 199–202, 206, Death drive, 5, 6, 29, 30, 119–141,
206n2, 207n9 155, 158n12, 265
272 Index
Debt, 3, 32, 101, 120, 131, 132, Ego-ideal, 5, 22, 23, 36n13, 80,
137, 187, 228–230 157n6, 196, 198, 207n7, 214,
Decolonization, 203, 204 215, 218, 219, 222–226, 229,
Depression (political), 94 230
Depressive anxieties and paranoid- Ego-ideal, ideal-ego (distinction
schizoid anxieties, 44 between), 196, 198, 207n7,
Derrida, Jacques, 22, 36n12, 231 222–225, 229, 230
Desire for knowledge (Bion), 43 Ego-psychology, 5
Dialectical disorder (narcissism as), Elias, Norbert, 49
96 Empire (as lost object), 55
Digital Emptiness
narcissism, 70, 71 empty self, 94, 103
revolution, 65, 74, 78, 79 as feeling, 94
space, 28, 69, 73–78, 81, 84, Enclosure (narcissistic), 266
84n1 Eng, David (2000), 9, 35n5
subjectivites, 65–66, 76, 81 Enjoyment, 135, 136, 242
Disappearance, 21, 25, 26, 30, 124, Enlightenment project, 260
125, 132, 140 Entanglement, 3, 25, 187
Disavowal, 7, 9, 97, 233n1, 236 Eros, 152, 158n12
Displacement, 3, 9, 31, 53, 69, 148, Esposito, Roberto, 33, 227–232
177 European fascism, 19
Dispossession (politics of ), 20 Excommunication, 11, 139
‘Drives and their Vicissitudes,’ 147 Exhaustion, 34, 255–267
Drives/Instincts, 5–7, 29, 30, 43, Exile (exilic subjectivity), 10, 11
45–48, 66, 68, 95, 103, Experts / expertise, 74, 94, 95, 103,
119–141, 145–147, 155, 112n3, 164, 171, 179n8
156n1, 156n3, 156n4,
158n12, 194, 195, 199, 256,
259, 266 F
DSM-V, 68 Fairbairn (1954), 92, 95, 112n2
False Self–True Self
(D.W. Winnicott), 69
E Fanon, Frantz, 9, 31, 32, 185–208
Echo, 26, 66, 139, 227 Fantasies of distinction, 13
Economic imperialism, 216 Fantasies of merging, 13
The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1923), 258 Fantasy/phantasy, 6, 8, 10, 12–14,
Ego formation, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 20, 26, 28, 30, 50, 55, 58, 74,
22, 26, 67 76–78, 82, 97, 102, 110, 111,
Index
273
113, 121, 122, 137, 148–150, 59n5, 66–69, 72, 106,

153–155, 156n1, 157n10, 119–122, 125, 141n1,
162, 166, 168, 170, 181n23, 145–148, 150–152, 154–156,
196, 207n6, 242, 251, 261, 158n12, 158n13, 159n13,
263 170, 173–177, 194–197,
Farage, Nigel (expl), 57, 58 201–204, 207n8, 212–214,
Father(s) (dad), 21, 22, 35–36n11, 216–218, 220–223, 230–232,
36n12, 53, 82, 100, 101, 107, 255–261, 263–266
108, 112, 113n5, 125, 140, Frosh, Stephen, 3, 8, 33, 235–252
141n7, 149, 153, 155, 162, Fuss, Diana, 14
163, 175, 215, 244, 247, 266
Female genitals, 151
Feminine psychology (narcissism of G
women), 5 Gaming, 82
Feminist perspectives, 53 Gay cruising, 82
Feminization Gay, P, 35n10, 108
of culture, 91, 101 Gaze (the maternal), 30, 148, 149,
of relationships, 5, 111 153
Fight Club (David Fincher film), 29, Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, 18, 21
91–113 Gender, 76, 95–97, 108, 153, 217,
‘Figurational sociology’ (Elias, 260
Norbert), 49 General will, 17, 60n8
Film studies, 96 Generational conflict, 71
Fine, Reuben (Narcissism, The Self Generation ‘me’–generation ‘we,’ 70,
and Society), 34n3 71, 73, 107
‘Folk politics,’ 213, 217 Generation X, 70
Fort-Da!, 30 Gestalt, 147, 149
Foucault, Michel, 24, 108, 206n1, Giddens, Anthony (Modernity and
223, 233n1 Self-Identity, 1991), 92, 98,
Frankfurt school, 59n6, 92–95, 98, 112n3
112n1 Gift economy, 231
Fraser, Nancy, 24 Gift(s), 51, 123, 124, 126, 129–131,
French psychiatry, 185, 187, 190, 133, 140, 214, 229–232
205 Gilbert, Jeremy (2015), 33, 213,
Freud, Sigmund, 2–8, 10, 11, 219–221
14–18, 21–24, 26, 27, 29–31, Gilroy, Paul (2005), 3, 9, 10, 28, 32,
33, 34n1, 34n4, 35n10, 35n5, 54–56, 59, 204, 208n10
35n11, 36n14, 41–45, 47, 50, Global capitalism, 33, 105, 241, 250
274 Index
Goffman, Erving, 73–78, 84 Horde (mentality), 36n11, 175,

