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52 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
other, a dependency on an eroticized or nuturing object-choice. Narcissism, on
the other hand, eschews object cathexis, or, in a more proper sense, cathects the
self to the self. Moreover, this division between anaclitic and narcissistic types
becomes the basis for an implicit hierarchization of cathexes. Narcissistic
cathexis becomes associated with “perverts and homosexuals,” while the
association between anaclitic cathexis and the mother links it to reproductive
heterosexuality. Later Freud tells us that “complete object-love of the anaclitic
type is, properly speaking, characteristic of the man,” while “the maturing of the
female sexual organs…seems to bring about an intensification of the original
narcissism” (1914:68–69). The anaclitic/narcissistic binary becomes a master
trope that replicates and grounds the sexual binary of heterosexual/homosexual
and the gender binary of man/woman. 8
This strategy of intervalidating binaries as expressive of each other is not
unusual in Freud. In discussing the dynamics of sadism and masochism, Freud
explains that “We should rather be inclined to connect the simultaneous presence
of these opposites with the opposing masculinity and femininity which are in
bisexuality—a contrast which often has to be replaced in psycho-analysis by that
between activity and passivity” (1905:26). The explanation of the difference
between anaclitic and narcissistic desire becomes a mimetic enactment of the
primacy of the anaclitic, for narcissistic and anaclitic cathexis are “leaning-upagainst”
9 one another and are anaclitically dependent on one another in much the
same way that the binaries of man/woman, homo/hetero, and passive/active can
only find expression and meaning in anaclitic dependence and contradistinction.
Freud’s perhaps unconscious desire to (re)present the anaclitic/ narcissistic
difference as a grounding of the anaclitic shows forth strongly in his earliest
invocation of the term narcissism. In 1910 Freud added a lengthy footnote on
sexual inversion to the essay “The Sexual Aberrations” in Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, originally published in 1905. The note begins with an
analysis of narcissism and the invert:
It is true that psycho-analysis has not yet produced a complete explanation
of the origin of inversion; nevertheless, it has discovered the psychical
mechanism of its development, and has made essential contributions to the
statement of the problems involved. In all cases we have examined we
have established the fact that future inverts, in the earliest years of
childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation to a
woman (usually their mother), and that, after leaving this behind, they
identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual
object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a
young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their
mother loved them.
(1905:10 n. 1)