Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Chapter 50 Original desire to say: Narcissism (2)
In fact, your second question raises a quite reasonable question, but the argument is inevitably wrong.The return of the object libido to the ego is not necessarily disease-causing; it is certainly true that the libido is always withdrawn before sleep and restored after waking.For example, protoplasmic microbes often retract their pseudopods immediately after retracting them.If, however, there had been a definite and powerful psychic process which compelled the libido to withdraw from the object, the result would of course be different.Thus those libidos which have been transformed into narcissism cannot return to the object; the free movement of the libido is impeded, and thus the disease arises.If the accumulation of narcissism exceeds a certain extreme value, it becomes intolerable.We may suppose that it invests in objects for precisely this reason.The ego can only release libido so as not to accumulate too much and cause disease.If we plan to do a more specific study of schizophrenia, then I shall tell you that the process by which the libido leaves the object and cannot return is in fact closely related to, or may be regarded as one of, repression. one.At any rate, if you understand the initial conditions of this process, which are said to almost coincide with repression, you will therefore have no difficulty in recognizing these new facts.The so-called conflicts are also similar, and the conflicting forces are also equal.However, its results are still different from those of hysteria, and the reason is that the tendency of consciousness is different.The development of the libido in these patients is located in a special period of life, and the location of the obsession that causes the symptoms is different, either in the early narcissistic stage, or in the final stage of schizophrenia and return here.In general, with regard to narcissistic psychoses, we must assume that the developmental obsession of libido predates hysteria or obsessive-compulsive psychoses, but you have also heard of narcissistic psychoses, in It's actually more serious than transference psychosis, but your research on the latter is enough to explain the former.There are many features that communicate with each other between the two; in fact, they belong to the same group of phenomena.Thus, one cannot hope to give an adequate explanation of the psychosis to which these symptoms belong without knowledge of the transferred psychosis.

The symptoms of schizophrenia are different from others in that they are not caused by the accumulation of libido in the ego, as in narcissism, because the libido cannot return to the object.They also have other manifestations, which can be traced back to the efforts of the libido to return to the object, the attempt of reconstruction and recovery.These are, in fact, the most striking features of the syndrome; it has similar symptoms to hysteria, and occasionally a few symptoms to obsessive-compulsive psychosis; but on the whole, it is largely different.Regarding schizophrenia, the original effort to return to the object or the attempt of the object concept seems to have achieved something, but what is obtained is only some afterimages of the original, for example, nouns and images attached to the original.Due to space limitations, we will not elaborate further on this issue.I think, however, that the recognition of the distinction between conscious and unconscious ideas can be advanced by the aspect of the effort of the libido to return to the object.

Now we can hope to go a step further in the study of psychoanalysis.The understanding of narcissistic psychoses has become possible just because we have the concept of libido; our present task is to discover in these disorders the origin of the diseased drive and, in light of our understanding of the ego, to extend the knowledge of the psychic knowledge of the world.Our purpose is to establish a theoretical system of ego psychology, but the basis of ego psychology cannot be the materials provided by our own self-consciousness; it must be based on the analysis of symptoms like the theory of libido psychology.Perhaps we think that if ego psychology holds true, what we already know about libido in the study of transferred psychosis will be of little importance.However, we have not yet made great progress in this regard.The study of narcissistic psychosis naturally cannot adopt the research method of obsessive-compulsive psychosis, and you will soon understand why.For narcissistic psychopaths, we often find that this is a dead end and hit a wall after we have walked a short distance.You know that in the mechanism of transference psychosis there are also such barriers of resistance, but this type of barrier is broken down segment by segment.But the resistance of narcissistic psychopaths is indestructible, and at most they can stretch their necks to peek at the scenery outside the wall and chat about masturbation.Therefore, we must find ways to find a suitable research method, which has not been successful so far.We have material on a considerable number of patients, although not enough to answer our questions.Right now, we only have the knowledge of research on transference psychosis to interpret what they have said.As regards our starting point, the many similarities between the two diseases warrant a fair degree of satisfaction.So, how effective this research method is, we will wait and see.

In addition, there are other difficulties blocking our progress.Indeed, the study of narcissistic psychosis and narcissistic-related psychosis can only be done after the analytical study of transference psychosis.Psychiatrists, however, never study psychoanalysis, and our psychoanalysts see very few examples of psychosis.Therefore, I now have to produce a number of psychiatrists who are pre-trained in psychoanalysis.The United States has made attempts in this direction. Several leading psychiatrists are speaking to students on the theory of psychoanalysis. The attending physicians in hospitals or mental hospitals also hope to use the theory of psychoanalysis to guide the observation of patients. treat.Sometimes, I also get a glimpse into the mysteries of narcissism, so I want to give you some insights and perspectives on this syndrome.