‘Good’ (the nation as), 163 214–219, 230
Gorgon, 151, 152 Horkheimer, M., 53, 95, 258
Governance, 217, 243 Hospitality, 10, 56
Grandiosity, 93, 96, 113n4 Humiliation, 108
Gratification, 72, 128, 148, 215, 221 Hyperconnectivity, 139
Grigg, Russel, 29, 120–122, 124,
126, 127
Group dynamics, 211 I
Group psychology, 14, 21–24, Ideal-ego, 22, 23, 196, 198, 207n7,
36n14, 204, 213, 216, 222 221–225, 227, 229, 230, 232
‘Group Psychology and the Analysis Idealization, 29, 93, 96
of the Ego’ (Freud, 1921), 21, Identification (axes of ), 196
36n14, 204 Identification (dis-identification), 2,
Guilt, 50, 54, 112n4, 125, 126, 154, 3, 6, 9, 11–14, 18, 19, 21–24,
155, 174–176, 212, 221, 223, 27, 29, 36n12, 43, 49, 51–53,
225, 232, 247 55, 58, 60n17, 67, 93, 99, 140,
146–149, 155, 157n6, 158n12,
176, 194, 196, 202–204,
H 207n7, 215, 218, 220–222,
Habermas, Jurgen, 38, 116 226, 232, 255, 258–260, 265
Hall, Stuart, 11, 12, 97, 99, 109 Identity politics, 9, 226
Han, Shinhee (2000), 35n5 Ideology, 47, 49, 76, 77, 79, 93, 97,
Hardt, M., 235, 237 214, 218, 237
Harvey, David, 25 Id-psychology, 5
Healthy narcissism, 8, 45 ‘Imagined communities’ (Anderson,
Hedonism (hedonistic), 28, 46–48 Benedict ), 19
Hegel (master-slave dialectic), 196 Immigration, 19, 31, 55
Heterotopia(s), 24 Immunitas / immunity (as principle
Hilflosigkeit (helplessness), 260 of community), 228, 229
‘His Majesty the Baby,’ 148, 194, ‘Impossible’ (the), 25, 48, 163
258 Incest, 30, 35n11, 149
Hobbes, Thomas (‘war of all against Incorporation, 6, 7, 12, 13, 20, 22,
all’), 216 26, 146, 147, 156n2
Homecoming, 257, 265, 266 Independence Referendum, Scotland
Homophobia, 112 2015, 56
Homosociality, 21 Individualism, 46, 47, 49, 60n8, 71,
Hook, Derek (2014), 29, 30, 35n5, 92, 98, 99, 109, 218–222
119–141 Individualization, 92, 98, 99, 109
Index
275
Infant, 4, 28, 41–43, 67, 69, 154, K

