24 Jul Learn to become inconsequential | Part A’ (BRETT KAHR)
According to show-business lore, the film star and cabaret artiste Marlene Dietrich had a notorious reputation for egotism. Once, after a live concert performance, Dietrich assembled a group of fawning admirers in her dressing room and enquired, rather disingenuously: ‘Didn’t I sing that first song well? And didn’t I look great in the red dress? And didn’t I get a big laugh after telling that joke? But enough about me, what did you think of my performance?’
In 1914, Sigmund Freud wrote a seminal essay, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, in which he provided a very clear description of the clinical phenomenon of people who become completely self-obsessed and convinced of their own importance. Freud regarded the narcissist as infantile, and as someone who believes himself or herself to be the centre of the universe, much like the neonate who has neither the capacity nor the need to express concern about others. Every baby begins life as an omnipotent narcissist. The newborn craves food and, lo and behold, a breast appears, as if by magic, full of tasty milk. The newborn infant feels a chill and then, equally impressively, a blanket appears, seemingly from nowhere, offering warmth. These early experiences of being cared for by a diligent parent allow the little girl or boy to develop what Freud called ‘primary narcissism’, a healthy and necessary stage of development which places the infant’s physical and psychological needs at the forefront. Good parents do not mind too much if the infant behaves like a diva-in-training; after all, young boys and girls have neither the motoric skills nor the cognitive capacities to cook their own supper or to dress themselves. Parents must become servants, providing twenty-four-hour room service catering for the infant’s every requirement, in order for the child to survive.
But while most of us become more independent and self-reliant as we age, some people never renounce the narcissistic attitude of babyhood, and they become clinical narcissists in adult life, whose relentless self-absorption causes grievous offence to family and friends and work colleagues. Freud came to regard the adult narcissist as psychologically troubled.
As most of us grow older, we learn to share space with others, starting with our siblings and our schoolmates. We arrive at the painful realization that other children may have birthday parties, other boys and girls also score 100 per cent in the arithmetic exam, and so forth. But many people who suffer from a deep sense of inadequacy and deprivation cannot abandon this early narcissistic posture, and they persist, Dietrich-like, in stealing the limelight.
Freud realized that narcissists cannot bear the ordinariness of their lives, and thus they often lament:
Why did not Nature give us the golden curls of Balder or the strength of Siegfried or the lofty brow of genius or the noble profile of aristocracy? Why were we born in a middle-class home instead of in a royal palace? We could carry off beauty and distinction quite as well as any of those whom we are now obliged to envy for these qualities.
(‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work’,1916)
In order to become emotionally healthy grown-ups, we must abandon our infantile narcissism, and find a way to become less grandiose, less self-centred and better able to share our planet with 7 billion other people. In other words, we must also learn to become inconsequential, and to accept the fact that life has other meanings and sources of satisfaction than the pursuit of fame and glory, and of having statues built in our honour. But Freud went further in his understanding of the nature of inconsequentiality. Not only did he underscore the importance of divesting ourselves of our infantile narcissism – of our need to be the star of the show – but, also, he further shattered the narcissistic illusions of humankind by claiming that human beings in general may not be quite as impressive as we suspect.
Freud knew only too well that most people regard themselves as independent agents, controlling their own lives, determining their destinies, choosing their careers and their partners carefully; but he argued that although we pretend to be the architects of our existence, we do, in fact, become slaves to powerful unconscious forces which govern our minds and our behaviours. Throughout his psychoanalytical writings, Freud came to describe himself (perhaps a tad narcissistically) as a great revolutionary in history who shattered the narcissistic illusions of human beings. He positioned himself as the most recent in a trinity of geniuses, along with Nicolaus Copernicus, the sixteenth-century astronomer, and Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century evolutionist – rather impressive company.
Life Lessons from Freud
Brett Kahr