Delusional disorder is a chronic mental disorder whose place in today's psychiatric classification is uncertain.However, its close connection with schizophrenia is beyond doubt; I have suggested before that both should be grouped under the name of delusional psychosis, and that the forms of delusional disorder have different names depending on the content of the phantasies, such as delusions of grandeur , delusion of persecution, delusion of jealousy and delusion of being loved, etc. We do not hope that psychiatry can explain these phenomena.Psychiatry, with its intellectual rationalizations, has tried to explain each other out of these different symptoms. Let us take an old but not ideal example: the patient is convinced that he is being persecuted, and therefore assumes that he must be an important person. Overblown fantasy.According to our analysis of the concept, this kind of exaggerated delusion is caused by the return of libido from the object, which makes the self inflated and causes the disease, thus forming "secondary narcissism", which is the reproduction of the early naive form.In persecutory delusions, however, we discover a cognitive clue by observation.First, in most cases we know that the persecutor and the victim were of the same sex; this could be an innocuous explanation, but, from those well-studied cases, it seems that the patient was A homosexual is very affectionate and only considers him a persecutor because of his illness.Such symptoms can be aggravated by associations, and a loved one can be replaced by another, such as a father by a master or authority figure.From these unanimous observations, we conclude that a man who adopts persecutory delusions as his talisman is trying to resist a strong homosexual impulse.Once the emotion of love turns into hatred, it is enough to endanger the life of the object of both hatred and love. This transformation is no different from the transformation of libidinal impulse into anxiety, and it is the result that often occurs under the action of repression.Let us give one of the most general examples to illustrate.A young doctor once terrorized the son of a college professor in his apartment, so he had to leave.The two of them were close friends, and at this time he believed that his close friend had superhuman strength and evil intentions; he believed that this friend was responsible for all his misfortunes and difficulties in work and life in recent years .And more than that, this evil friend and his father started a war, which directly led to the invasion of the frontier by the Russians; they tried in various ways to murder his life; The whole society is in chaos.However, in fact, he still loves this friend deeply. He also had a good chance to shoot him, but finally gave up because he couldn't bear it.As a result of my short conversations with the patient, I learned that their friendship had begun as schoolmates, and that at least once their relationship had grown beyond the boundaries of friendship, and on one night they had a full-blown intercourse.Judging from the patient's age and character, he is young and good-looking, and he should have the emotion of loving women, but he never shows this.He was once engaged to a beautiful and rich girl, but broke off the engagement because he was too cold.Years later he had an attack, just as he was giving a woman sexual gratification for the first time.She embraced him with love and gratitude, and he felt a sudden pain, like a knife through his head.He later described how he felt at the time, as if his head had been cut open during an autopsy; his friend happened to be a pathological anatomist, so he gradually believed that the woman was sent by his friend to seduce him of.Therefore, he had a better understanding of the persecutions he had suffered from this close friend, and his intrigues.

Sometimes, however, persecutors and victims can be of the opposite sex, so isn't it a contradiction to say that the disorder is a rebellion against same-sex love?I have had occasion to examine this symptom, which appears to be contradictory, but in fact they corroborate each other.A young woman fantasizes that she is being persecuted by a man with whom she has twice been intimately involved; in fact she initially harbored a hatred for a woman who may be regarded as her mother's representative.She did not transfer the phantasies of persecution from the woman to the man until after her meeting with him again; so, in this case, the view that persecutor and victim were of the same sex remains true.Since the patient said nothing about the first phantasy when he described it to lawyers and doctors, it appeared to contradict our theory of paranoia.

Choosing the same sex as an object has a deeper connection with narcissism than choosing the opposite sex as an object; once the enthusiasm for loving the same sex is rejected, it is particularly easy to turn back and form narcissism.In these lectures I have not had the opportunity to tell you all that I know about the pathways and basic plans of the love impulse, nor can I add now.What I want you to know above all is the following: The choice of object, or the development of the libido beyond the narcissistic period, can take two forms: the first is the narcissistic type, which takes as its object something similar to the ego, as a substitute for the ego; the second is the dependent type, and this type of libido takes the elders who can meet the needs of one's infancy as objects.The narcissistic type, whose libido is strongly obsessed with object choice, is a characteristic of persons with pronounced homosexual tendencies.

You will recall that in the first lecture of this article I enumerated a woman's delusional jealousy.Now, at the end of our lecture, I am sure you will expect me to explain phantasy by psychoanalysis.In this matter, however, I may not tell you much more than you expect.Delusions, unaffected by logical argument and actual experience, are explained, like obsessions, by their relation to subconscious material; Obsessive ideas are presented.The difference between the two lies in the form and dynamics of the two emotions.