157n7, 157n8, 232 Kernberg/Kohut debates, 68
Infanticide, 30, 149, 150, 157n8 Kernberg, Otto, 68, 73, 84, 92, 93,
Infantile 112n1, 112n2
omnipotence, 148, 149 Khanna, Ranjana, 3, 35n5
sexuality, 15, 17 Klein, Melanie, 27, 28, 41, 43, 45,
Injury (narcissistic), 96, 111, 262 50, 54, 60n12, 93
Inside/outside boundary, 2, 14, 229 Knowledge, 43, 58, 59n5,
Institutionalization (of 74, 98, 163, 165, 167,
psychoanalysis), 16 170–172, 180n21, 207n5,
Institutional racism, 56 239, 240
Interdependence, 94, 95, 108, 199, 223 Kohut, Heinz, 5, 68, 73, 84, 92–94,
Internet (new communities), 19, 26, 112n1, 112n2
30, 36n15
Internet (rise of ), 26
Interpellation, 26 L
Intersubjectivity (intersubjective Lacan, Jacques, 28, 31, 32, 48, 49,
recognition), 227 60n10, 67, 68, 73, 83, 84,
Intimacy, 21, 36n12, 77, 104, 106, 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 135,
108, 124, 127, 131, 132, 140, 137, 141n1, 146–149, 157n5,
141n4 159n15, 162, 171, 174,
Into the Wild (Krakauer, Jon text), 180n21, 181n23, 185, 190,
30, 119, 120, 128–138 192–198, 203, 207n5–7, 222,
Into the Wild (McCandless, 230, 233
Chirstopher), 30, 119, 120, Lacan’s mirror stage, 73, 185, 193,
128–138, 140 198
Introjection, 13, 43, 48, 146, 258 Lagache, Daniel, 148, 149, 157n6
iPhone, 66 Laplanche, J., 12, 146, 156n3,
Isin, Engin, 25, 242, 243 258
Lasch, Christopher (Culture of
Narcissism), 52, 65, 70, 92
J Late capitalism, 94, 237
Jouissance, 121, 122, 124, 127, 128, Law
158n10, 181n26, 242 the law, 35n11, 77, 138, 162,
Journeying, 33, 34, 255–267 166, 168, 175, 180n21, 221,
Judge Schreber (Freud’s case study 223
of ), 26, 66, 197 law of the land, 162
Jung, C.G., 15, 16, 18 Law of the father, 215
276 Index
Leader (the leaderless group), 212 omnipotence, 30, 148–150

