Edited by Moe Meyer - Get a Free Blog

NARCISSUS IN THE WILDE 55
cathexis with its own authority, but a misplaying of the singularly authorized
heterosexual cathexis.
Not surprisingly, narcissism follows a similar course within Freud’s refinement
of his theory. Initially, Freud accepted the term from the earlier work of Ellis and
Rank, and Ellis’s own critique of Freud provides an excellent ground against
which to view Freud’s reconstruction of narcissism. As Ellis states:
For me Narcissism was the extreme form of auto-eroticism, which, it must
be remembered, was a term devised to cover all the spontaneous
manifestations of the sexual impulse in the absence of a definite outer
object to evoke them, erotic dreams in sleep being the type of auto-erotic
activity. Auto-eroticism while thus not properly a perversion…might
become so deliberately pursued at the expense of the normal objects of
sexual attraction. The psycho-analysts in adopting the term “auto-eroticism”
have given it a different meaning which I regret, as being both illegitimate
and inconvenient. For the psycho-analyst “autoeroticism” generally means
sexual activity directed toward the self as its object. That is illegitimate, for
the ordinary rule is that a word compounded with “auto” (like automobile
or autonomous) means not toward itself but by itself. It is inconvenient
because if we divert the term “auto-eroticism” to this use we have no term
left to cover the objectless spontaneous sexual manifestations for which the
term was devised.
(1900:3:362–363)
That to which Ellis objects—though these precise terms might escape him—is
the increasing territorialization of the narcissistic cathexis by the anaclitic
framework that dominates the Freudian model. 14
What Ellis perceives is an increasing effort to erase anything that disrupts the
hegemony of the anaclitic subject/object divide. While Freud is not responsible
for initiating this strategy—we have already seen it in the earliest theories of the
term—his primary engagements of the concept succinctly summarize the
problem Ellis pinpoints. In both the Three Essays and his essay “On Narcissism:
An Introduction,” Freud seems to posit a difference and an authority to
narcissism and inversion, claiming that homosexuals “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:
69). Already, as I have suggested, Ellis’s objection is verified, for narcissism is
figured not as “auto-erotism”—a process of and by the self—but as a mode of
anaclitic cathexis to the self. Moreover, Freud’s 1914 expansion of the concept
adds a new twist: “we say that the human being has originally two sexual
objects: himself and the woman who tends him, and thereby we postulate a
primary narcissism in everyone, which may in the long run manifest itself as
dominating his object-choice” (1914:69). The difference of narcissistic cathexis