Concept
Negative narcissism
André Green's term for a narcissism governed by the death drive, which he set beside the life narcissism that strives for the unity of the ego. Instead of investing the ego it aims at its reduction towards zero, at the extinction of desire and of every tie to objects; clinically it appears as emptiness, a pull towards nothingness and withdrawal from relations.
Development
Undated
introduced by André Green
Green postulated a death narcissism, which he called negative narcissism, beside the life narcissism that seeks the unity of the ego: it aims at the ego's abolition, an aspiration to zero. The papers collected in his 1983 book develop it.
In The Work of the Negative (1993);Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism (1983)
Relations
- introduced by André Green
Green postulated a death narcissism, which he called negative narcissism, beside the life narcissism that seeks the unity of the ego: it aims at the ego's abolition, an aspiration to zero. The papers collected in his 1983 book develop it.
- derives from Death drive
Negative narcissism is Green's narcissism of the death drive: where life narcissism binds the ego into a unity, it pursues the ego's extinction.
Works
- 1983
Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism
A collection of André Green's essays on narcissism, some previously unpublished, by an author who had worked on the subject since 1963. Freud introduced narcissism in 1914 and let it recede after the revisions of around 1920: the opposition of life and death drives, the second topography and a new theory of anxiety. Green ties narcissism to that last drive theory. Beside the positive narcissism of the life drives, which seeks the unity of the ego, he postulates a death narcissism, which he calls negative narcissism, aiming at the ego's abolition in an aspiration towards zero. A first part treats the theory of narcissism (the same, the other and the neutral; primary narcissism as structure or state; anxiety), a second describes clinical forms (moral narcissism, the neutral gender, the dead mother), and a postface on the ego as mortal and immortal ends on the figure of a Janus-faced Narcissus. Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1983, it appeared in Andrew Weller's English translation as Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism (2001).
- 1993
André Green's book on the negative in psychoanalysis. The notion comes from Hegel; Lacan brought it into psychoanalysis in his reinterpretation of Freud and later dropped it. Green gathers under the work of the negative repression, foreclosure, disavowal and negation, together with splitting and negative hallucination, to show what unites them while distinguishing their effects, which best reveal the subject's structure and shape the outcome of an analysis. After comparing Hegel and Freud, he traces the negative where it usually goes unrecognised in Freud, as in dream-work, mourning and identification, and follows Freud's clinical path from neurosis as the negative of perversion to the masochism behind the negative therapeutic reaction, whose pessimism he reads as typical of borderline structures. Later chapters treat the death drive, negative narcissism and the disobjectalising function, masochism in analytic failures, splitting in borderline cases, negative hallucination and sublimation. The negative is not only pathological: the drive in excess has to be refused for a person to belong to the human community. The book ends by asking why, for some, this no becomes a refusal to live. Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1993, it appeared in Andrew Weller's English translation as The Work of the Negative (1999).
See also
People
References
- The Work of the Negative1993Evidence for a relation
- Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism1983Evidence for a relation