Left (the), 171, 212, 213, 217, 221, plenitude, 147, 149
223, 226, 228, 231, 232 Matthews (2016), 22, 36n12
Leviathan logic, 219–221 May 1968, 49
Libidinal narcissism and destructive Mead, G. H., 78
narcissism (distinction Mechanisms of defence, 13
between, Rosenfeld, Herber), Medusa (myth of ), 31
44 Megalomania, 5, 45, 258
Libido ‘Me generation,’ 70, 73
narcissistic libido, 67, 158n12 Melancholia
object-libido, 158n12, 194, 256 anti-colonial, 31, 185–208
Lifestyle, 105, 139 as different to mourning, 2, 4–6,
Little Hans (Freud’s case study of ), 8, 9, 29, 47, 50, 58, 120, 122,
197 201, 205, 257
Locke, J., 229 as a mode of (a)sociality, 138–139
Lorde, Audre, 2–4, 12, 17 and violence, 199, 203
Loss, 6–9, 20, 30, 32, 34, 50, 53, Melancholic
55–58, 60n11, 79, 91, 105, identification, 2, 14, 255,
108, 111, 120, 121, 146, 147, 258–260, 265
150, 158n10, 168–170, 172, subjectivity (proximity to
173, 175–178, 200–202, 215, psychosis), 9
238, 250–252, 257, 259–265, turn, 9
267 Memory, 30, 51, 135, 172, 173,
Lunbeck, Elizabeth, 3, 65, 68 177, 178n5, 204, 217, 251,
259, 265, 266
Metapsychology, 3, 4, 8, 20, 24, 32
M Millennial narcissism, 26
Mania Millennials, 26, 28, 70, 71
and melancholia, 32, 54, 205 Mill, J. S., 47
and revolution, 32, 205 Mirror stage, 67, 73, 147, 148,
Masculinity, 29, 91, 92, 94–100, 185, 193, 194, 197, 198,
102, 108–112 207n7
Mask, 73, 80, 84, 151, 236, 263 Misogyny, 105, 112
Masquerade/masquerading, 72, 83 Misrecognition, 67, 81, 196
Mass-society, 14 Mitscherliches, (The Inability to
Maternal Mourn), 8, 31
ecstasy, 148 ‘Monster in the mirror’ (phrase), 30,
gaze, 30, 148, 149, 153 145–159
Index
277
Mother, 41–43, 69, 100, 101, 146, Neurotic citizen (Isin), 25, 26,
148, 149, 152–154, 157n9, 188 240–246
Mourning New Narcissist (the), 29
as diferent to melancholia, 2, 4–6, ‘New psychical action’ (phrase), 7,
8, 9, 29, 47, 50, 58, 120, 122, 20, 67, 146, 194
201, 205, 257 Nisbet, Robert (The Sociological
as endless, 255, 263, 265 Tradition), 18
Mourning and Melancholia (1917 Non-sovereign (relations), 27
[1915]), 2, 4, 201, 205, 257 ‘Normative unconscious process’
‘Multicultural conviviality’ (S Hall), (Layton), 99, 111
32, 56 Nostalgia, 10, 13, 18
Multiculturalism, 19 Nunberg, Herman, 148
Nurturing environment, 49
N
Nancy, Jean Luc (The Inoperative O
Community), 20 Object, 2, 5–7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 17, 18,
Narcissism 22, 23, 27–31, 33, 34n2,
and gender, 95–97, 153, 260 41–60, 66–69, 72, 83, 92, 96,
and masculinity (crisis of ), 92, 97 108, 119–122, 124, 126, 127,
‘narcissism of minor differences,’ 132, 140, 141n1, 146, 147,
213, 227, 231 153, 156, 156n1, 157n9,
Narcissistic 158n12, 159n15, 163, 168,
injury, 96 170, 172–175, 177, 194, 197,
personality disorder, 68, 71, 202, 203, 214, 219–221, 224,
92–94 238, 241, 242, 246, 251,
poles (oscillation between), 93 256–261, 263
sociability, 8, 24 Object-loss, 2, 6, 120, 201, 202
Narrative (incoherence), 105 Object-love, 6, 66, 68, 72, 83, 214,
Nation (the), 166, 168, 169, 172, 224, 256, 257, 260, 261
173, 177 Object relations theory, 5
Nationalism, 19, 199, 216 Oedipus, 5, 12, 15, 32, 149, 152,
Nazi Germany, 54 155, 157n7, 157n8, 197
Negative therapeutic reaction, 154 Oedipus complex, 5, 15, 32, 155,
Negri, A., Empire, 235, 237 157n8, 197
Neoliberal capitalism, 29, 106, 223 On Narcissism: An Introduction
Network theory, 25, 30, 79, 81, 120, (Freud, 1914), 2, 4, 194, 256
137, 214, 217, 226, 227, 243 ‘On Transience’ (Freud, 1916), 263
278 Index
Organizational ecology (Srnicek and Precarity (culture of ), 246

