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NARCISSUS IN THE WILDE 51
What is striking about all three examples is the extent to which they write selfattraction
in terms of a self/other or subject/object split. In Nicefero’s example,
the penis becomes tacitly dismembered from the subject and exists as an external
object, a phenomenon outside the subject which then stimulates him. The
question that is repressed here is the obvious one: what stimulates the penis to
erection in the first place if stimulation is only derived from the erect penis
itself? In Moll’s example, the issue of self-attraction is preceded by a declaration
of the object-attraction of the subject. The self-attraction is further categorized as
an engagement of a self/other dynamic—“his own image” is simply an
intercourse with the images of “other men.” For the French girl, the hand is not
herself, but a “fetich,” an object which, as Ellis tells us in his essay “Erotic
Symbolism,” only functions in “the absence of the beloved person” and as the
surrogate for the beloved. (1900:3:18). Desire, it seems, can only manifest itself
across the great divide—“/”—and the self cannot exist in any sense that is
entirely self-sufficient. Narcissism in these instances seems to hint at a mode of
desire that precedes or escapes the divisive binaries of sexual and gender
ontology but, at the same time, this possibility also is clearly subordinated to an
articulation that privileges this binaristic logic.
Narcissism maps a complicated interplay between the autonomy of the self
and the need to tether this autonomy to the dependence of object-choice. These
two tensions are best displayed in Freud’s summation and refinement of the
earlier Victorians’ explorations in sexology. In his essay “On Narcissism: An
Introduction,” Freud provides a vocabulary for expressing the two elements of
this tension.
The first auto-erotic sexual gratifications are experienced in connection
with vital functions in the service of self-preservation. The sexual instincts
are at the outset supported upon the ego-instincts; only later do they become
independent of these, and even then we have an indication of that original
dependence in the fact that those persons who have to do with the feeding,
care, and protection of the child become his earliest sexual objects; that is
to say, in the first instance the mother or her substitute. Side by side with
this type and source of object-choice, which may be called the anaclitic
type, a second type, the existence of which we had not suspected, has been
revealed by psychoanalytic investigation. We have found, especially in
persons whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, as in
perverts and homosexuals, that in the choice of their love-object, they have
taken as their model not the mother but their own selves. They are plainly
seeking themselves as a love-object and their type of object choice may be
termed narcissistic.
(1914:68–69)
The difference marked here is also the difference marked between self-attraction
and self/other attraction. The anaclitic relation is a manifestation of cathexis to an