1

One, Other, Neuter: Narcissistic

Values of Sameness (1976)

The way in which he modelled men was this. He took a lum p of

earth and said to himself, T will make man, but he must be able
to walk and run and go out into the fields, so I will give him two
long legs, like the flamingo'. Having done so, he thought again,
The man must be able to cultivate his millet, so I will give him
two arms, one to hold the hoe, and the other to tear up the
weeds'. So he gave him two arms. Then he thought again, The
man must be able to see his millet, so I will give him two eyes'.
So two eyes he gave him. Next he thought to himself, The man
must be able to eat his millet, so I will give h im a mouth'. So a
m outh he gave him. After that he thought within himself, The
m an must be able to dance and speak and sing and shout, and
for these purposes he must have a tongue'. And a tongue he
gave him accordingly. Lastly the deity said to himself, The man
must be able to hear the noise of the dance and the speech of
great men, and for that he needs two ears'. So two ears he gave
him , and sent him out into the world a perfect man.
J.G. Frazer, The Worship of Nature.1

Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness;2 and let them have dom inion over the fish of the sea,
and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the
earth.'

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Semantic Shifts
The two sources of psychoanalytic concepts are psychoanalytic
practice, on the one hand, and the epistemological point of view, on
the other. Once they have been adopted, psychoanalytic concepts
modify the psychoanalyst's listening, which leads him to call into
question the theoretical instruments of psychoanalysis. Perhaps more
than of any other concept, this has been true in the case of narcis­
sism, a concept Freud invented under the influence of various
pressures. Throughout his work, his approach was supported by an
unshakeable certitude with regard to the role played by sexuality. But
he was equally certain that an anti-sexual factor lay at the root of
conflictuality w ithin the psychical apparatus. This was the role origi­
nally assigned to the so-called drives (SE, 'instincts') of
self-preservation. Allocating this role to them did not require a great
effort of originality on Freud's part, for he needed urgently to devote
all his attention to that which had been so obstinately excluded from
the picture, that is, the sexual dimension. As a first step, it was there­
fore sufficient to establish, albeit on a provisional basis, the opposite
pole of self-preservation, even if it might have to be revised at a later
stage. This Freud was forced to do as much due to difficulties arising
from experience as to the criticisms of opponents from within and
without. Among these, but the first of them, was Jung, whose main
interest was dementia praecox. The ego, which had been awaiting
theoretical explication, now occupied centre stage. Nevertheless, as
far back as the Project (1895b), Freud's definitions of it suggested that
its cathexes were of a specific nature and of endogenous origin.

This organisation is called the 'Ego'; it can easily be depicted if we

consider that the regularly repeated reception of endogenous
quantities in certain neurones (of the nucleus) and the facilitating
effect proceeding thence will produce a group of neurones which
is constantly cathected and thus corresponds to the vehicle o f the
slore required by the secondary function.3

Admittedly, Freud primarily had the secondary function in view, but

the idea of a particular cathexis, a kind of energy store specific to the
ego, was already confirmed. The very last sentences of the Project bear
this out. Freud was pondering, without going any further than this -
the manuscript ends at this point - on the relations between auto­
erotism and the primal ego. It was, as you will recall, through his
study of the psychogenic disturbances of vision (1910) that Freud
came to formulate the hypothesis of narcissism. But the second
edition of the Three Essays (1905) already shows how much attention
he was devoting to the problem. 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of
his Childhood', which dates from the same period, refers explicitly to
the myth of Narcissus (SE, XI, p. 100). And we should note that the
opposition of two types of object-choice as well as the material under­
lying the theory of narcissism, are both connected with the activity of
looking, that is, Leonardo's conflict between his activity as a painter,
linked to scopophilia, and his extraordinary intellectual curiosity
deriving from epistemophilia, itself an offshoot of the former. Mona
Lisa's strange gaze may therefore be of much more importance than
the misleading vulture (which, moreover, was not discovered by
Freud). Argos' eyes follow one everywhere from above the mysterious
smile. It was thus no coincidence that once he had returned to the
more serious - even the most serious, since it concerned ocular
medicine - terrain of clinical experience, Freud again made use of
vision to introduce the idea of a libidinal investment of the so-called
drives of self-preservation. But, up to that point, we were still in the
familiar waters of the castration complex.
The Psycho-Analytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision'
(1910b)4 afforded Freud with a late consolation for having missed out
on the discovery of cocaine. However, if the act of looking directs its
rays towards the external world and can become libidinised to the
point that it can no longer see anything in its state of hysterical blind­
ness, it is because it has become the victim of excessive erotisation. It
turns towards the internal world where other adventures await it. The
validity of the relation Freud established between scopophilia and
epistemophilia, the latter involving the erotisation of thought
processes, is still recognised today. This is why I maintain that the
most neglected precursory text on narcissism is The Rat Man' (1909).
W hen discussing the relations between narcissism and omnipotent
thinking it is customary to cite Totem and Taboo (1912-13). But then
one is forgetting that everything that Freud says on this subject was
discovered through analysing the Rat Man. There are good grounds
for thinking this, since in the last lines of his essay, Freud makes an
allusion to a triple psychical organisation, an unconscious personality
and two preconscious ones; the third psychical organisation showing
the patient to be 'superstitious and ascetic' (my italics). He even adds
that this third organisation would have swallowed up the normal
personality had the illness lasted much longer.
Thus by taking the activity of looking as his starting point, Freud
tied narcissism to the domain of the visible. But there were theoretical
difficulties from the outset. W hat had been involved up till then? The
closed-circuit cathexis of the ego; the primal ego and its relations with
auto-erotism, foreshadowing the emergence of primary narcissism in