Williams), 217, 226, 233n1 Prefigurative politics, 213, 217, 218
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 66, 151 Prepositions (prepositional logic/
inflections), 21, 25
Primal horde, 175, 214, 230
P Primary narcissism, 5, 27, 30, 41,
Pain, 44, 46, 51, 66, 82, 103, 104, 45, 66–68, 145–159, 194,
161–181, 195, 257, 262, 263 256, 258
Paranoia, 26, 33, 121, 193, 223, 246 Primary relational needs, 49
Paranoid Primary / secondary (identifications),
fantasies, 25, 242, 251 148, 149, 157n6, 158n12
sociability, 25 Private property, 32, 214, 220, 230,
subject (comparison with 231
hysterical subject), 244, 252 Projection, 43, 148, 227, 258
Parasitism, 10 Projective-identification, 13
‘Passage to the act’ (Lacan), 137, 138 Property, abolition of, 231
Passivity, 33, 156, 236, 245, 249, Propinquity, 26, 36n15
250 Protest movements, 211, 212, 217
Peretz, Issac Leib (Bontsha the Silent), Proximity/proxemics, 4, 5, 13, 19,
33, 246, 248, 250 26, 36n12, 124, 241
Personality disorder, 3, 68, 71, Psyche-soma borders, 29
92–94 Psychical structre (esp psychosis /
Phobogenic object (Fanon, ‘the neurosis), 26, 138, 197
negro as’), 197 Psychosis, 5, 26, 29, 77, 138, 150,
Plato’s eidolon, 152 152, 157n8, 170, 176, 189,
Pleasure, 8, 34, 46, 47, 110, 127, 197, 200
256, 263–265 Psychosocial; psycho-social, 8,
Political activism, 185, 212 14, 30, 53, 138, 188, 216,
Political theory, 3, 193 248
Pontalis, J. B., 12, 146 ‘Psychothérapie institutionnelle’
Possessive individualism, 46, 47, 222 (institutional psychotherapy),
Post 9/11, 25, 204 189, 190, 200, 206
Postcapitalism, 213, 226 Public sphere, 19, 24
Post-colonialism (postcolonial Punishment, 150, 155, 180n17
melancholia), 9, 32, 204
Post-Freudian community, 24
Post-Kleinian psychoanalysis, 44, 58 Q
Postmodernism, 40 Queer melancholia, 9
Index
279
R indifference, 238, 245

Racism modes of, 238
epidermal, 188 passivity, 245, 250
pathogenic effects of, 187 Return of the repressed, 223, 225
Radical narcissism (Watt), 28, 81–83 Revolutionary violence, 186
Rage (narcissistic), 93, 95, 96 Rieff, Philip, 21
Rationality, 103, 219, 242 Riviere, Joan, 72
Real / symbolic / imaginary, 7, 13, Rosenfeld, Herbert (two forms of
18, 19, 24, 25, 30, 31, 48, 49, narcissism), 44, 45, 72
56, 65, 69, 73–77, 83, 96,
100, 103, 107, 108, 110–112,
119–127, 129–137, 139, 140, S
141n1, 141n5, 170, 173, 188, Sado-masochism (sado-masochistic),
195, 196, 202–204, 207n6, 99, 101, 105, 106
207n7, 214, 222, 223, 231, Sameness / difference, 13, 23, 24,
237, 241, 244, 248–251, 267 216, 219
Recognize/recognition, 4, 10, 12, 17, Schizophrenia, 5, 68, 76, 80, 207n8
20, 31, 41–45, 47, 48, 54, Schmitt, Carl, 213
59n5, 68, 69, 75, 83, 93, 95, Science (psychoanalysis as), 123
96, 102–104, 109, 163–165, Scopophilic drive, 147
168, 170, 171, 177, 178, Secondary narcissism, 66–68, 194
179n7, 180n19, 189, 195, Second World War, 57
196, 198, 200, 203, 213, 214, Security surveillance, 223
218, 221, 224, 227, 247, 258 Self-annihilation, 119, 128, 135
Referendum, 56, 163, 164, 170, Self-care, 108, 212, 223
171, 181n27 Self-complaint, 242
Regression, 58, 155, 173, 265 Self-help group(s), 101–103, 105,
Relation (social), 5, 8, 28, 49, 83, 110
126, 206, 216, 236 Self-idealisation, 147, 149, 153
Remorse, 54, 174, 176 Selfie, 28, 71, 82, 83, 222
Repression, 17, 22, 48, 49, 150, generation, 71
157n8, 157n9, 226 Self-love, 22, 66, 68, 72, 148, 256
Resistance Self / other relation, 2, 26, 69, 196
denial, 54, 238, 251 Self-regard (self-regarding feelings),
difference from withdrawal, 32, 150
246, 250 September 11 (relevance of ), 101
distinction between psychoanalytic Sexual difference, 152
and political, 32 Sexuality, 5, 15, 17, 95, 146, 156n1
280 Index
Shame, 27, 31, 161–181, 249 213, 223, 228–230, 236–238,