Depression, like paranoia, can be divided into many different clinical types, and we can also glimpse the internal structure of this disease.We have learned that what these patients feel distressed or deeply blamed is actually about sexual objects, which they have lost or no longer cherish due to some fault.We therefore believe that the depressed patient does indeed withdraw libido from the object, but through a process of "narcissistic imitation," which transplants the object into the ego, thereby replacing the object with the ego.Now, I can only express this process in a narrative concept, and cannot explain it with the concepts of situation theory and dynamics.At this point, the ego is treated as an object that has been abandoned; all acts of vengeance and harsh treatment that would be inflicted on the object are naturally inflicted on the self.It can therefore be assumed that the suicidal impulse of the depressed patient is also more intelligible by the hypothesis that the patient hates himself as strongly as he hates the object of both love and hatred.Depression, like other narcissistic disorders, has a distinctly "ambivalent" character in its mood and life, a name we often refer to due to Breuer; the meaning of this term is, It refers to having two opposite emotions for the same person, that is, love and hate.It is a pity that we cannot dwell on this conflicting sentiment in more detail here.

In addition to narcissistic psychosis, we know of a hysterical form of "simulation".Here, I very much hope to tell you the difference between the two in a few simple words, but unfortunately it is no longer possible.Now, it will be of interest to you to give a brief account of the cyclical or cyclical nature of depression.If conditions are suitable, we can use analytical therapy between the two attacks of symptoms to prevent the recurrence of the disease.We have tried several times with success.We then know that in depression, mania, or other psychoses, a special mechanism of conflict resolution is at work whose prerequisites are identical to those of other psychoses.As you can imagine, psychoanalysis is very useful in this respect.

The analysis of narcissistic psychosis will help us gain some knowledge of the composition of the ego, its function and elemental structure.We have touched upon this aspect briefly before.From the analysis of the phantasies we have observed, we have come to the conclusion that the ego has a function which is constantly monitoring, criticizing, or comparing against another part of the ego.Therefore, I think that the patient's statement, as if someone is monitoring his every move and every thought is known and examined, has in fact revealed a truth that no one can know as the truth.His mistake was only that he thought that this hateful force was not his own but came from without; in fact he created a self-ideal in his self-development and found within himself a measure of The ruler enables him to measure his actual self and all his activities by this ideal activity of himself.We further speculate that his purpose in creating this ideal was thereby to restore the original childish narcissistic self-satisfaction, which had been repeatedly repressed, injured and sacrificed with age.This function of self-criticism is what was formerly called the censorship of the ego or "conscience"; the function of the same nature is that which is manifested in dreams at night as a defense against immoral desires.If this function can be analyzed from the fantasy of being monitored, I can understand where this function originated. It is influenced by parents, teachers and society and produced through the process of self-comparison of these models.

What has been said above are some of the results of psychoanalytic research as applied to narcissistic psychosis.Unfortunately, there are too few. There are still many concepts that have not been understood by us. Only through years of research on new materials can we fully grasp these concepts.These results are justified by the application of the concepts of ego libido or narcissistic libido; together these concepts allow us to generalize the results of transference psychosis to explain narcissistic psychosis.But you will now ask: Can all the disorders of narcissistic and other psychoses be explained by the libidinal theory?Is it possible to discover in the development of the disease the element of libido which is omnipresent in psychic life?Is it possible to completely avoid attributing the cause of the disease to the disturbance of the instinct of self-preservation?The explanation of these questions seems to me of little importance; moreover, we cannot yet answer them; we may as well wait for future science to resolve them.It must then be shown, I suppose, that this disease-causing capacity is peculiar to libidinal impulses.Thus the theory of libidoism can be very successful both in the case of actual neuroses and in the most serious form of psychosis, the psychosis of personal disintegration.I know very well that libido is characterized by its disobedience to the principles of reality and the domination of needs.However, I also think that the self-instinct must be related here. Since the libido has pathogenic emotions, the function of the self-instinct has to be disturbed.Even if we admit that the ego instinct is the chief victim in severe psychosis, the direction of our research is by no means disaffected by it; let the future decide.

Now, let's come back to anxiety for a moment, hoping to clarify what we didn't know before.We have said that the relationship between anxiety and libido is quite clear, but it may not be easy to reconcile it with the following undeniable hypothesis.That is, the real anxiety that occurs due to danger is a manifestation of self-instinct.However, if the anxiety does not originate from the self instinct but from the libido, how will we deal with it?Anxiety is often enough to hurt the body more than enough, the higher the degree, the more obvious the harm.It frequently intrudes upon the only act of self-preservation, be it flight or self-defense.Therefore, if we attribute the emotional component of real anxiety to libido and the actions taken by it to instinct, all theoretical difficulties will be solved.Nor would you claim that we know fear and run from it.The reason why we flee from fear stems from the same impulse triggered by the perception of danger.Those who survive danger do so because they calmly wait, not being held back by fear, as in aiming a gun at an attacking beast, and indeed this is the most advantageous method.

(End of this chapter)