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A collection of André Green's essays on narcissism, some previously unpublished, by an author who had worked on the subject since 1963.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).