Shared social states of mind, 51 241, 255, 260, 264–267
Silence, 33, 80, 187, 246–252 Sublimation, 46
Singleton, Jermaine (2015), 35n5 Substitutes (logic of substitutions), 3,
Smart technologies, 65 98, 151, 153, 240–242, 257,
SNS, see Social Networking Sites 265
Social bond, 15, 18, 21, 138 Suicide
Social character suicidality, 30, 158n11
historical variation, 92, 111 suicidal thoughts, 126
relationship to capitalism, 92–95, Superego, 5, 36n13, 93, 94, 98, 121,
97, 111 148, 157n6
Social media, 26, 70, 80, 222 Surveillance, 30, 223, 243, 245
Social Networking Sites (SNS), 71, society, 30, 243, 245
73–77, 79 Symbolization, 69, 203
‘Social therapy,’ 191 Symbol-usage, 69
Societas, 18, 20
Sociothérapie, 189, 190
South African anti-apartheid, 165 T
Specular (the), 28, 67, 147–149, Technology/changing technologies
153, 222 (role of ), 19, 70
Specular ‘I’ (Lacan, mirror stage), 28, Teenage, 78–80, 130
67 Terra nullius, 161, 162
Spinoza, 47, 59n5 Thanatos, 152
Splitting, 13, 23, 32, 56, 72, 73, 93, Therapeutic (triumph of ), 8
102 Therapeutic discourse, 91–113
Srnicek, Nick (2015), 33, 213, ‘Therapy’ (Audre Lorde, poem), 1, 2
217–219, 226, 233n1 Third Reich, the, 53
State of self-sufficiency, 44 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
State power, 26 (Freud, 1905), 146
Stauth, G., 18 Togetherness (as illusionary), 221
Strachey, James, 35n8, 35n9 Tomb of the unknown soldier, 19
Stranger Tönnies, Ferdinand (1887), 18
association with danger, 13, 78 Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1913), 22,
relation to significant other, 77, 35n11
78 Transference, 5, 16, 17, 97, 99, 100,
Subjectivity, 3, 6, 11, 30, 66, 72, 73, 120, 154, 162, 179n6, 207n8
76, 80, 81, 96, 98, 108, 139, Tripartite theory of the psyche
145, 157n8, 196, 198, 205, (Freud), 214
Index
281
Trump, Donald, 26 W
Turner, B. S., 18 Walsh, Julie, 1–36, 65, 141n6
‘Turn to affect,’ 242 Warner, Michael, 24
Tyler, Imogen, 25, 101–110, War of all against all (Hobbes), 216
112–13n4, 113n5, 113n6 Weber, Samuel, 2
Tyranny of structurelessness Welfare state model, 28
(Freeman, Jo), 212, 213, 218 Western culture, 8, 91, 94, 98
Wholeness / separateness, 146
Williams, Alex (2015), 33, 213,
U 217–219, 226, 233n1
Uncertainty, 7, 76, 138, 165, 173, Williams, Raymond, 53, 60n9
177, 181n26, 224, 244 Winnicott, D.W., 68, 69, 73
Unconscious ‘Withdrawal of interest from the
infanticidal fantasies, 149 outside world’ (phrase), 5
sense of guilt, 154, 155 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 59n4
the unconscious, 2, 14, 20, 59n3, Wolfe, Tom, 70
59n5, 104, 105, 109, 148, Working through / worked through,
196, 201, 202, 215, 225 6, 50, 51, 263
Utilitarianism (English), 46 The Wretched of the Earth
(Fanon), 186, 188, 191, 199,
203–205
V
Violence, 19, 29, 31, 43, 80, 111,
121, 161–163, 168, 178, 186, Y
192, 199–205, 236, 237, 248, Yates, C., 91, 97, 98, 109
251, 260, 262
colonial, 31, 199, 203
Virgin, 147, 149 Z
Virtual reality, 53 Žižek, Slavoj, 59n7, 74, 75, 77, 78,
Vulnerability, 43, 94, 98, 103, 106, 97, 128, 135, 137, 207n6,
111, 133, 260 235–240, 264

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NARCISSISM, MELANCHOLIA AND

THE SUBJECT OF COMMUNITY

STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL

EDITED BY BARRY SHEILS AND JULIE WALSH

More information about this series at

Studies in the Psychosocial

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956122

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: ‘Narcissus’ (1948) by Lucian Freud (1922–2011)

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book emerged from the ‘Narcissism and Melancholia: Reflections

1 Introduction: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject

2 Narcissism and Melancholia from the Psychoanalytical

3 Narcissism Through the Digital Looking Glass 65

4 Something to Do with a Girl Named Marla Singer:

5 Melancholia, the Death Drive and Into the Wild 119

6 The Monster in the Mirror: Theoretical and Clinical

7 Shame, Pain and Melancholia for the Australian

8 Dr Fanon on Colonial Narcissism and Anti-Colonial

9 ‘This Nothing Held in Common’: Towards a Theory

10 Neurotic and Paranoid Citizens 235

11 Narcissism, Melancholia and the Exhaustion

© The Author(s) 2017 1

appreciated for a few of its most elegant formulations—formulations

(1) In positioning the different functions of narcissism in the male and

This brief catalogue gives us some impression of the diversity of the

From another perspective, however, the same melancholic praxis of

Gilroy’s writing on postcolonial melancholia, which redirected the work

guage, identification is constructed on the back of a recognition of some

The ego is established by intimating the lost object of love; it is based on a

not pre-exist dis-identification); so it is not a question of identifying with

localist in an age of state politics and the formations of mass-society, the

the nature of the social bond, rather the occasion is autobiographical—at

The negotiation of psychoanalytic authority likewise, and despite Freud’s

Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983]) has shown, for example, in his

fatally beset by economic unevenness, unacknowledged and unknown

melancholic structure, Nancy is also concerned to challenge the melancho-

The re-temporalisation of community implicit in both Nancy and

At face value, this positions Freud at some distance from contempo-

[In appearance it is] possessed of every perfection that is of value’ (94).

publics’ (124). The terms of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘regroupment’ suggest a

decades] through various discourses on the border […] their disappear-

Politics is also about redistributing insecurity, after all. So whatever else it

‘innate object-relatedness’ of the self, with narcissism acting only as a

In Chap. 4, Lynne Layton continues to apply psychoanalytic thought

budding subject with petrifying omnipotence, inscribing death, from the

commentary of the post-capitalist/neoliberal era (Nick Srnicek and Alex

sense of mobility is important to Gaitanidis, as much as the sense that the

Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham

Foucault, M. (1984 [1967]). Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias [“Des

An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of

Muñoz, J. E. (1997). Photographies of Mourning: Melancholia and Ambivalence

Barry Sheils is Assistant Professor in twentieth- and twenty-first-century litera-

Julie Walsh is Lecturer in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the

The argument I am going to put forward in this chapter is for a view of

© The Author(s) 2017 41

neonate awaiting their realisation—among these preconceptions were

its violence projections of emotion—terror, greed, hatred, love—so that

regarded by the patient with contempt, as of no significance or worth.

objects am I? Plainly, these possible relations to objects take an almost

other-regarding activities of the arts and sciences, represented a less self-

achieve sudden illumination in those moments of revolutionary challenge

1 Introduction: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject

2 Narcissism and Melancholia from the Psychoanalytical

3 Narcissism Through the Digital Looking Glass 65

4 Something to Do with a Girl Named Marla Singer:

5 Melancholia, the Death Drive and Into the Wild 119

6 The Monster in the Mirror: Theoretical and Clinical

7 Shame, Pain and Melancholia for the Australian

8 Dr Fanon on Colonial Narcissism and Anti-Colonial

9 ‘This Nothing Held in Common’: Towards a Theory

10 Neurotic and Paranoid Citizens 235

11 Narcissism, Melancholia and the Exhaustion

r esentment of others, in a defensive formation intended to limit the pain

Narcissism, Melancholia and Society

institutional level. This difference is because settings for clinical work or

iterability and accountability of the clinical use of psychoanalytic con-

subjectivities. Let us start with a brief history of narcissism within psy-

Narcissism in the Cultural Imagination

Narcissism and the Digital Looking Glass

The Workings of Cyber-Communities

Masculinity, Femininity, and Narcissism

Popular Culture and Therapeutic Culture

g eneral. Consumerism, as is often the case, is figured as feminine, and in

Tyler: It could be worse. A woman could cut off your

The Over-Proximity of the Object

Seceding from the Symbolic: A Case Summary

Life Beyond Life